[MUD-Dev] Advogato

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 6 May 2000 15:13:54 -0600 
Travis Nixon <tnixon at avalanchesoftware.com> wrote:

> J C Lawrence wrote:

>> The main point of my interest however was his trust metric model
>> as documented at:
>> 
>> http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html
...

> Er, maybe I'm confused, but what exactly does a trust metric have
> to do with mud development?

A question that has come up regularly on the the list is how to
manage RP judging systems, reputation systems, electorial systems,
and other similar player-derived scalars in a manner that is
resistant to abuse, or which does ot encourage cliques and intense
stratification of any resulting society.  Advogato's trust metric
system gives a possible model that *could* be applied there,
reducing some of the abuses most prior attempts have had.

> You still have to assume the client is in the hands of the enemy,
> don't you?

Nothing to do with the client.  The idea is to support soft metrics
with their own feedback loops (say "RP quality") in a non-abusive
manner that still allows use and manipulation by GoP players without
actually breaking or violating the metric itself.

Consider: Say you wanted to provide a feedback loop for RP quality
in your game, with tangible in-game rewards.  Good RP'ers get more
power, get better stuff, get whatever.  They benefit.  How could you
do that in an automated fashion that is not itself subject to abuse
by GoP (defined mostly as non-RP for this context) players who
manipulate and thus break the system for their own ends without
actually increasing the RP quality of your game?  How could you do
it so you don't create small cliques of players all of whom reward
each other as being "super RP'ers" without actually interacting with 
anyone outside the clique?

> I can easily see how something like this might apply to, say, a
> network infrastructure, but I fail to understand how it might be
> helpful in "defining online communities, reliably excluding
> spammers, trolls, and other common annoyances."

It comes in under the "Community definition" side.

> Anybody care to enlighten me?

Umm.

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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