We would maintain a higher player count. It's my belief we have to man angry types, (My self included at times) who play and they drive off other players.

There are few things that ruin my gamming sessions more than ooc or near ooc threats to me through my character.

We all know when we are being griefed, and I think as players we should expect a little help from our Imms when it comes to curtailing some of this behavior.

I'd say ramp it up, in the form of a talk, then a slay, a full loot, then denial.

I do like the idea of Players posting secret ratings about other players as I think patterns would emerge, both on the person being posted about and on the person who does the posts.

syntax
tag character <1-10>

It shouldn't have any value other than as a judgment tool.

Let's be honest, how many times have #### storms erupted because we players were incensed over the decisions of Imms to let a sub-par character continue? I think we have lost more players to Immortal tolerance than Immortal intolerance.

That’s just my thinking.

I wouldn't be disappointed if the Immortals took a quicker, heavier hand towards punishing or interfering with players who continually "grief" other players. IMHO, smite doesn't get used enough.

Letting players judge or rate each other just isn't going to work, for a lot of different reasons. Honestly though, it's not even necessary because by the time someone would become a quantifiable asshole, their behavior has already been pointed out on IRC, Dio's, through friends, etc. Most of us either know who the buttheads are before we meet them or have at least heard rumors.

Though it's not a surprise as it comes from a dumb person.

Those tags would hardly have any value and be any close to the reality.
Even imms with snoop command can't always see what actually happened. Many immortal PBF comments are way off of what actually was going on. Imagine what value would mortal players bring to these tags if they don't even have snoop, can see things only from their eyes, share opinion of their fiends instead of thinking about things themselves and often act based on immediate emotions after getting PK'd.

I suggested something like this a while back and didn't get much love.

http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=6&topic_id=27924&mesg_id=27924

However, if people could leave notes explaining why they gave a particular rating, it might make for some interesting PBFs at least.

That's a horrible idea. It would just serve as a rallying point for the more vocal elements of the community to ostracize certain individuals who might have a tendancy to go into OOC stints.

Also, it would (perhaps even unjustly) give people reputations that may or may not be difficult to shake off.

Imagine 'GenericImm' logs in and scouts my/my enemy's character for the tail end of a conversation. The enemy has been a little bitch and I lose it and fly off the handle. This might be the only time in 300 hours I do so but I still have this permanent stain against my character's name because of the one incident.

People are more prone to remembering the bad rather than the good.

But my addition at least makes the first one entertaining. I wasn't being serious.

Good. Your character should get a stain on his record if he flies off the handle and goes OOC on someone. Without player mods that behavior will only ever be noticed and recorded if an imm happens to be snooping you (or the other guy) at the time.

The flip side to this is that, in your hypothetical situation, if your enemy has been douchey enough to warrant a mod down then you can go ahead and mod him down. Currently his lame behavior would go entirely unnoticed unless an imm happened to be snooping him (or you).

The reasons I don't think this would as big of a flaw as you think:

1. The staff aren't morons. They realize that some players would abuse a moderation system and mod down people for doing completely legitimate things. So a given player's "rating" would never be taken at face value and used to justify ignoring that person, punishing that person, or rewarding that person. It would just be a sort of "hint".

Say I'm an imm and am trying to decide who to snoop. Maybe I run a query on the online players mod ratings, and one guy is rated much, much higher than the rest. Maybe I snoop him to see he's actually cool. Or on the flip side, maybe one guy's rating is way, way lower than everyone else's. Maybe I snoop him to see if he's actually such a huge douche.

2. Most players are not morons and would not abuse the system. This would mitigate the ability of the few abusers to skew the ratings.

3. Limiting the amount of "mod points" people get would also mitigate an abuser's ability to skew the system. For instance, it would make it impossible for someone to run out and mod down the entire Empire cabal "just because".

4. Limiting it only to "mod down" (instead of also allowing people to "mod up") would prevent would-be abusers from just modding up their ooc friends. They could, of course, mod down their ooc enemies, but that implies the "enemy" has made himself "known" in an ooc manner, so I don't have a ton of sympathy for him.

>2. Most players are not morons and would not abuse the system.
> This would mitigate the ability of the few abusers to skew
>the ratings.

I'm not saying I'm not cynical, but I think if you could be "Daevryn for a Day" and decided to snoop everyone who died for five minutes thereafter, within an hour you would give up hope that most players would reserve their scorn for the genuinely worthy.

If I engage in that exercise, within an hour I will with 100% certainty see (for example) someone who gets solo killed, gets looted of a single piece of gear by their killer, and who subsequently rages at them in a semi-coherent way that, if not obviously OOC, seems to indicate real anger.

Hmm. Think you could weed out the lion's share of these folks by limiting mod points in some way?

Maybe a minimum rank, minimum hours played or minimum imm xp received.

Or maybe only cabal leaders get mod points because they've supposedly been "vetted" by some member of the staff.

Obviously there are still douchey cabal leaders who might abuse their mod points, but I'd expect the rate to be lower when compared to the general population.

One thing I like about CF is that there is relatively little drama. You put this in the hands of players, and it's gonna just be drama-llama-rama. Some of those PK threads really do get heated.

Granted, It annoys me to think I might have random imms snooping me. I'm jealous of my privacy... but I do enjoy the game and there are valid reasons for it. Leave it in the hands of a couple, and I'll be sure to never say anything on the mud that I wouldn't actually want someone to know. :D

The staff isn't dumb. I know as a newbie I've grouped with at least one or two of them. This sort of thing really is what appendix message boards are for, not in game enforcement systems.

There's just a better tool set available to deal with the occasional problem. It's not of itself a terrible idea.