Community Blog Topic: Should well-behaved players be rewarded?
Last time we talked about getting rid of funsuckers, but what about the many players who enhance our gametime? Should they be rewarded? How would you go about it?
Perhaps we could have a dropdown box where you could report a player for being extra helpful or otherwise going above and beyond to make your day better. Perhaps someone answered your question politely in tradechat. Or a player asked if you were going for the mining node you were fighting on top of rather than just ninjaing it during your battle. Or maybe someone helped you fight a battle out in the wild that got out of control with adds.
Once someone gathered enough reports of being helpful, what would the rewards be? I would think it would have to be something that doesn't affect gameplay. If it did, guilds may insist on guildies reporting each other has helpful just to skew the system in their favor. Perhaps it would just reward a series of titles. Unfortunately, guilds may still require guildies to report each other in order to get those titles just to collect.
There would have to be a system to get around that. Perhaps you couldn't report fellow guildies as helpful. Or there would be a time limit between good reports.
That's the problem with all systems for behavioral modification in game -- they can all be manipulated in some way by funsuckers. But just like the vote-kick system helps more than it harms, perhaps a system for reporting good behavior would do the same. Would the promise of titles make more people go out of their way to help others?
What system could you come up with to reward players? How would you fix it so that it wouldn't be exploited? Or do you think the positive reinforcement is just a waste of development hours?
Answer in your blog and post a link in the comments below. Or, if you don't have a WoW blog, answer in the comments. We'll be spotlighting some of the responses next week.
