GM and Player reviews: Why they should NOT be implemented.

The main strike against a review or karma (think likes on Facebook or upvotes on Reddit) is that it is a barrier to entry. New players or GMs will have a difficult time finding a place in Roll20 if they need good reviews or some specific level of karma before others will accept them as players or GMs.  Just browse through Looking for Group, and tell me there aren't far more players than GMs.  If there is an arbitrary requirement, you will be preventing GMs from running games until they meet the requirement.  Which means newbie GMs won't have any leeway to screw up, run a perfect game or no good review or karma for you.  When you lower the amount of people willing to try GMing, you'll increase the number of players looking for games. New players are doubly screwed.  Not only will they be posting in LFG begging for a GM, they'll be begging for good reviews or karma too. If you doubt that this would be a problem at all, that reviews and karma wouldn't be a barrier, I simply point to the World of Tanks forums and Reddit.  People were so abusive to the karma system in World of Tanks that you can no longer downvote a post, you can only upvote it.  Much like this forum.  Give people a means to be mean, and they will.  Reddit is the same, you can up or downvote threads and comments.  Brigading is quite common, where people will make sockpuppet accounts (extra accounts) or gather up their friends, and mass upvote or downvote threads and comments.  It's a popularity contest, and yes, people can and do go out of their way to get what they want. Does a review system, or a karma system, really work if your choices are either to remain silent or post a glowing review/upvote? How do you know if a review is fair?  Or that the upvote/downvote is based on the reviewee's actions and behaviour, and not based on the fact that the reviewer loathed the race the reviewee played that one time?  Do you allow a reviewee to have a rebuttal?  Or allow the reviewee to upvote/downvote the reviewer's upvote/downvote?  How do you deal with people who lie? That brings me to the next point.  A simple review system is too simplistic to be useful, except as an arbitrary barrier to filter out people you don't have time to vet.  A review system that has context requires human intervention on a regular basis to keep things from getting out of hand.  How does that intervention get handled? Are we to pay Roll20 to hire extra employees?  Are we to set up a player council to oversee it?  Both? It would require quite a bit of work to implement and oversee, more work that it would take people, themselves, to vet one another.  It's far too easy, and it will happen, for people to abuse the system.

SOme good points

So, as a new player to Roll20 myself I have to agree with a lot that is here. I do not understand why I can't disagree or add suggestions to a post as a sub post. 

Just a nudge.

Not advocating either way, but some points I thought of: New players or GMs will have a difficult time finding a place in Roll20 if they need good reviews or some specific level of karma before others will accept them as players or GMs.  Just browse through Looking for Group, and tell me there aren't far more players than GMs.  If there is an arbitrary requirement, you will be preventing GMs from running games until they meet the requirement.  Which means newbie GMs won't have any leeway to screw up, run a perfect game or no good review or karma for you.  When you lower the amount of people willing to try GMing, you'll increase the number of players looking for games. New players are doubly screwed.  Not only will they be posting in LFG begging for a GM, they'll be begging for good reviews or karma too. With the shortage of GMs, new GMs would still not have a problem hosting. Even if experienced/senior players avoided them, new players would be more than happy to join in. The corollary would be, new players still have games to join even if experienced GMs were not accepting (and from what I've seen so far, I doubt that's a problem. I have yet to encounter a single GM on R20 who actively rejects new players. There may be some, but they're definitely a minority). If you doubt that this would be a problem at all, that reviews and karma wouldn't be a barrier, I simply point to the World of Tanks forums and Reddit.  People were so abusive to the karma system in World of Tanks that you can no longer downvote a post, you can only upvote it.  Much like this forum.  Give people a means to be mean, and they will.  Reddit is the same, you can up or downvote threads and comments.  Brigading is quite common, where people will make sockpuppet accounts (extra accounts) or gather up their friends, and mass upvote or downvote threads and comments.  It's a popularity contest, and yes, people can and do go out of their way to get what they want. One of the biggest issues about preventing sockpuppets is the problem of limiting accounts to one per player. That's easily addressed on Roll20 since we have premium accounts. Limit reviews to premium accounts, and I don't foresee many people creating brigades of sockpuppet accounts. Also, you should only be able to review accounts that you have played with, which bottlenecks the possibility of brigading severely. There may be more problems we haven't thought of, or some of my ideas might not be workable. But hey, it's a start to a discussion.

Dennis said: One of the biggest issues about preventing sockpuppets is the problem of limiting accounts to one per player. That's easily addressed on Roll20 since we have premium accounts. Limit reviews to premium accounts, and I don't foresee many people creating brigades of sockpuppet accounts. Also, you should only be able to review accounts that you have played with, which bottlenecks the possibility of brigading severely. There may be more problems we haven't thought of, or some of my ideas might not be workable. But hey, it's a start to a discussion. I agree with Dennis on this one.  I think that a lot of the problems seen with a review system on other sites could be handled several different ways here on Roll20.  Being a Pro user, I would not mind that being a subscription benefit at all.  I think a review system for GMs would be more important than for players anyway and would help save people the most time (identifying good reliable GMs and the ones not so reliable).  I think gamification would work well here too, such as the stack exchange websites that award players not just trophies for achievements (which roll20 already does), but also gives them points and permissions based on their level of participation and the value of that participation that they bring to the website. I understand where Peter B. is coming from, but I think not doing something just because bad things could happen is too risk averse.  If it doesn't work, oh well, go back to the way it was before.  But if it works, you've just added a great deal of value to the system and the way the community here runs. If I could down vote this suggestion, I would, but oh well.

I can't believe I'm devil's advocating this but.... This thread was made in response to an opposite thread that supports the idea of a voting system. Per the guidelines established by the community, you are not supposed to dissent views and suggestions in this topic, but rather, if you disagree, make a post, or support a post, of dissenting view. I've stated my views on this in the other thread, and appropriately, this thread was made to combat the ideas laid forth in that thread. In the interest of not side-jacking this thread, I will not post the link to that thread, feel free to search for it. Roll20 doesn't want arguments breaking out over people's ideas, and while their system is a bit 'stiff' I find that it is favor of what Peter B. is going for already. You can agree, but if you want to disagree, you are supposed to do so in your own thread or one similarly aligned. I'm not a mod, nor do I think I could ever handle being one, but as I mentioned in the other thread months ago, prompting (maybe?) this thread, instead of trying to change people's minds, try to garner support for your stance and let people make up their own minds. Also, you may want to review the stickied policy thread on this topic. Have fun guys :)

SFX said: I can't believe I'm devil's advocating this but.... This thread was made in response to an opposite thread that supports the idea of a voting system. Per the guidelines established by the community, you are not supposed to dissent views and suggestions in this topic, but rather, if you disagree, make a post, or support a post, of dissenting view. I've stated my views on this in the other thread, and appropriately, this thread was made to combat the ideas laid forth in that thread. In the interest of not side-jacking this thread, I will not post the link to that thread, feel free to search for it. Roll20 doesn't want arguments breaking out over people's ideas, and while their system is a bit 'stiff' I find that it is favor of what Peter B. is going for already. You can agree, but if you want to disagree, you are supposed to do so in your own thread or one similarly aligned. I'm not a mod, nor do I think I could ever handle being one, but as I mentioned in the other thread months ago, prompting (maybe?) this thread, instead of trying to change people's minds, try to garner support for your stance and let people make up their own minds. Also, you may want to review the stickied policy thread on this topic. Have fun guys :) Fair enough. I've never seen the thread you mentioned. I guess that's the problem with having separate threads for each side of a discussion - new people come in with no idea what's going on. 

SFX said: I can't believe I'm devil's advocating this but.... This thread was made in response to an opposite thread that supports the idea of a voting system. Per the guidelines established by the community, you are not supposed to dissent views and suggestions in this topic, but rather, if you disagree, make a post, or support a post, of dissenting view. I've stated my views on this in the other thread, and appropriately, this thread was made to combat the ideas laid forth in that thread. In the interest of not side-jacking this thread, I will not post the link to that thread, feel free to search for it. Roll20 doesn't want arguments breaking out over people's ideas, and while their system is a bit 'stiff' I find that it is favor of what Peter B. is going for already. You can agree, but if you want to disagree, you are supposed to do so in your own thread or one similarly aligned. I'm not a mod, nor do I think I could ever handle being one, but as I mentioned in the other thread months ago, prompting (maybe?) this thread, instead of trying to change people's minds, try to garner support for your stance and let people make up their own minds. Also, you may want to review the stickied policy thread on this topic. Have fun guys :) Yeah, after being told that I could not dissent in the other threads, I deleted my posts before creating this thread.  I can understand them to keep flame wars and dickery to a minimum, but it is quite odd not being able to discuss the pros and cons of people's suggestions in their threads.  I'm all for having a debate, especially about this topic.

Well, maybe if you as the thread starter state that you're ok with discussion and dissension in this thread? I dunno, I've never been active in a forum as restricted as this one before. 

Dennis said: Well, maybe if you as the thread starter state that you're ok with discussion and dissension in this thread? I dunno, I've never been active in a forum as restricted as this one before.  Yeah, I doubt they'd allow that to happen.

Bumping to keep this current.

Hmm, missed this in my Great Purge weeks back. Allowing people to ascribe a rating to other people is not something we really want on Roll20, even though I understand why it would be useful to weed out toxicity in peer-driven games like tabletop. We don't foresee this feature being on our radar for a long time, at least until we can figure out the ethical implications of it. This type of feature can and has been very easily abused before. On toxic users though, that is why our dev and mod team is here. We absolutely want to weed out toxic users and abusive users but rating is not the way to do that. Reporting toxic behavior is. Please report any users that violate our code of conduct and if you don't see a report button on the relevant interaction, please email us at <a href="mailto:team@roll20.net" rel="nofollow">team@roll20.net</a> I hope you understand our firm stance on this. I'll be closing this thread and releasing everyone's votes.