Include a Blacklist Percentage
Include as part of every person's profile the percentage of the entire warlight membership who has blacklisted that player. The idea is to give a measure "across the membership" of a particular player's blacklist-worthiness.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don’t think this would be a good thing for the site as a whole.
Blacklisting is a very personal thing and people do it for a variety of reasons. Blacklisting can be a way of saying “I don’t want to play with you” or “I want to be notified when I’m about to play with you”. Some people do this for reasons you may not expect, such as if a player is very good and they want to avoid playing them.
For a feature like blacklist percentage to work, the reasons for blacklisting would have to be standardized and enforced, which isn’t going to happen. Otherwise good and well-meaning people would find themselves the victim of a feature like this, and that should never happen.
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TheFalconGuy commented
A better idea would be the percentage of people Player A has been blacklisted by compared to the players he has played with.
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Cass commented
I like the idea very much, therefore: 3 votes!
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xhat commented
to Ian and Funk:
Thanks for the comments. I appreciate you guys thinking about this issue and putting your two cents out there. I don't think the "scoring" methods you are proposing would be useful, however, for one very simple reason: Under either scenario, there is no base for determining the meaningfulness of a percentage. Ian identified the core issue in his first post: the scoring would be fatally relativistic. Only by having the entirety of the WarLight community as the basis for deriving a ratio do you arrive at a meaningful number that anyone can objectively evaluate. If you determine the percentage as a ratio of BL / # of games played for the individual, what does a percentage of 30% mean? If I've played 10 games, and 3 people have blacklisted me, is that an equal data set to someone who has played 1000 games, and had 300 people blacklist them? The heart of the usefulness of deriving a BL ratio is a large dataset. The smaller the dataset, the less reliable the conclusions drawn from that set (in this case, where subjective evaluation is the basis for BLing).
Finally, to Funk's idea about having a minimum number of games, that was addressed by Fluk Tuation as part of a larger issue of giving more weighted votes to some members than others. He also suggested a minimum number of games, but I think the better system is to have a cap rather than a minimum. The learning curve in the first 1000 games is quite steep, and as a player gets more experience, his subjective evaluation of a player's BL-worthiness grows more "accurate" accordingly (imo). So as he or she grows in experience on the site, that player's vote gains more weight until such time as the player is fully vested, and then their weighting is fixed at a given number.
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Ian commented
I think a flaw in my last suggestion that should be considered is that it leaves the door for someone who is a 'vet' and has played many many people, to avoid blacklisting even if they decide to start making 'offenses' simply because of the way the stats work out. So with that in mind, maybe some kind of rolling interval. In the last 30 days User A has played X games with Y unique users. Doing something this way might also give incentive for users to change their bad ways.
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Ian commented
Not a bad idea. The only reason I think this % wouldn't hold much weight though is it will really depend on how many different people a certain person has played. Newer players like myself have never even blacklisted someone before. I wouldn't even know what to blacklist someone for. I assume some type of cheating. With that said, it would all depend on the frequency of the person playing and the chance of them being spotted and reported by multiple users. Also, as the user-base grows the ratio will change and make the weighting even more diluted.
It sounds like the primary intent of this idea is to proactively identify who potential cheaters are. Is there a public list of people who are 'blacklisted'? Or at the very least, a list of people who have been reported by particular individuals? Maybe a useful list going along with an idea like this would be a public ranking of who has the most blacklist reports, how many blacklist reports particular people have reported, and maybe the % of those that ended up actually becoming blacklisted.
Instead of an overall measure based on 'across the membership' what if it were based on interactions. If you play 10 different people and 2 of them report you for blacklist, that says a lot compared to someone who is reported 4 times but has played 100 different people.
Thoughts?
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Funk Boy commented
Man, some complex arguments, my metric has merit, pls consider it, it is very simple. Again 15/200 would equal 15 players blacklisted you out of 200 you have played with, could add percentage at the end also.
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Funk Boy commented
I think simply listing how many players have blacklisted another player such as 15/200 = "15 players out of 200 played" would give a useful metric.
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Funk Boy commented
Very large WL membership, many of whom have played relatively few games, make it "all members who have completed 500 games" might be better, they are the cadre
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[HL] Fluk Tuation commented
Thanks for the reply. I have, however, reservations regarding some of your points.
With regard to your first two points it should be noted, that the blacklisting-quotient cannot be absolute, but that it is a relative number. Although the figures will typically be, as you point out, "minuscle", they will be regarded as high or low if they are higher or lower than those of the other players on warlight. Accordingly, I would argue, blacklistings by individual players who have played more games would weigh heavy. In other words, a particular portion of the warlight community is significant if its weighed blacklisting potential is greater than that of another portion because, essentially, we simply compare the numbers.
With regard to your third point, I wish to remind of the fact, that with my proposal the quotient would also be dynamic. I proposed "number of blacklistings by different players" / "number of players, the specific player has played with" as a practicable quotient. As the number of players a specific player has played with increases, the denominator would grow. In turn, the impact of a specific blacklisting would decrease. Such a number would be consistent with the familiar winning percentage since once a game is lost or won it will influence the ratio forever. The game's impact on the ratio, however, decreases with the number of games played.
Finally, regarding our philosophical difference, I must say that it prevails. Blacklisting another player is not bridging the Hudson. Rather it is using ones own judgemental skills in order to decide and mark whether a specific player should be avoided or treated with care, or not. Such a decision is not generally dependend on experience measured in games played on Warlight. If a more experienced player insults a newby, it is equally wrong and inacceptable. My point is that social skills or fairness are not measureable by the number of games played on Warlight. Of course, I too wish for informed judgements, however, I believe in investing some confidence in the judgmental skills of fellow players.
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xhat commented
Fluk Tuation,
Thanks for your comments. I want to reply to several of your points.
1) To your first point, I think you overdramatize the effects of a player's number of games relative to another particular player's. Yes, my 3K games would be 15 times more than a player with 200, but that's not the appropriate metric. The appropriate metric is how weighted is my blacklisting relative to the entire number of games ever played on WL? The way you phrase it, it makes it sound as if a few "whales" could decide to blacklist a player, and that would be all she wrote. But even if I had 5K or 10K games played, it is a minuscule number compared to the entirety of the WL universe. Which brings to me my next point…
2) You say whole clans could blacklist a player for any number of trivial (or legitimate) reasons. Again, I refer back to the built-in, self-limiting feature of weighting the blacklisting relative to the entirety of the WL universe. No matter how you add it up individually, a player's blacklist percentage that he or she receives from the rest of the community ONLY becomes large enough to be relevant in the aggregate, when, essentially, a significant portion of the entire WL community would have to deem that player to be so obstreperous or immature or whatever that they earn a significantly high blacklist percentage…
3) The system cannot work without an expiry on the blacklisting. Leaving a blacklist in place in perpetuity guarantees that your BL percentage can never go down. That is simply unrealistic, as players who start out new often get blacklisted simply because they haven't figured out the game, the system, and the community yet. They should not be punished forever more going forward for simply being new, and should have a chance to lower their BL percentage as they gain more experience. As time passes, the community as a whole will judge if the player has earned a chance to have their BL percentage lowered, or increased, or maintained. Which brings me to my next point….
4) Veterans should get more weight than newbies. This is a philosophical difference we have. You rightly point out that children are not allowed to vote in elections, presumably because they are not as wise as adults. The same principle applies in any field of endeavor where knowledge and experience are valued. You get charged with murder, you're going to hire a seasoned veteran attorney instead of some fresh-faced kid just out of law school. You want to build a bridge over the Hudson River, you don't put an intern in charge of the project. You want an opinion of a player's skill in a sport, you get the opinions of veteran players. BL'ing is no different. Veterans are better judges of a player's BL-worthiness, in my opinion, than new players. I think you agree with me in principle on that matter. However, I do agree that after a certain point, everyone's vote should count equally. You make a good point. I would modify your idea as follows: instead of arbitrarily figuring out a number of minimum games that qualifies a particular player for equal vote status, figure out a maximum number of games. I think everyone could agree that 3K games or more qualifies one as a veteran. So, as you play more and more games, your weighting increases until such time as you hit 3K games (an arbitrary number), and then your weighting is fixed.
The overarching goal here is simply to put into the hands of the community of players who want a fun, respectful game a tool to allow them to filter out players who have demonstrated to the community that they are too immature, or difficult, or objectionable to participate. I think I have hit upon a scheme that minimizes the inevitable petty personal squabbles that arise, and properly puts the self-policing of the community where it belongs: in the hands of the community as a whole. The community as a whole will decide if my idea is worthy or not...
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[HL] Fluk Tuation commented
i am sorry have made a mistake in the second paragraph of my comment.
your suggestion is to take a weighted sum which might be encapsulated in the following formula:
"blacklisting number" = the sum (running from p = 1 to n) of Xp divided by Y, where Xp is the total number of games a specific player has played and Y is the number of games that have ever been played on warlight.
accordingly, as you rightly point out, this will give more weight to "veterans". as i have pointed out, i do not like the idea of having more impportant people. you, for example have more than 3000 games. so your blacklisting would weigh 15 times as much as a blacklisting by a player who has played 200 games. to me, that seems out of proportion.
my suggestion is to consider an easier quotient which is based on an estimation of the probability that a player has been blacklisted by another player they have played with:
"number of blacklistings by different players" / "number of players, the specific player has played with".
i havn t voted for your suggestion, and i do not know if i would vote for mine. in my view, bobby fisher has a point there. this is an example of what i have also pointed out. such a number cannot include any reasons for blacklistings. another scenario would be a whole clan blacklisting a specific player due to personal reasons such as rivalry.
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[HL] Fluk Tuation commented
well, if something like this should ever happen, it has to be kept simple. that, in a way, rules out the idea that blacklistings have to be renewed after specific time intervalls.
moreover, the quotient shouldn t be "number of blacklistings" / "entire warlight community", but rather number of "blacklistings" / "number of players, the specific player has played with".
finally, i do not like the idea of "giving veterans more weight". one could maybe simply not count blacklistings by very new players. this mirrors the fact that chlidren are generally not allowed to vote in political elections. the reason for this suggestion is that - well, at least I believe so - new players need some time to "grow into" specific communities of practice. however, after 50 games or so (an arbitrary number) a vote should count as much as everybody else's - just like your vote in a political election does, once you are allowed to vote. after all, wisdom does not generally come with age.
in general, a blacklist quotient might be a useful number. however, this number cannot include any reasons for blacklistings. maybe one player's reasons for blacklisting are very different from another player's reasons to do so.
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wim36 commented
very good idea!
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bobby fisher commented
I ask people to blacklist me after I blacklist them, so my percentage would be inaccurately high
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xhat commented
Ok, this is how I envision this working: A player's total number of games X would be divided by the total number of games played by the entirety of the Warlight accounts (paid and free) Y. This would give a weighted number to every person's blacklist vote. X / Y. So if the total number of games across all of Warlight is 1M, for example, and I have 10,000 games played, my percentage of the total is 1%. If I blacklist a player, my 1% is added along with everyone else's percentages to arrive at a total percentage for the player who is on the blacklist. This gives more weight to veterans than to new players, but I think it is fair for two reasons: first, one person's vote can not dramatically alter another person's total blacklist percentage(they can't possibly make up that large of a percentage of the total number of games played), but veterans do have more of a 'stake' in the site and gameplay than noobies, and second, more experienced players are, on general in my opinion, less likely to blacklist for trivial reasons. Plus, it just doesn't make sense that some new account's blacklisting, who has 5 games under his belt, should carry the same weight as a veteran with 1,000+ games. Experience in the game is worth something...
This presents the problem, though, of blacklisting that is never lifted. If I blacklist you today, and I have 50 games, my weighted number is very small. A year, or two, or five, from now, my weighting could have grown significantly, while the reasons and sense of why I blacklisted you five years ago are long forgotten. To account for this, I think that the calculation of a player's total blacklist percentage should not factor in any blacklisting where the blacklisting account has been inactive for more than 30 days, in the case of free accounts. In the case of a paid player's account, the account has been inactive for more than 120 days. The player who blacklisted will still retain the blacklisting on that player, but it will not calculate into the blacklisted player's total blacklist percentage unless the blacklisting player renews the blacklisting. Example: Player A, a free account, blacklists Player B. Player A doesn't play for 45 days after this. Player A logs into his account on the 45th day. Player A still sees Player B on his blacklist, but Player A's blacklisting no longer counts towards Player B's total blacklist percentage. Player A must remove Player B from his blacklist, and then add him back to have his blacklisting count again toward Player B's total blacklist percentage. Then, of course, the clock starts ticking again.
Lastly, all blacklisting, regardless of whether a free or paid account, is dropped from the calculation of a player's total blacklist percentage after a year, and must be renewed if a player wants their blacklisting to count against a particular player. Let's face it, after a year, who remembers why they blacklisted anyone anyways, but if you remember well enough to still want to blacklist a guy after a year, well, that player must be a real douche...
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xhat commented
Last bit of self-promotion of this idea, I promise: As a filter, I think using a Total Blacklist Percentage is superior to either total number of games or boot percentage. Either of those filters unfairly, in my opinion, discriminates against noobs, who are only guilty of being new to Warlight. Not all noobs are malicious or mean-spirited, but total number of games and/or boot percentage paints them all with the same brush. Ok, I'm going to quit proselytizing now...