In Savage 2, after each game you can give/remove karma from one participant in the match, and leave a comment as to why you did...

Effectively discourages quitting, gold hoarding, "cowboy"ing, flaming, etc. while encouraging staying, team playing, and treating people with respect...  if you care about karma that is.

By looking at a person's karma history and how much +/- karma people gave them as well as reading the comments, you get a good feel for what kind of person that player is and know, perhaps even better than from the player's stats, whether he is a guy you'd want in your clan.

He has a really good point. Karma is not about how good you are. It's a rating how friendly you are in the game. I respect everyone how stays till the game has ended. Kind of supports the spirit of sport. On the other side I stay till the end just to tell them that it was a good game.

I can only support this idea!

I like the idea of player feedback, much like we have here on the forum, however the system can be easily abused by those with enough time and dedication. For example, members of Clans would be give each other member Karma, artifically raising their Karma level. Ok, so you change it so that Clan Members can't give other Clan members Karma. So they quit the Clan, have their Karma bumped up, and re-join. It sounds far fetched, but I can promise this kind of abuse would happen.

The moment the Karma system is able to be directly effect by players the system's credibility goes out the window. Even here on the forums, one recently banned member had around 20 Karma points - despite the majority of the community agreeing he was a troll and posted nothing useful or meaningful. The only way the system would work is to remove the ability for players to give Karma, which would remove a lot of the usefulness of the system.

A karma system might include a screen at the end of a game that displays:

• all the people you played with (and their demigods, in case you forget usernames)
• a section where you give a thumbs up/down
• a drop-down menu with categories/sub-categories for why you chose to give or take karma
• a comments section

If you want to get crazier, maybe add the ability to add or take karma on multiple issues.  For instance, if the opponent stayed when he was losing, but was abusive in the chat, you could add karma for staying, and take it for "sportsmanship" (or whatever you choose to call it).  Obviously, this is might be a bit much, but I know that if I had a game experience that stood out (for good or bad), I'd take the time to fill out the post-game Karma screen.  The Karma screen could be a post-game button, so it would be completely optional and the people that weren't interested in doing it could just hit exit.

The overall Karma could be viewed in a custom game with a summary menu that pops up based on a mouse-over.  Detailed Karma could be viewed on the website, or in some other fashion.  Karma could also be weighted with more weight on some non-user method of Karma, like the aforementioned rage-quit/win/loss method, to reduce abuse.

In the interests of brainstorming.

This.

and also

3. Coloured text indicating who is speaking/messaging in game (dark brown vs light blue etc)

4. NO NEGATIVE KARMA but show exp and allow positive karma. Therefore, a person with not much karma but a high experience is realised as a not fun player. But a person with no karma and low exp is recognised as a noob.

5. Trying in with 2, please reloop or randomise some more songs in the main screen. Trying for 20 minutes to connect to a game with nothing to take in but wind and waiting to connect loading screens, really would build up frustration for a lot of players.

6.Perhaps as someone suggested, a global instant wall/board thing on the side whilst waiting to connect. so that people can interact with everyone over the world whilst connecting.

7. More mana denying favour items. With so many heros mana-stacking abilities, more types of favour items to combat them would make for more interesting dynamics. I.e. blood of the serpent in reverse ?

8. And probably the craziest (realisitc) idea to combat ragequitting i would propose - Ascension.

Basically, if the rival team is 4-5 levels up, and "controls the map" with flags, the announcer shouts ASCENSION BEGINS.

Doing so means the losing team colour scheme starts to slowly fade to black in line with how much health the citadel has. It also gets a great bonus like 1.5x exp, gold from creeps, and 1.5x length of flag locks and certain citadel upgrades become cheaper, and 1.5 times favour points for winning.

If a team is dominating by that much, they should still win. But making surving asencion mode a recordable score, so that people can show off their anility to stay in the game and fight out nearly impossible odds by managing to come from deep behind and win, is something people would love to brag about.

this is a very good idea.

possibly you could have an only positive karma system which determines if the majority of people like playing with them.

then have a negative system where the majority votes for it for ragequiting or abusive language. this negative karma is recorded as a banlist consisting of who voted for them and what reason.

each person has their own banlist which CANNOT BE VIEWED AT ALL(or edited) and records this information, this cannot be shared with other players until...

someone joins a game and more than 4(or some other value) people have this same person on their own banlist a note comes up notifying all players in the game that this person "is bad for reason... by these players..".

note everyone out of the 4 people must have the same reason.

but yea just an idea...

Crikey I was thinking of a similar thing not mere seconds before I saw your post! My idea for such a thing works like this:

The notion of a personal banlist is implemented, however it is split into a banned section and a commended section. AT the end of each game you add players to your own banned or commended list. Specifying a reason is mandatory, and the reason is selected from a drop-down menu (For reasons that will become apparent in a second).

The contents of these banlists is then shared and used to build a player's rating. The rating, rather than being a single attribute, is split into positive and negative values. Positive values are gained by completing games and receiving commendations from teammates. Negative values are gained by quitting games (Disconnecting will also garner negative values but under a "disconnected" category) and for getting on people's banlists. Whether or not these ratings are followed by the host is entirely up to them.

In addition, the actual awarding of commendations or bans to players will alter your rating as well, and also adjusts how much your ratings are worth to other players ie: If you hand out far more many bans than commendations then your bans are worth less to player's ratings (ie: They give less negative values), and vice versa for commendations. This could also be category based ie: Only decrease worth of player X's ban ratings if 75% of his bans are under the category "omfg n00b gtfo" or whatever. This would reduce the possibility of griefers or arrogant sods ruining a player's rating.

May be a bit complicated but the idea is that by performing a little housekeeping and being fair about the commendations and bans that you hand out, an effective rating could be established for hosts to use in trying to maintain a fun and exciting game.

Thoughts? Criticisms?

For what is worth, i think the karma system should be automatic. Anything else would get abused, one way or another. My 2 cents.

But i still think a skill rating, based on in-game statistics, would be more useful.

^ wrong, it works fine with esea

Meh, I don't really see the problem with negative karma, it's not like it's that hard to detect and filter out most grief behavior and it doesn't have to be a perfect system to add value. The fundamental assumption of a karma system is that generally people are helpful, so the number of helpful people overwhelm the griefers/trolls.  It's not like it's very hard to detect and filter people giving primarily negative karma, or always (often) giving bad karma to teammates when they lose, or most any of the things people in this thread seem to feel would be abused. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect, even if 30% of karma given out is invalid it's still a useful system because annoying people will accumulate negative and nice guys will accumulate positive over time.  It seems like a lot of people are worried that bad karma will be given out for stupid reasons.  No doubt it will, but it doesn't matter so long as the majority of weighted responses are valid.  Just very simply I'd imagine something like positive karma always counts at 100%, negative karma's impact degrades the more you give it (taking into consideration number of games/people played).  If I give out negative karma to one person every fourth game on average that is weighted much more heavily than they guy who gives negative karma every time he fights UB because "OMG UB IS SO BROKEN".  I'll repeat it again - it doesn't matter if the angry teenager gives bad karma to every teammate who he feels isn't playing right so long as he's in the minority after weighting.  I see plenty of “gg”s in my games, and if the interface was simple enough that that number of people gave good karma with the “gg” then I think such a system would work very nicely.

I don't think an automated system would work (+ karma for completing a game, etc.) because when it's a known system then it'll be rigged, such as the example of people just going AFK to get points for completing a match.  The only thing that makes sense is for players in game to give feedback, they're the ultimate judge of who desrves karma even if there is a bit of noise in the signal.

What about a rolling karma system? 

Something where you get +1/-1 for winning/losing (or some type of distribution system)  but it only takes into account the last 20 games you've played, or last 3 months?  so if you finish all your games without quitting, you have this perfect karma, but if you need to quit or ragequit, your karma goes down.  With the system being rolling, it doesn't punish players who occasionally need to leave games for real reasons.  Eventually the negative karma will drop off. 

I disagree that the choice is between ruining the game for the majority of people or ruining it for a minority.  I think that it is a choice between forcing everyone to have to deal with a minor inconvenience, or completely ruining the game for a minority of people.

Honestly, I don't think it's a horrible fate, to sometimes have an early leaver in your game.  In fact, it has been my experience that people almost never leave the game unless the game is already decided.  I shouldn't be horrified at this thought: the biggest problem is that the game currently freezes for thirty seconds while the player disconnects, then if other players follow, the game continues to freeze over and over, then you're left fighting a bunch of computer players.  The concede option would fix all of this.  Keep in mind too that this game is very prone to crashes.  But putting in a karma system isn't going to change that.

What I don't see often is players getting killed a few times early on, and rage-quitting before the game is actually decided.  Is this just me?

Regardless, a big problem with DotA is that people boot others out of the lobby for, in my opinion, absolutely no good reason.  A ping too high maybe, or maybe just a whim.  And I'm already starting to see this happen in Demigod.  Even with just ping, I can't count the number of times I've seen players get booted because their ping is too high (even though I've seen players with higher ping run just fine).  The last thing I'd want to do is give game-creators even more incentive to boot people joining their games, and this is exactly what these sorts of karma systems do, except that the karma system is worse because once your karma is low, you can never repair it.

As for ESEA, I personally think their karma system works horribly and its problems are masked because only the most hardcore of players play EA Sports games online.

Even if karma is implemented, I don't expect I'd have a low karma.  But if I somehow did, you can bet I'd be asking to refund a now-unplayable game.