fred, on Dec 15 2009, 05:31 PM, said:
To some extent that is true and that is the reason why this problem is harder to solve than one might think. What I think we need to achieve is to add some value to the notion of a BBO user ID. In this way people will have something to lose if their ID is taken away or stripped of its priviledges.
Hi Fred,
as a long-time administrator on another internet gaming site[1], I sympathise a lot with the problems you, and the BBO community, are facing. Even a handful of troublemakers can drain a lot of energy - sometimes we will ban one person 10 or 20 times in a day before they give up on making new IDs for a while. We have all sorts of tools for watching for logins with certain parameters[2] and so on.
I think you are on the right track with your notion of associating value with IDs. I already have quite a bit of value associated with my BBO ID. Not only have I bought some instructional content by Larry Cohen online, which I can come back and reread occasionally, there are also other people on BBO who will recognise me in their friends list even after I take a year-long break from playing Bridge. I'm certainly happy about that.
Yet still, when I go to the MBC to play in a pickup game, there are thousands of people there who know nothing about what I and others associate with my ID, and conversely I know nothing about them and their IDs - though it certainly feels like a significant percentage of them don't particularily care about their reputation.
So, for one thing, I would be in favour of a tournament filter which only allows people who have ever bought BB$. This is not the same as charging a fee - if you charge a fee the money is gone. If I buy BB$, I can use those to play with GIB, to buy content by Marty Bergen or Larry Cohen, to buy Bridgemaster deals, to play in the ACBL Sat 2AM Speedball Pairs, or to give away to someone else.
But what I think would be even more useful is some sort of social rating system. Here is what I envision: whenever you have played a certain amount of boards (say 4 or 8) with or against another player, you are allowed to "rate" that player. Your options will be:
1. This player was pleasant to play with. He was courteous and ethical throughout.
2. This player was neither particularily pleasant nor unpleasant to play with. Perhaps he said some nice things but also made a disparaging remark, or perhaps he just didn't say anything at all.
3. This player was unpleasant to play with. He was rude, disruptive or hostile.
Now, there are a few considerations for implementing such a rating system. For one thing, it should be totally anonymous, or you will have the "Ebay effect" (give me a positive rating or I'll give you a negative one). For another, you will obviously have people who will rate negatively anyone who made a single bid they disagreed with. To deal with this, you need to weight the ratings. I will present a simple proposal that I just came up with on the spur of the moment - if there is serious interest in the idea I would of course happily give it more thought.
Say we give each player a score, 0 being neutral, positive numbers indicating positive ratings and negative numbers indicating negative ratings. Now say Player A gives Player B a negative rating. Player B's rating should go down by
max(1, sqrt(Atot)/Aneg)
where Atot is the total number of players rated by A and Aneg is the number of players given a negative rating by A. For reasons of symmetry, something similar should be applied to positive ratings. Another obvious idea would be to give higher weight to ratings by people who are rated highly by others.
What will you do with these ratings? Show them in people's profiles, of course - BUT I would only show positive ratings, and no exact values. So you could mark anyone with a rating of, say, +5 or higher as a "friendly player" and anyone with a rating of +20 or higher as a "very friendly player".
Enough about that for now, I have one more idea I want to share. One of the main weaknesses of BBO, as I see it, is that there is still[3] no possibility for pairs to find a pickup game, outside of tournaments. One of the ways I typically use BBO is to log on, see if anyone in my friends list is willing to play, and go to the MBC with them to play against two randoms.
Now, in this situation my partner and I obviously have much more incentive to behave well than the other two at the table, because we know we will likely want to play with one another again and don't want to disappoint each other. Furthermore, we have a better chance of producing decent bridge because we already have some mutual understanding about bidding or carding.
But what if there are other pairs in the same situation? Well, then we won't get to play against them, obviously, because we are opening a table, and they are opening a table. That's too bad, because it would probably make for a better game if we could play against one another.
So it looks like I am stuck with building a much bigger friends list, and trying to find not 1 but 3 (or even 7) people willing to play with me, and I won't get to meet anyone new via this method. That sucks.
So what I would really like to see is a system which "helps me find a game" - but where I register with a partner, and get to play against other people with a partner. And there should NOT be any sort of partnership desk for this feature, otherwise I'll be back to the same situation as before. Ideally, it should also be possible to automatically organise team matches - register as a pair OR as a team.
Thanks for reading up to this point!
Regards,
Michael
[1] The KGS Go Server, www.gokgs.com
[2] Obviously, I won't discuss what those parameters are in public - if someone from BBO is interested in discussing technical details they should feel free to send me an email.
[3] And I am sure this was already discussed here when I was last active on the forums 2 or 3 years ago.
"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision"
-- Bertrand Russell
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