The Karma and Exile system

TheBroth features a player rating system which allows players to give each other positive or negative feedback based on behaviour. For example, a player intent on destroying others’ work would receive negative feedback, while a player co-operating with others to build a piece of digital art may receive positive feedback. The player rating system is known as the ‘Karma system’.

You could think of the Karma system as deployed in TheBroth as an exercise in creating a “trendy Web 2.0″ application where events are entirely dependent on social consensus by many.

If you’re “doing good”, the collective playership will reward you.

If you’re stealing other’s tiles or disrupt collaborative art, you’re being branded a bully and thrown out - if, and only IF, the majority vote agrees on that evaluation of your actions at that point in time!

We opted for a time-sensitive system. Someone who’s done “bad” may do real good in the next minute, and vice versa. And of course we hope we made the system fair, and unobtrusive, so everyone can focus on the fun of tile dragging, as opposed to being distracted by dishing out minuses for no reason!

The Player Feedback System

Player feedback is given via a rating system: each active player can give other players in the room positive or negative votes by clicking on either the ‘+’ or ‘-’ sign next to the player’s name.

A player who receives 3 negative votes within one minute is “exiled” from the room he is currently in for a set period of time. This has the advantage of removing destructive players from rooms to allow co-operative players to continue playing undisturbed.

Key concepts involved in understanding TheBroth’s Karma system are:

• Mover identification
• Room karma
• Exile

Mover identification

Mover identification allows players to see which player last moved a tile by holding down CTRL as they mouse over the tile. Using this feature, players can identify other players who are acting destructively or co-operatively and rate them accordingly.

Room karma

A player’s rating at any given time is known as their ‘room karma’. Each player starts out with a neutral room karma of 0, which is altered by positive or negative votes from other players. A player can have unlimited positive karma, but can only have a negative karma of -3 before being exiled. Players cannot alter their room karma by voting for themselves.

Each player can only rate another player in the same way once per minute: for example, a player cannot give another player two negative or two positive votes in the same minute. They can, however, alternate between positive and negative votes for another player in the same minute, which allows a player to neutralise any votes given out in error.

Room karma is designed to be fluid and temporary: both positive and negative karma votes from other players last only 60 seconds, after which time a player’s karma gradually reverts back to neutral.

Exile

Wikipedia defines Exile as “… a form of punishment. It means to be away from one’s home (i.e. city, state or country) while being explicitly refused permission to return […]”

Exile in TheBroth isn’t all that bad. You’re being put into a different room. Amongst TheBroth developers, this room is also known as the “bully room”, because all those that misbehave and act destructively are hauled up together there.

Once a player has a room karma of -3, he is automatically “exiled” from the current room. Exile involves being transferred to a designated room for a set period of time where players can interact only with other exiled players. Banners in the exile room let the exiled player know where he is and what has happened.

The exile room differs from a regular TheBroth room in the following ways:

• Only other players with a karma of -3 are present.
• Players cannot rate other players in the exile room.
• While in the exile room, players’ karma remains at -3 – it does not revert back to neutral as in other rooms.

After a player has been in exile for x minutes (at the time or writing, this value is 2 minutes), a link appears, inviting the player to re-join the room from which he was exiled.

How it works

The system checks each player’s room karma every 5 seconds. Depending on the player’s room karma and the time of the player’s last karma vote, the system does one of two things:

1. For players with room karma not equal to either 0 or -3, the system checks when the player last received a karma vote. If the last karma vote was given over 60 seconds ago, the system neutralizes the player’s room karma by taking it one step closer to zero. As an example, if a player’s room karma is -2, the karma neutralization will adjust it to -1. Conversely, if a player’s room karma is +2, the karma neutralization will adjust it to +1.
2. If the player’s karma is -3, he is exiled, and a countdown timer is set to allow him back into his pre-exile room after a few minutes.

Curious?

It’s actually possible to visit the exile voluntarily. It’s where all the bullies and the naughty kids hang out! And of course the innocently evicted ones, too.

So if you want to have a peek at what it’s like in the exile, here’s the link to the exile.