Valve Discusses Charging Customers Based on Popularity

[starhaven]

This is actually a great idea. Its motivation to be a nicer person.

yer but what about that poor new guy who doest talk who joins a game in left for dead with say 3 mates and then him self hes not very good hes just got the game or is just plain not good the 3 mates kick him because hes not good this leads to valve thinking hes a jerk and he now has to pay more

is this really what you think should happen

 

[Norris IV]

A good Idea but it's gonna need some refining beofre its implemented or trolling and hell Ill say it bullying will end up taking place as groups of people could complain about 1 person and jack the prices up for them, but oter than that i see no reason why this wouldn't work

 

[Tron Paul]

I see really only one way to implement this with a minimum of abuse.

Track each user and the player counts of the server before they join and at intervals after they join and if the user was banned or kicked. No community upvoting or downvoting, just pure algorithms.

Valve could right now take all the players and determine what a significant (statistically) change in player count is after joining. If a is significantly lowering server player counts on average they join they should be considered "bad" players. If the player raises or causes no significant lowering of the server they should be considered "good" players.

If a user is kicked or banned a penalty could be applied to that player normalizing on the frequency of kicks/bans the server does.

There should be other features Valve looks at as well, possibly voice chat frequency of the server before and after (is that player engaging the server?), the score of the player (are they pubstomping) and what kinds of server do they play on, etc.

This is pretty much a classification problem which is is actually dealt with by people in Information Retrieval. Valve should hire some search engine guys.

 

[Taawus]

Gabe Newell, less crazy marketing schemes, more Episode 3.

 

[Setsuri21]

In theory its a nice idea

In practice? Not only no, but hell no. There are so many avenues for abuse, and in the long run you'd just end up pissing off a lot of players. On top of that, as bad as those assholes who spout nonesense are, you shouldn't force them to pay more. I love the positive = pay less aspect, but negative = pay more is just a bad business model I think.

This. Positive reinforcement is what the entire game industry needs. Don't make jerks pay more, let nice folks pay less. If the gaming industry tried more positive reinforcement options, I think a lot of people would be happier.

 

[ph0b0s123]

As long as I don't have to pay more to play off-line single player games even if I am a douche, I don't mind. Otherwise punishing people for not being popular seems like school all over again and was the reason I wasted my youth on computer games in the first place.....

 

[PurplePlatypus]

Price decided via a popularity contest that, however you implement it, will be open to abuse?
How about no.

Positive reinforcement and rewards for contributing is one thing but this? THIS!?

 

[Nurb]

So valve is making itself "God" and doling out judgement based on the sins of the gamer. Huh.

Yea, like this won't cause major problems if gamers "conspire" by reporting a popular gamer or rate someone poorly out of petty jealousy when they beat them.

Not to mention all the extra work valve employees would have to do to deal with appeals and complaints beyond what they already deal with.

Hey... Hey, Gabe? How about you work on getting Ep. 3 out the door instead of making yourself Libra with the "scales of gaming justice"

Also, here's how the "awful gamers" will think:
"What? I have to pay more for games because my reputation is bad in multiplayer? Well screw you, I'm pirating it"

 

[CrazT]

I like the idea...in theory. In practise, I fear it would be very difficult to implement, let alone find a suitable pricing scheme.

I do, however, find it interesting that Valve are talking about a new pricing system instead of the next Half-Life. The announcement has to come soon, the wait is tearing me apart

 

[Inkidu]

I think it's illegal. I mean, you can refuse service to anyone, but I don't think it's right to charge them more because they're jackasses. Their money is still good, if people don't like them they can simply play on another server (the gamer equivalent of leaving him alone to cry in the sandbox all alone). However, it's discriminatory behavior. Someone's going to play some lame card on Valve, and then they're gong to get sued.

Either that or everyone will go out of their way to be nice on Valve servers and Steam and valve will go out of business.

I could kind of care less. I'm not a Valve fan.

Let's just put it this way. I've never seen assholes in diners get bigger bills.

 

[w1ndscar]

This:

Spoiler

and this:

Spoiler

Two of my all time favourite games and got them used. Very nice indeed.

 

[Xexxar]

Good way to get more people to torrent instead of buying to be honest.

 

[The Red Spy]

[HEADING=3]This can't be a serious proposition, can it? [/HEADING]

Everyone, to some extent, is an arsehole. You can argue that you are the embodiment of tranquillity, a patient soul whose only goal online is to scour servers, looking for new players and teaching them the ways of the mouse and keyboard, but you are fooling no one. You like to win, you don't like to lose, and everyone has a shitty day once in a while. Whilst this should never be an excuse for repeat offenders; the players who spout racism or derogatory terms, the griefers or the trolls (to name but a few), why should someone be labelled as one of these on a simple slip up once or twice?

You know what else, these are the very people who this system hopes to "punish" then be the judge on how YOU play, in line with their questionable morals, and how you conform with their expectations. Take a moment and think about how many times you've been in a lobby or server filled with racists, or with people who blindly attack someone based on their age, gender or country of origin? How does this at all defend the poor player who already faces harassment every time that he or she steps into a party, when they now have to prepare for unjust and ludicrous payments. This doesn't even take into consideration bullying continuing from real world events into an online space, or how elitists might file negative reports on new players, just based on their performance.


What kind of business model is this? I would imagine that any user who would get 'punished' wouldn't be able to simply just make another account, so they would just leave whatever game or service has been taken from them. Even the magical Valve still have a bottom line, one that share holders monitor with every waking moment. When they feel their investment is potentially losing customers, they cut ties and run. And for those of you who say "it won't be many people who are affected", just consider how prevalent the problem must be to start suggesting fixes like this.

Such an idea is admirable in it's assumption of purity and innocence within the average player, but the players who may need the system the most are prone to fall foul to it at the hands of the people who it wants to remove. It shall just remain an idyllic fantasy for all of us who live in the real world, and nothing more.


And this doesn't even consider those of us who may have no choice but to share accounts with siblings or even friends.

 

[FFHAuthor]

Sounds more like a barrier to expanding their consumer base than an incentive to current players. If I'm going to be charged more for my first game than someone who's been playing it for a while, and if I'm going to be charged more for being a bad player, that seems like multiple reasons for me to simply not buy the game, especially if the amount of money I have to put in to play can vary based on my ongoing game play.

Part of me would just say 'hell with it, I'll take -generic shooter 14- with one price over that sliding scale payment option game that valve has'

 

[Ben Simon]

I would support this, but I think that the system itself would drive away steam customers, both good and bad.

 

[Jumwa]

If you could make this work in a way where it wasn't just abused by rotten people and their rotten friends, than I think it'd be the best thing to happen to gaming ever.

If anyone could make it work, Valve has a good chance. Give it a shot, please! Experiment and find out.

 

[GeneWard]

This would be a fucking awesome idea if some kind of bad player blacklisting system was introduced on steam, and as long as by nice players he can also just mean polite, respectable but also independent, 'cos I only have a couple of steam friends and would'nt want to be penalized for using an xbox as my social platform as opposed to my PC.

 

[Tron Paul]

You're all stark raving mad.

If anyone actually thinks this is a good idea, we should probably ask you for the password to get into crazytown, because you're probably the freaking mayor.

'So lets give discounts to the really good players and lets charge extra to those who don't really know any better. Because this is what fair is.'

This is basically an extended version of a popularity contest and the people that end up suffering are the nameless thousands who never make that much of an impact in the servers. Because it's obviously fair to hike the price up for those. I mean, Their K/D ratio is bellow 3.

I think this could be properly implemented given the right information. The problem is how to classify "good" and "bad" players. There are many different opinions, but plenty of overlap in the extremes of the spectrum. What Valve needs to do is find features, or data, that significantly determines the classification while minimizing false positives (incorrect classifications).

It's a novel idea for the an interesting problem. Player A may adversely affect my enjoyment of the game, while Player B may increase my enjoyment of the game. Shouldn't Player B be rewarded for their actions and Player A punished?

As long as up/down voting is not used, Valve only uses hard data for classification, and "bad" gamers are not charged more than normal, I think it's possible that Valve could accurately classify gamers and reward those that are good. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_classification