Ron's been cranking away to add a new feature for the site: Karma

Karma is a general concept related to the how a player is viewed by others. You can give positive or negative karma, but only the latest karma value from you towards that particular toon will factor into the toon's overall karma total. This will limit any griefing while allowing players a forum thru which to post their impression of the character.

You can search for a toon by typing a partial name, then select from the list presented. You will then see the toon's karma total on the left and any karma reports (or feedback) listed in the middle. Just hit the 'Submit Feedback' button to fill in a report... and please remember, this is a PG-13 board

Let us know if you think this'll be useful while making your groups.

So if someone gets a lot of bad karma do you ban them? Shouldn't the karma be displayed for the person when they post? Does this karma depreciate like in-game karma?

I haz questions >.<

The karma is only for WoW characters at the moment. We will be adding karma to the site in general, for like forum posts, blog comments, etc etc, but atm its only WoW characters.

If user A has toon B linked to their account, and toon B gets a bunch of bad reviews, it doesn't actually have any negative effects for user A. BUT, people can now come to the site, checkout toon B and see that he/she has a bunch of bad reviews, and they might not want to group with them.

We are working on ways to make it easier to access this information while in game. You should be able to just click on a toon in game, and automatically see their reviews here on SolidICE.

How a toons karma will effect the person who has claimed that toon, we are not sure yet. Chances are people with bad karma will just not link their toons, or will unlink them when they get in the negatives. However we can probably display the karma for a person on the forums based on their linked toons. I also plan to make it so other people can see your toons, and the karma associated with those toons on your user page. Ofcourse this information will be able to be hidden in your settings for obvious privacy concerns.

As for degration, we are not sure how this will work in just yet.

Before we expand on the system further though, I need to modify the site to support other addon authors.

Ah I see, so really it is to assist with in-game. Still, it should encourage good behavior (pending people realize the karma function is on the site also, might take time).

In classic SolidICE fashion, there will probably be some kind of "gawdy, intrusive, annoying [insert insult here] popup" in game or something to bring attention to it.Actually we can probably just replace / share the "raffles" overlay in game to also mention the karma system. Once we get in the game component developed I'll make a video on how its used as well.

Sounds fabulous ^.^

i think we should probably have a staggered 'aging' of karma and it might be useful to use 2 decimal points for calculating it
.... let's say:

1) karma points less than one (or two) weeks old do not degrade at all,
2) between two weeks and a month they degrade at one percent per week, (yes, percentages and not actual points- this is why we need karma points with decimal points)
3) karma points between one to two months old should degrade at 2 percent per week,
4) and everything over two months old should degrade at 20 percent per week.
5) karma totals between [-0.99;0.99] should be displayed as zero but still kept around and accounted for. If any user's total karma falls in this interval after two months, then as a final step of the 20 percent per week aging process any remaining karma point is deleted and the user is treated as having no karma.

All this would mean that the site should keep track of each individual karma point but in return it encourages granting karma to active players (be it positive or negative)... and the algorithm also incorporates some means on purging inactive players out of the database.

Does Karma reset on Tuesdays? Or if I delete my Oqueue folder in addons when updating to latest version?

I noticed I was green all last week and had 25 karma on Monday. Tuesday rolls around and I'm back to zilch.