INTRODUCTION

When we have developed MINDNIGHT back in 2017, we have developed it with a small team at No Moon, in a game jam. We had plenty of ideas of what we wanted to do back then while we were working on another game - a top-down melee multiplayer RPG (since then cancelled). We said a game jam, would take some steam off the team and get our creative heads active. But we decided on MINDNIGHT - because it was close to our hearts - most of us played before social deduction games such as Werewolf and The Resistance. So we said - let's take The Resistance and try to adapt it to a digital format. While developing the game, we had in our minds only the wholesome and deeply frustrating, but fun moments of these type of games. We hoped that people from all around the world would be able to experience that, but in a digital format - scaled well and wrapped up in a very cool concept, narrative and setting. Fast forward now, after 2 years - we are very surprised what the game represents now and how a community was build around it. There is no question that the game still has many issues, many issues that we were unable to solve in time, or solve at all to this day. There is no question that parts of the games' community has become problematic due to harassment and toxicity. We never knew and we are still challenged each day by how we should handle this, since we are good at making games - not at managing communities. We tried to learn in time some things, but we are still nowhere near where we would like to be. For that being said, we wanted to start communicating with the community more, here on Steam, through regular posts so that we can explain our stance on different issues, explain new features and shed a light on our thought process and design decisions. Last but not least, we want this to also be an opportunity for everyone in the community to keep us in check, give feedback and discuss how we should shape MINDNIGHT in the game that you would like to play.

THE REPUTATION SYSTEM

We have recently pushed a new update, the Halloween update, where we focused on content and we started doing some fixes and roll out new features. One of the new features that we introduced partially is the REPUTATION SYSTEM. What is the reputation system? Inspired by some other popular multiplayer online games, we decided to design and implement a reputation system that would allow you give other players likes and dislikes. Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down. These binary ratings also have an underlying layer to them where they can split in several compliments or complaints.
Why add a reputation system We wanted to add a reputation system for several reasons: [olist]

To encourage you to have a more positive behaviour, and respect one another

To build a feature that will allows us in the future to have a better matchmaking

To build a feature that can become a progression factor that motivates you to come back to the game constantly

To award good play, nice behaviour and let community members inspire each other and cultivate a safe, friendly environment for new players[/olist] Thumbs Up

• Friendly For those of you that know how to behave, help others and are genuinely good with no toxicity lying under your skin.
• Communicative For those of you that communicate well, politely and are focused on the game's objectives.
• Teamplayer For those of you that simply play really well, collaborate well with others and can easily help the general cause of your team's objective objective

Thumbs Up

• Rude For those of you that have a foul mouth and cannot stop harassing others with your ill-intended and noisy behaviour.
• Non-Communicative For those of you, that simply do not communicate at all, or you communicate topics that have nothing to do with the objective and gameplay at hand.
• Gamethrower For those of you that go against your objective, reveal your role and refuse to adapt to others and to your team's objective.

By all means, we do not consider these Reputation System ratings, perfect - nor final. Some of these, are arguable or borderline subjective. But we do want to make a few things clear about some of these ratings, especially the ones that then can transform into a unjust report.

Report System vs Reputation System

Many of you have asked where is the report system, since it's not present at the end of a match anymore. By introducing the Reputation System, we have also taken this opportunity to hide the report buttons under the Thumbs Down Function, making everyone not able to see the report button the first thing after they finish a game. We all know how salty and frustrating some social deduction games tend to be in the end, and we decided not to have lots of report buttons on the screen, because as humans we are reactive and make bad decisions sometimes. When we introduced the Report System, we did not want it to become a center piece element of the end game. We wanted it to be there in order to let the community to self regulate itself. By moving the report button behind the Thumbs Down function, we hope that we will see lower report numbers, and have players "punish" other players by using the Thumbs Down function without reporting. The report should be only used in extreme cases by all players. As a consequence, after just a few days, we see a substantial decline in reports and bans - which we hope will help new players adapt to the game in a safer, more friendlier environment.

Expanding the Reputation System

Now that we went through our motivations, thoughts and design decisions, we want to give you a glimpse in all of the gameplay elements that we are working on right now, in order to receive your thoughts and comments around them. These possible mechanics of the Reputation System, are work in progress and it's needless to say that they are final in any form. It is important to know that right now the Reputation System does not communicate nor affect any other gameplay system. The mechanics that we are thinking and working on adding to expand the Reputation System are: [olist]

PROFILE - Display the positive ratings of each player in the Profile Section (Stats)

RATINGS - Adjust ratings and add definitions in-game for each, for a better understanding of what they mean, and their level of objectivity

PROGRESSION - Introduce a progression system for the reputation, where you are able to go up and down on a scale, and have relevant titles and rewards awarded to them relative to their rating sum

MATCHMAKING - As the player base grows, we hope that we are able to enable and add new filters to make a better matchmaking, in order to not just separate skill levels, but also separate

PUBLIC PROFILE - We would also like to introduce at some point a feature to expand the Profile Feature with the possibility of players to inspect other players' profile. In this expanded public profile we would like publicly show the positive ratings from the Reputation System [/olist] We will now take our time and go through each and one of them and explain what we would like to do. As a disclaimer again - these are all work in progress designs, propositions and thoughts. We are working on some of them in implementation - but these are all subject to change. 1. Player Profile + Reputation System This is almost self-explanatory - but by adding the positive ratings in the player profile we will let players know, inspect and brag around about how awesome they are. Also when the progression will kick in - this will be even more relevant. 2. Ratings and possible changes The ratings that we have chosen now, might end up not being so popular among some players and we might change them in the future. We had some debates if we should put Polite vs Friendly, Rude vs Abusive etc. It may be at the end of the day a semantic battle, but we would like to know your thoughts about it. We are thinking of not having Gamethrowing as a thumbs down, as that still has a lot of subjectivity and not a lot of players can define it well enough. 3. Reputation Progression The primary feature extension that we would like to add to the Reputation System is a progression, where players would be able to go up and down a scale as they receive positive and negative ratings. Everyone would have 7 levels. Everyone would start on the Neutral Stance in the middle. As a player you would have 3 levels beneath Neutral, meaning a negative reputation level and 3 levels above Neutral, meaning a positive reputation level. This is not a linear progression system and players can go up and down this range. Each reputation level would have a title and this would be publicly shown with badges at the end of each game. Additionally we would like to add two more things to this feature: [olist]

Reputation Rewards - depending on your reputation level, you will receive unique rewards based on the title that you have

Reputation Season - each 4 weeks the reputation levels will have a soft reset, until gaining new titles, reputation levels and badges and at the end of this season, rewards will be handed.[/olist] 4. Reputation and Matchmaking Furthermore, after we would introduce a reputation progression with relative levels, we can then say that this can reflect a player's behaviour and playstyle quite well. With enough players, to avoid long queues, we can apply a filter to the matchmaking and have negative players with a similar reputation level play with each other, while the positive rated players would play together. 5. Public Profile As initially we would only show the overall reputation level badge at the end of a game, we would like at some point, far in the future probably to add public profiles. Players would be able to inspect each others profiles and see different things including what positive ratings and how many each player has. This will act like a motivation factor and make players compete for positive reinforcement.

CONCLUSION

We are aware that the Reputation System does not solve all issues that the game have but we think this is a step towards a better game and community. We also know that we don't hold the universal truth and we don't make the best decisions all the time, that is why we want you, our community to keep us in check so we don't tunnel vision on some aspects and trigger a fuss around decisions made in our design cave with no contact outside in the real world. These are all of the things that we wanted to share with you so far and we would love to have you part of the decisions, give us feedback and help us develop them in a sane way to create a better and safer environment in MINDNIGHT. We would also like to hear your suggestions on how would you like us to communicate with you, and if you would like for us to do other things such as AMAs, Streams, Interview, Youtube Videos etc. Please leave a comment below by hitting the discuss button and/or join our discord and be part of the discussion.