Ask a Game Dev

The reason Dawngate’s system worked wasn’t the voting on its own. Lots of games have post-game voting systems for player karma – FF14, Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, and many others. In these other games, the incentives to earn good karma are not super strong – they are usually mostly cosmetics. The main difference with Dawngate was that they tied a large part of their core progression to it. Not many games are willing to risk that much to push for a better community.

In Dawngate, ranked play was gated behind reaching a player level of 30 and individual matches along the way granted very small amounts of base XP. The Karma voting system functioned as a multiplier, which meant that positive play resulted in significantly more XP over time. High karma also earned significantly better items that for the pre-game loadout configurations that conferred bonuses in-game. The only other way to obtain the better loadout configuration items was to spend real money. As such, anyone who wanted to play seriously would have to either spend a lot of money or be a helpful and positive player… or both. Further, account actions like being banned for toxicity would reset the toxic player’s account level to 1, meaning they would have to grind their way back up to ranked again. By the time players reached level 30 for ranked play, the positivity and karma system had already done its job at establishing positive community environment norms.

It’s really a fascinating examination of system incentives here. Player behavior is proportionally correlated to the value of the incentives for that system. If incentives for a system are weak, the resulting player behavior will be weakly correlated. If the incentives are strong, the system will be a large factor in shaping community behavior. But it’s also risky – you risk many players simply bouncing off the game if they don’t like it.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

Got a burning question you want answered?