Instead of game moderators hitting the "you must rename your toon" button, maybe a flag could be set such that non-player characters would react negatively. At first with various emotes, and then some derogatory remarks, and eventually by adding on an additional 20% vendors fee to any goods they sell.
Wolfshead writes in an excellent post:
Most MMO enthusiasts have noticed a sharp decline in the quality of the WoW community of late. Cursing, nastiness, bullying and other forms of rudeness have now become endemic in Azeroth.I can imagine at least one prominent blogger arguing that "no, the community hasn't changed, it's just your nostalgic recollection of the past".
These Yahoo Reputation Design patterns are very interesting, particularly the table further down the page. They are specifically for managing reputations within online communities, like forums, but they could also be applied to game design on further thought.
On the community front, this suggests to me that CMs could do well to be proactive in managing their community, and not just reactive to posted comments. Something like a kinda-weekly wrap up of good posts, handing out the plaudits. This would be different from the case of a CM weighing in on an existing thread.
It also puts paid to the idea that you can't design community, that forums are fated to be terrible, and that designers/publishers are not responsible for a lousy community.
