The new baseline of players in WOW

The majority of players in the World of Warcraft could become accustomed to always getting the rewards like WOW gold and that would be considered the new baseline. Where if you make some faction happy enough, one of their members randomly charges up to you, gives you a sweet roll and dissapears, never to be seen again. And then when you get back to town they charge you for repairs / arrows.

The type of player the system would be looking to reward in WOW gold is the same player who would turn such things down. You don't help your fellow players because you are looking to get something out of it. Knowing you made someone's day a little brighter should its own reward. Not to mention that a system like this, though noble in its mission, would probably end up so bogged down in people exploiting loopholes that it would fail to accomplish its purpose.  It reminds me of the old adage, "Jesus is coming. Quick! Look busy."

Behavior modification of trolls (small t) is quite a hot button these days, but diminishing negative behavior by reinforcing positive behavior only looks good in a psychology textbook (in theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice, they are different.) You have already anticipated that a structure purportedly meant to reward good behavior will only stimulate new negative behavior. This was already covered extensively yesterday on another topic. The consensus there was that Blizzard merely needs to put their money where their mouth is (i.e., actually do what they say they are doing.) Why add another layer of micromanagement and responsibility to an mechanism that already fails?

A way to avoid exploitation of this system would be the following: Each player account would have a certain amount of "karma" that accrues over time. This would be divided evenly amongst all of the players that he/she reports "vote-kudos".Now you know, there would be people on Alts or whatever just down voting anything they can get their nasty little mitts on. They would do it to prove that the system is broken.

Source: http://www.iurpg.com/news/The-new-baseline-of-players-in-WOW.html