Alignment System (Ragnarok Online)

The Alignment System is a defunct feature which was partially implemented into Ragnarok Online which was implemented around 2002. It is thought that it was to be implemented as a means of rating players and potentially making the work of Game Masters (GM) easier by allowing them to view how they had been rated by players in general. It required the user to have at least Level 9 Basic Skill to use.

Background

Information about this system is limited to what was released prematurely in the Ragnarok Online client. It was originally visible within the client around 2002 and 2003, where when the player right-clicked on another player, they would see the text "align with good point" or "align with bad point"; either of which, when clicked simply provided a modal popup stating "this feature is not implemented".

Looking at the "ragnarok_online_client" release provided by iRO in 2002, the client's "msgstringtable.txt" (a list of pre-defined strings which the Ragnarok Online client looks up) has the following items listed for the Alignment system:

You haven't learned enough skills for alignning.#
Alignning has been done.#
You already spent your point for today.#
Hasn't been a month yet since you aligned this person.#
You got a Good Point from %s.#
You got a Bad point from %s.#
Alignning with a Good Point#
Alignning with a Bad Point#

This was then expanded slightly in some 2003 clients, which outlined that the player required Level 9 Basic Skill in order to be used. Around this time, Ragnarok Online was near the height of its popularity and there were also several high-profile hacking incidents as well as griefing and client modification which allowed people to send unlimited chats and swear words, as well as trade scams, and it's very likely the Alignment System was created to deal with these issues. There is also an NPC named Newbie Instructor (Ragnarok Online) which informs the player:

    [Newbie Instructor]
    We have a system called "Alignment System"
    When you meet somebody nice or somebody helps you, you can give the person a good point in recognition of services.
    On the contrary, to someone who is ill-mannered or doing evil things on people, you can give the person 2 bad points. Meanwhile you will get 1 bad point for the penalty. This is to prevent abuse of the alignment system.

    [Newbie Instructor]
    The Alignment system is only available for adult characters over Novice level 8 and can be used once a day.
    I know you don't think this is not important right now, but be careful, it causes you the cumulative effects on your character.
    Somehow I believe nice persons will play fair even without this kind of restriction!

Mechanics

The Alignment System from the RO GUI in 2002.

The mechanics of the system can only really be inferred from what has been provided in the Ragnarok Online client. The first part of the client which shows the Alignment system is the UI, where there is a radar graph with four dimensions:

• Righteous
• Vulgar
• Wicked
• Famed

In the client, the message strings made clear that a user could register one point, which could be registered once per month per player, either good or bad. This would be done by the user right-clicking on the user and clicking "align good/bad point" (in the client it is transliterated to "Aligning with good point" and "Aligning with bad point") and then this data would presumably be transmitted to AEGIS and then stored in its database. When a user then opened their "status" window to view how they had been rated with other players.

Since the image we have for the client shows 4 dimensions, and we can only assume two dimensions from data we have seen ("good", "bad") then we have to assume that the calculation of the four categories shown in the chart would have been done in some other way. We could assume that for instance, the "good" and "bad" corresponded to "righteous" and "wicked", so if 4 people rated a player as "good" and 2 bad, we would see a peak facing upwards larger (representing "righteous"/ "good") than a peak half its size facing downwards, so this way the player can judge how often the user is rated bad as opposed to good.

The "Vulgar" and "Famed" however, seems more vague. It could be assumed that "vulgar" is an alignment a GM does or the system does if it notices that the user has used some bad language, but what would its converse be? If a player said "fuck" 10 times, what would be considered its opposite -- saying "kittens"? The issue with this system is that really it could just have easily be replaced by a user feedback system showing the % of people who rated the character positively, and that would give an idea of how that player had been rated. A graph showing two axes to represent this data makes the display more confusing.