All these reporting mechanism are there merely to be cathartic. Someone pisses you off and the game give you a Complaint Button to push. But much like those "close door" button on an elevator, the button doesn't do anything...its there for impatient people to press so they don't just punch the wall. I'm sure 90% of the reporting will either be false or simple reverese griefing. But it will be cathartic to think reporting people matters.

One 'real' solution is to have real live people 'policing' the most popular games. These hired staff that play the games and monitor behavior. That way people who really do 'need' to be downranked will get downranked quickly. Policing doesn't have to be vast it just has to skim-off the worst scum. Believe me people caught and banned seem to love to advertise about it on forums, just punishing/banning the worst offenders will be seen by others.

The other tool should be massive 'data collection', every single game we play should have hundreds of data points tracked. Anomalous behavior by players should be flagged and then when that account gets too many flags it is watched by live staff. My guess is data collection looking for anomalous play will work better than people reporting each other, because it will be more accurate.

This seems like it could be an interesting way to help make people not assholes. It works fairly well on Dota 2. I've had Valve take action against most of the people I've reported in games, so if it works similar to that system it should be pretty good.

All online systems need a robust reporting system but this style of reputation management still seems dubious. No one should be demoting anyone or it will be abused where 30 years of various systems that have come and gone have proven that over and over again.

Using "Big Data" to weed out offenders is definitely the future of all things social online. Even if such systems are inefficient and buggy, there's no way they can be worse than the "anything goes unless a mod is watching" nature of pretty much every online community ever.

I don't know where you live but where I live all the elevators do shut the door when I press the button. It's not a placebo button.