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I felt that there were some problems that rendered most reputation systems unusable for MMOs. Abalieno hit a few more with his rant. While the author of the article on GamaSutra had a few ways to try to fix problems, they revolved around time (decaying reputation, time grouped before you can render an opinion).

The problems I found were with Anonymity (any time there is an aggregate value for reputation, it anonymizes the reviewers), Lack of Feedback (note that eBay lets you post reasons why you received a negative review), and Popularity (only popular people will have large numbers of reviews, and those reviews will always be inaccurately skewed positively or negatively). The real killer, though, is that people will game any reputation system, as is evidenced by eBay and shill reviews. Making a reputation more complex (such as through decaying reputation over time, or weighing reputation reviews based on length of time associated) only makes it easier for the system to be gamed. For example, I own four accounts in World of Reputationcraft, one of which I regularly use to ninja while the others are lily white. Reputation ratings decay by one influence per hour logged in and active, so I log my ninja in and farm long enough to reduce the negative ratings to a point where my other three accounts with good reputations can vote and overcome the negative rating. Now, I have a net positive reputation, join a raiding group, and go ninja the final pieces of my Armor of the Devoted Catass. (Remember, in a system with reputation decay, you have to be able to provide a reputation vote to a character more than once, otherwise all reputation will eventually decay to 0 and be unable to be adjusted.)