About our reputation engine - and what problem is this solving?

Have you ever started a match, carrying a popular or sought-after sprite, only to be followed off the jump, deleted, and that sprite lost to a sweaty mess? I have, a great many times. But whilst that isn't directly related to the feature, it demonstrates that the game has a problem. It fosters some not-so-nice behaviours in its players. And these behaviours extend out to the concept of trading and indexing.

Now, Fornite itself doesn't have any sort of trading system, but as a community one has somewhat developed outside the game. Users will organise themselves, share their Epic usernames and attempt to jump into a game to make a trade (or an index, which is a special variation of a trade where the same Sprite is returned to the person who shared it originally). This trades might go just fine, but quite often, one of the parties has other ideas - they steal the sprite leaving the other party footing the bill, and the bad experience.

Dustbound attempts to solve this issue but introducing a managed, reputation-backed trading system. Each trade has outcomes, good or bad, and those outcomes factor into your own reputation. A good trade is reward, a bad trade is penalised. And this reputation is surfaced up front, you can see before you agree to a trade, what the reputation is of that other party.

Dustbound extends this further with leaderboards - where you can chase the top spot by being a good citizen. Dustbound manages all this whilst keeping you anonymous until the point you exchange your Epic usernames.