The Elite Dangerous ingame reputation system thread

[Alex Brentnall]

I agree but I'd look at something more like this:

Spoiler

40% of the rep you earn for Federation is taken away from your Alliance/Empire rank and vice versa.

This means say you have the following rep points (I assume it works on a points base system or some equivalent):

Empire 90
Alliance 50
Federation -18

And do a +10 points empire mission this takes 4 points away from Alliance and Federation leaving you with:

Empire 100
Alliance 46
Federation -22

That means you only have an overall net gain of 2 points for all 3 factions making it very difficult to max all 3 factions yet easy to do one in particular at the expense of annoying the other two.
To keep in with all 3 factions you'd have to rotate doing one mission in each until you have a ground layer of reputation/trust that you can wear away.

Tl:dr I don't mind it being hard, just no real life time based decay system.

 

[Sysmon]

FD presented a living game world where the players are small pegs in the great machine and where things move on whether you participate or not. Just like RL, being away from it for a while decreases reputation. It works as intended, I'm sure, although some tweaking may happen.

Positive reputation, especially at the very highest levels, should diminish towards a balance point of the amount of effort you can/want to put into it versus the decay. It shouldn't go to neutral, but you can't be a star if you don't work for it.

Negative reputation should diminish, or what's the point of being a baddie if you can't lie low until the heat diminishes a bit.

Wanting whatever you participate in to stop when you are not there is a bit spoiled, in my opinion. So please stop posting these requests and enjoy the game as it is. As a player, change your stance on this matter. This game is a fresh breeze in a pretty stale market.

S

 

[Renegade Roach]

I agree but I'd look at something more like this:

Spoiler

40% of the rep you earn for Federation is taken away from your Alliance/Empire rank and vice versa.

This means say you have the following rep points (I assume it works on a points base system or some equivalent):

Empire 90
Alliance 50
Federation -18

And do a +10 points empire mission this takes 4 points away from Alliance and Federation leaving you with:

Empire 100
Alliance 46
Federation -22

That means you only have an overall net gain of 2 points for all 3 factions making it very difficult to max all 3 factions yet easy to do one in particular at the expense of annoying the other two.
To keep in with all 3 factions you'd have to rotate doing one mission in each until you have a ground layer of reputation/trust that you can wear away.

Tl:dr I don't mind it being hard, just no real life time based decay system.

I'm with this, never understood why at least Major faction rep wasn't done on a system of weights and balances.

 

[FreeeLancer]

never mind, totally missed the subject

 

[Renegade Roach]

Negative reputation should diminish, or what's the point of being a baddie if you can't lie low until the heat diminishes a bit.

This actually doesn't make sense if you think about it. Sure the immediate fuss might die down when a criminal 'lies low' after a big crime, but if their negative rep is substantial enough they will remain a highly wanted target regardless. If anything small misdemeanors and loss of rep should stabilise... the real bad guys have to tough it out and work for their rehabilitation into society Same applies at the other end. Great war heroes don't suddenly become nobody after a holiday, but somebody who served in a cushy desk job... who's going to remember them?

tldr: Frontier (and everybody else) have it all back to front

 

[n13L5]

Perhaps if people didn't jump to immediately label the developers as fraudsters and swindlers for axing a game mode that they couldn't reconcile with the direction they wanted the game to go in, and then try and tie any perceived shortcoming of the game to that missing game mode, they might be more inclined to consider suggestions from those people. Just a thought.

Just in case it matters, I have removed that line. I agree with you, that it didn't really belong here, I just can't get over it, when people enter into an agreement, take your money... then they have a "vision" and decide to do something else with it. Because the inability to do both couldn't have just been realized at the last minute. It was a conscious decision much earlier to go in an irreconcilably different direction. That's dishonorable. You fund an old people's home and they build a hospital instead, telling you only at the last minute, when you're wondering why the building is so ...different. The "Save and Exit" options are still in the game today

 

[n13L5]

Thing is, people overestimate how hard it is to gain reputation in the first place.. You can get to rank 4 in 10 hours tops, and once you get to rank 5 you can practically constantly maintain that level just with your faction income.

Reputation doesn't equal rank. rank missions depend on how many minor factions you gain reputation with. So yes, rank can be done pretty fast, but that's also not what's decaying.

It took me a lot of effort to go from friendly to allied. I was partly doing it for ranks, but also for less interdictions, repair and fuel discounts.

Getting to friendly wasn't exactly fast either, I did a zillion missions, combining multiple missions using the cargo hold of my ASP to multitask pretty massively. This took literally two weeks of constant, focused grinding, where I wasn't doing anything else but playing Elite. Granted that earning credits was primary goal with reputation secondary, but I watched closely to optimize both as much as possible.

 

[DangerousLarry]

nvm, jumped to conclusions.

 

[Armour]

Just in case it matters, I have removed that line. I agree with you, that it didn't really belong here, I just can't get over it, when people enter into an agreement, take your money... then they have a "vision" and decide to do something else with it. Because the inability to do both couldn't have just been realized at the last minute. It was a conscious decision much earlier to go in an irreconcilably different direction. That's dishonorable. You fund an old people's home and they build a hospital instead, telling you only at the last minute, when you're wondering why the building is so ...different. The "Save and Exit" options are still in the game today

I dunno, it seems like it's twisted your mind a bit. Why not just sell up and move on if it's eating you up inside as badly as you state? I know that strictly speaking you can't, according to the EULA, but it seems to happen regardless. There are other games out there, and I would presume that not every developer of games has a negative reputation with you, so maybe there's one that has a product you can enjoy, one that will eventually allow you forget that such an injustice ever happened?

 

[Sysmon]

This actually doesn't make sense if you think about it. Sure the immediate fuss might die down when a criminal 'lies low' after a big crime, but if their negative rep is substantial enough they will remain a highly wanted target regardless. If anything small misdemeanors and loss of rep should stabilise... the real bad guys have to tough it out and work for their rehabilitation into society Same applies at the other end. Great war heroes don't suddenly become nobody after a holiday, but somebody who served in a cushy desk job... who's going to remember them?

tldr: Frontier (and everybody else) have it all back to front

Not really. I agree that if you are notorious enough (or famous enough) it should take a long time for that rep to diminish. But there are really only very few of such fame/notoriety in history today (compared to total number of people). How many Great War Heroes are there really? I'm not suggesting that any leaving the game for a few weeks should mean back to square one, but or reputation should definitely not be at the extremes either.

In case of criminals, if there are unpaid fines or bounties, rep could balance slower than if the baddie had paid everything off. The System doesn't forget, but will forget (to a point) after a while if everything is sorted.

So you are wrong, everybody else (and Frontier) doesn't have it back to front. Rather, people here seem to exaggerate the loss/gain of reputation with time for the purpose of saying it is bad. Read the description and play the game! You'll see it is not really that bad, unless you want to be Captain Awesome all the time even when you are not playing.

S

- - - Updated - - -

I dunno, it seems like it's twisted your mind a bit. Why not just sell up and move on if it's eating you up inside as badly as you state? I know that strictly speaking you can't, according to the EULA, but it seems to happen regardless. There are other games out there, and I would presume that not every developer of games has a negative reputation with you, so maybe there's one that has a product you can enjoy, one that will eventually allow you forget that such an injustice ever happened?

Rep balancing in action!

S

 

[Tenshi]

Any of you played GTA V online?

In that game your online character will decrease in skill levels if you don't play the game. So all that time spent leveling up its stats will decay over a few weeks back to level 1 stats regardless of your actual character level. Its a stupid idea in that game and its a stupid one in FD.

I like to explore why should I join a power if when I am away my reputation will decrease? It makes no sense.

 

[Sysmon]

I like to explore why should I join a power if when I am away my reputation will decrease? It makes no sense.

No need to join powers in the first place. Is there a power that gives perks to explorers? If there is, then the balancing rate might be set to reflect that the power must be used to people being off exploring for long time periods.

S

 

[Don Alvarez]

PP is only a few days old, maybe we should, I don't know, give it some time to see how it works in practice before condemning it after only a short span?

 

[Hacker#451563]

Loads of good ideas here from people who care about, and play, the game.

Dont expect anything to be implemented though. I dont think FD wants common sense to get in the way of their 'Great Vision'.

 

[withnail]

Nice beer that. Suggest you do a lot of washing down, it might make more sense!

 

[Sysmon]

How much beer can a tin foil hat hold, if a tin foil hat could hold beer?

S

 

[Mortiferus]

As a casual player, I am also disgusted with Frontier's attitude to reputation... So I was working hard (my whole online time) to reach friendly with Federation, and now they are telling me I will get Neutral if I don't play for a few days? Well, thank you! I like my RL more than game, sorry.

 

[Ancipital]

How much beer can a tin foil hat hold, if a tin foil hat could hold beer?

Nice apron, are you some sort of chef?

..and yes, I am fully in agreement with the thrust of this thread. It's amazing that 1.3 came out of beta in this state. Of late, it has felt like the game itself should probably still be in beta.

I haven't played in over a week, after the 1.3 beta screwed up my controls (causing a messy cargo-loss-splosion incident) and gave me a thoroughly horrible and nerve-wracking evening. Remembering the mess that was the 1.2 release, I resolved to let the fuss die down with 1.3, as the inevitable rush patch to fix things would be needed to make the game safely playable again. Sadly, like 1.2, it's going to need not just a bigger boat, but multiple rushed updates- to address not just the new bugs, but some of the weird regressions (repair costs spring to mind as a particularly impressively untested example), and address whatever the earlier rush fixes did too.

It's not very impressive. Some of the bugs are large and obvious, and easy to reproduce. The live game is now more buggy than the 1.3 betas, not less. It's a strange way to run a software project, "ship it and ask if it works" is a daring approach. I'm aware that not everything is trivial to reproduce in a distributed system like this, but many of the problems that we're seeing either could be or were pointed out in beta. Having internal QA actually play the game for a day or two on an internal staging setup would have revealed at least some of these problems.

This slapdash approach is not a comfortable fit with a game that has a very punitive "hardcore" setup and compulsory online play/no proper saves- and doubly not in the case of a relatively major developer. While I don't wish to be a doom-monger (after all, I'm one of the harshest Elite fanboys that this pale blue dot has ever seen), it's hard to avoid. I'm glad that it's "just" a game, rather than either something safety-critical or something that customers depend on for their day to day financial and regulatory survival. That said, it's still not a good sign when your non-gaming partner can tell how broken ED is, and knowing that you have an evening to yourself to nerd out disgustingly, says "oh, no, I hope you find something to play, then".

 

[n13L5]

PP is only a few days old, maybe we should, I don't know, give it some time to see how it works in practice before condemning it after only a short span?

This thread isn't about Power Play reputation decay.

Its about major AND minor faction decay - even though we were promised ONLY major factions will decay (Empire, Federation, Alliance) the minor factions also decay, and it doesn't take a lot of time to decay. I currently play a lot and I'm not offline anymore than to eat, sleep and go outside a bit. And even I'm online 5 or more hours a day, I get decay of major and minor factions. While I grind up one minor Empire faction, another one starts to droop, This is ridiculous and not even what FD said it would be.

 

[Genus]

How much beer can a tin foil hat hold, if a tin foil hat could hold beer?

S

I'd hazard an unqualified and highly experimental guess at roughly 1.3..?