I've been brooding over this for a while now, ever since it was announced that in 2.1, there would come a new maximum reputation level above allied, plus major faction reputation will no longer override a lower minor faction reputation. While a big part of my problem with the chance is that it devalues any already achieved allied status (a weaker variant of a typical "MMO level cap raise"), it is the other part which I would like to discuss:
Gaining reputation varies greatly in both speed and quality of the experience. Have a look at this chart:
The vertical axis is the fun axis, the horizontal axis is the speed axis. What I noticed is that it depends on both the intrinsic nature of a faction and some surrounding circumstances how fast or slow reputation gain is possible, and how fun or boring that is.
As we all know, some of these parameters can shift over time depending on the grander scheme of things (read: BGS). Factions can lose or gain system or station ownership, new factions can expand into a system giving you new options etc (e.g. pirate gang now active in a system where there was none before: bounty hunters rejoice). War or civil war can provide a temporary opportunity to gain reputation by fighting where other combat options are not really viable. But all these things a elusive, the player is at the whim of the BGS basically.
And I am speaking not just on theoretical grounds. Anyone who has attempted to get all the system permits may have been thwarted in their efforts now and then by BGS, suddenly the faction giving the permit has no station and thus no place to trade or hand in data, no local bounty hunting etc.
The ebb and flow of the BGS can mean the difference between a week of excruciating mission grinding for change money or a weekend afternoon of blowing up pirates.
And I am not going deeper into how player groups can rally to intentionally affect the BGS to open up or close down viable opportunities. I am already 100% expect at one point or another some group to actively disrupt engineer accessibility by playing the BGS until that engineers faction owns no station at all, and anyone not already with the reputation may be almost completely shut out of access to that engineers service. (A related problem is how the downfall of a power would remove its special equipment, if ALD falls, for example no one afterward can get prismatic shields!)
Given past experience, I am not confident FD are considering these ramifications, or if they are, may just brush them aside, or even completely embrace them.
Now what could or should be done to alleviate these issues? I have some ideas:
Gaining reputation varies greatly in both speed and quality of the experience. Have a look at this chart:
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fun-+
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slow fastThe vertical axis is the fun axis, the horizontal axis is the speed axis. What I noticed is that it depends on both the intrinsic nature of a faction and some surrounding circumstances how fast or slow reputation gain is possible, and how fun or boring that is.
- In the worst case, we have an anarchist faction that owns no station at all. There are no legal bounties to collect with them, not even from the KWS, and you can't directly trade with them or sell them exploration data. Your only choice is missions, but since this is about a specific faction, the subset of actually relevant missions at any station in the system is tiny, sometimes you are unlucky and no mission for that faction is generated at all. Slow and a mixed bag in terms of fun, very dependent on RNG and your tolerance to doing even the most pitiful mission.
- Slightly better is a non-anarchist faction without a station. It adds the possibilities to hand in secondary bounties collected with the KWS. However these will be relatively little compare to how many criminals you have to destroy in the process, as they don't all yield a bounty with the faction you want to rep up with. This in practice it is barely any better than above.
- A bit better is a faction that owns a station but no commodities market. For any explorer this is already the jackpot - just dump a couple of million credits worth of data at their place and bingo. Maximum fun for an explorer, slow to collect all the data, and always at least an okay profit.
- If they have a commodity market, this is the trader's jackpot. It matters little whether the market is poor or rich - just dump lots of high-value goods on their market and soon you will be allied. Bonus points if it's a starport - send in the gold-laden Anacondas. Fun and fast, and sometimes quite profitable.
- If they have system ownership, you can now relatively effectively hunt criminals for bounties* at the nav beacon or in USS.
- If there is also an RES, especially high intensity or hazardous, that's the bounty hunter's jackpot*. You can get allied in just a few hours while doing your most fun activity and earning millions of credits. Fast and fun.
- *There is one caveat: it requires an actual criminal (e.g. pirate) faction to hunt, or any other faction in its place which the player is willing to ruin their reputation with in the first place. If you have a system of all legal corporations and Federation factions, the criminal NPCs will all spawn from those non-criminal factions. This can easily void the option to bounty hunt for reputation.
- Last but not least, there are those oddball places with lots of money donation missions. They are the joker, for anyone can just dock there and dump credits on them for an afternoon and a half and be finished. Very fast, but extremely boring.
As we all know, some of these parameters can shift over time depending on the grander scheme of things (read: BGS). Factions can lose or gain system or station ownership, new factions can expand into a system giving you new options etc (e.g. pirate gang now active in a system where there was none before: bounty hunters rejoice). War or civil war can provide a temporary opportunity to gain reputation by fighting where other combat options are not really viable. But all these things a elusive, the player is at the whim of the BGS basically.
And I am speaking not just on theoretical grounds. Anyone who has attempted to get all the system permits may have been thwarted in their efforts now and then by BGS, suddenly the faction giving the permit has no station and thus no place to trade or hand in data, no local bounty hunting etc.
The ebb and flow of the BGS can mean the difference between a week of excruciating mission grinding for change money or a weekend afternoon of blowing up pirates.
And I am not going deeper into how player groups can rally to intentionally affect the BGS to open up or close down viable opportunities. I am already 100% expect at one point or another some group to actively disrupt engineer accessibility by playing the BGS until that engineers faction owns no station at all, and anyone not already with the reputation may be almost completely shut out of access to that engineers service. (A related problem is how the downfall of a power would remove its special equipment, if ALD falls, for example no one afterward can get prismatic shields!)
Given past experience, I am not confident FD are considering these ramifications, or if they are, may just brush them aside, or even completely embrace them.
Now what could or should be done to alleviate these issues? I have some ideas:
- Same service at multiple engineers. Basically, no single service is exclusive to a particular engineer, and any engineer does multiple things. If there are enough alternatives, there is a good chance somewhere there will be someone with whom reputation gain is viable (for a given playstyle) at the moment.
- Improve mission spawning. Spawn much more missions at once and guarantee a minimum number per each faction in the system. When you have to rely on missions for a particular faction, you shouldn't ever have to try for 20 minutes (and/or mode-hop...) in order to get just one mission that is viable. And by viable I mean that it is functional (none of the currently bugged mission types), that it takes place locally (long distance courier job costs a lot of time away from the very faction you want to rep up with), that it is doable in the first place (only combat missions? have fun if you are a trader), and that they don't mess with other factions in unwanted ways (hunt Federal authority in neighbour system).
- Overhaul the reputation system. What I found most surprising in the first place was how there are no actual relations between the factions. Very often games with a dynamic reputation system pit some factions against each other: pirates hate the police, corporations hate the pirates, one faction's military is hostile to an enemy faction's military. Let there also be alliances; getting your reputation up with the legal authorities should be positively recognized by corporations. In Freelancer, for example, you could get your reputation up with one faction by destroying ships from their enemies (even different pirate clans in a gang war against each other, how cool is that), and doing missions for one faction would also improve your reputation with everyone they are also friendly with. Such a system would allow lots of ways of reputation gain by proxy, and unsanctioned reputation gain (e.g. just kill any ship of a certain faction in order to gain with their sworn enemy - no need to wait for a "kill 20" mission).
- While we are at "kill 20" missions - let all combat missions tell us which faction the target(s) belongs to. Not just hint at whether the mission is legal or not in the text, but provide the info fair and square, among the other listed data. Because it is not just a question of legality, but also about who you may make angry in the process even if you don't care about the law.
- A second improvement for for "kill 20" missions: forget about target type. Don't let us kill "20 traders". Send us to hunt 20 ships of a specific faction. This makes imo much more sense in almost every occasion. Right now one corporation sends you to kill 20 traders in the neighbour system - if they have expanded into it, you could blow up their own ships for the mission! But if it were against a specific faction, you could now have things like hidden gang warfare or illegal back-and-forth assassinations between two competing corporations, and all of that without adding any new dedicated game mechanics for it. (Conflict zones only convey the idea of a temporarily open conflict, but they don't convey the ongoing, sometimes illegal and hidden, struggle that is supposed to happen all the time.)
- For exploration data, increase the reputation gain. It may be in line with how much bounty profit equals how much reputation, but since exploration is already slow in terms of credits/time, don't also make it slow for reputation/time.
- For traders you could make it so if a faction owns no commodity market anywhere, double or triple any reputation gain from any transporation-related mission ("bring me a shrubbery", "deliver these boxes safely").
