You ask a valid question.
Thanks, I certainly think so.
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Here are a few ways fame (or what I think could be called "honor") could be calculated and tracked:
Community Goals: By delivering food and medical supplies, for example.
Mission Goals: Certain rewards could be tweaked to allow for points that count toward honor (similar to Reputation or Influence). However, this could be more problematic since mission goals are often zero sum affairs where helping one faction hurts a rival faction.
Search and Rescue: Receive "fame" (or honor) points in lieu of credits for returning escape pods, for example.
Bounty hunting: Receive "fame" (or honor) points in lieu of credits for knocking out a criminal (e.g., Batman and Commissioner Gordon).
Exploration: Discovery of earth-like worlds; receive fame in lieu of credits.
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Ok, again, I feel like the problem here is -
-Community goals, well, many, many commanders do these. They aren't "special" in any way. Getting famous for just standard game elements doesn't really work, as everyone is famous.
-The same with missions - and remember, currently, when you might otherwise get notoriety for actions performed on dodgy missions, you actually don't, it is removed - basically for this same reason.
- Search and Rescue - this is a possibility. It is a very specific action - my issue with this though, would be that there would in my opinion need to be a way to track helping a player who has say, run out of fuel, or needs their hull repairing etc. - This brings up a problem - you can just damage your hull, then get someone to repair it pretty easily. I'm not that for removing possibly nice gameplay elements just because people may exploit it, and I think it is likely true that you could do similar with notoriety - however, notoriety is a "Negative" effect - while there are cases where players want notoriety (kudos, they just wanna play with ATR) this isn't the norm, and it has no direct benefits - fame appears to be linked to benefits in this proposal, making this an odd method.
-Bounty hunting is the most obvious inversion of Notoriety - because you are destroying wanted ships, with notoriety you are destroying clean ships, polar opposites - however, this has the same problem as many of the other suggestions - Everyone does this (some miniscule exceptions) so everyone is famous for playing in a standard way.
-Exploration, I mean, this just sounds like your elite ranking for exploration. It doesn't match up well with the notoriety concept either.
Personally, I feel like Notoriety should have only applied to player vs player Illegal killing - in this way, you could have had "fame" or "honour" for player vs player legal bounty hunting very easily, and it would have made perfect sense.
As it is, trying to cram this fame idea into NPC interactions is just adding another counter onto what everyone already does.