Goblin Squad Member
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3a. SADing merchants for Rep gains as payment for escort.
Just like SADing your friends, but as a business proposition:
But, as I stated above, I would probably reserve the SAD for pre arranged SADs. Where my group agrees to escort a merchant, but instead of receiving coin for payment of our services, we will accept the reputation bonus for our payment.
Now there is a benefit for the merchant. All the protection would cost is 1 copper piece and reputation bonus that they themselves do not pay (it comes from the system).
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Goblin Squad Member
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3a. SADing merchants for Rep gains as payment for escort.
Just like SADing your friends, but as a business proposition:
But, as I stated above, I would probably reserve the SAD for pre arranged SADs. Where my group agrees to escort a merchant, but instead of receiving coin for payment of our services, we will accept the reputation bonus for our payment.
Now there is a benefit for the merchant. All the protection would cost is 1 copper piece and reputation bonus that they themselves do not pay (it comes from the system).
This is not gaming the system, it is using reputation as a currency in exchange for a service. That is a meaningful interaction, essentially the same as a contract, just that it can be done on the spot. How did Ryan Dancey put it, to make command decisions on the fly?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Reputation is not a currency though, and players should not be able to freely gift other players with reputation, as a general rule, else reputation is practically meaningless. That's why I feel that SAD'ing should have significant restrictions on how you gain reputation from it, just as any player-to-player system which is rep-positive should.
If a player is choosing between giving you 1 copper piece or dying, of course he will give you a copper. I would hope such an exchange would give you practically nothing, if not literally nothing, as far as reputation is concerned. To me, this is like the equivalent of a merchant gaining reputation for successfully delivering goods by an instantaneous fast travel mechanic. It's basically just free rep, which completely goes against the intent of the reputation mechanic. I would rather it not be a measure of how many 1-copper SAD's you have done since your last ambush.
One method which might move toward fixing this apparent "free rep" loophole is making the Reputation gain from using SAD proportional to the amount of goods/money obtained (we don't know much about the specific mechnics of SAD yet, so it's totally possible GW have something similar planned already). This would of course be paired with a restriction on SAD'ing the same targets multiple times, so you don't just pass coin back and forth with your company mates or anything like that.
As I said in the first paragraph we need to pay special attention to any player interaction whereby more reputation is gained than lost when looking at ways to game reputation. I hope we end up with a SAD mechanic which is flexible and useful, but also one that doesn't serve as a free rep machine.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Reputation is not a currency though, and players should not be able to freely gift other players with reputation, as a general rule, else reputation is practically meaningless. That's why I feel that SAD'ing should have significant restrictions on how you gain reputation from it, just as any player-to-player system which is rep-positive should.
If a player is choosing between giving you 1 copper piece or dying, of course he will give you a copper. I would hope such an exchange would give you practically nothing, if not literally nothing, as far as reputation is concerned. To me, this is like the equivalent of a merchant gaining reputation for successfully delivering goods by an instantaneous fast travel mechanic. It's basically just free rep, which completely goes against the intent of the reputation mechanic. I would rather it not be a measure of how many 1-copper SAD's you have done since your last ambush.
One method which might move toward fixing this apparent "free rep" loophole is making the Reputation gain from using SAD proportional to the amount of goods/money obtained (we don't know much about the specific mechnics of SAD yet, so it's totally possible GW have something similar planned already). This would of course be paired with a restriction on SAD'ing the same targets multiple times, so you don't just pass coin back and forth with your company mates or anything like that.
As I said in the first paragraph we need to pay special attention to any player interaction whereby more reputation is gained than lost when looking at ways to game reputation. I hope we end up with a SAD mechanic which is flexible and useful, but also one that doesn't serve as a free rep machine.
Reputation had been discussed as a currency by Ryan Dancey, although like almost everything it was not detailed. There was also, the Praise / Rebuke to give it take reputation from one individual to another, again like a currency. That system has not been publicly abandoned by the Devs.
If the person SADing would get more reputation from demanding more, that would be counter productive. The idea of a SAD is to ask for less than what you would have received if you had killed the merchant.
But I believe after reading your post you may in fact start seeing all of the problems with a reputation system in general. I wonder if GW us actually spending as much time with it as we are. I would not be surprised if it is already a dead end, and I hope they are focusing on the MVP and making the game play systems more complex.
Which would we care to have, a reputation system or all of the core races and classes? That poll if ever put up would have a predictable result and would probably frighten off many of those who feel they need a negative feedback loop.
My vote is obviously Core Classes and Races first.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Quoted without comment:
Are you saying that reputation will be a currency spent on things, to the exclusion of a capital good which has value when simply accumulated?That doesn't make much sense to me.
Reputation is not a unit of account or a store of value. You can't exchange it with someone for a good or service. I can't spend your reputation.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Quoted without comment:
Are you saying that reputation will be a currency spent on things, to the exclusion of a capital good which has value when simply accumulated?That doesn't make much sense to me.
Reputation is not a unit of account or a store of value. You can't exchange it with someone for a good or service. I can't spend your reputation.
Actually Urman, it has been discussed as just that, a unit that can be banked, spent and even exchanged.
Praise / Rebuke
Arranged (meta contracted) SADs
Grinding PVE content to then so end Rep on PvP rep losing activities
And probably many other ways we do not know of yet.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I would argue that 4 is not gaming the a reputation system but a product of it working as intended. Any time you are using an average to represent anything, you have to accept that the larger the population the less each individual affects the average.
Which is why an arithmetic mean wouldn't be a very useful test to use here. Because this is about intelligent behavior, you could end up with very different distributions in different communities that still had similar means. Maybe in a community with a fairly normal distribution, with a few bad apples, a few good apples, and a lot of avergae rep folks, the mean is a useful proxy for settlement rep (Averagetown).
The problem case here would be a very irregular, positively-scaled skewness in distribution, where the majority of the population is high-rep, but you have a small "go team" of very low rep characters to do dirty work. This settlement (Craftytown), ends up with a much higher rep mean than Averagetown, but has a much lower dip into low rep behavior--that's not likely to meet the goal of preventing toxic interactions.
One possible answer is to tie settlement rep to minimum rep--if you let a few of the worst scum into your town, then you are pretty scummy. Maybe not a a direct ceiling, as that might be too high a bar to ever allow for high rep settlements, given human variability in action. So maybe you cap settlement rep at one tranche higher than settlement minimum, or something similar.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@ Mbando
Your use of the term "Craftytown" is the epitome of settlement leaders making meaningful choices and command decisions to allow for doing what needs to be done, should circumstances call for it. Without this there would be no need for government / military secrets, clandestine operations or supporting political or military coups.
In a game based on Settlement vs. Settlement conflict, many sacrifices of individual reputation or alignment will be made, those are the "hard choices" Ryan has written about.
You as an individual may hold yourself to the highest of standards. You as a leader of your company may hold your membership to the highest of standards. But, a settlement has higher needs than your personal or company held standards.
I believe GW is developing PFO to be more like EVE 0.0 Alliance vs. Alliance conflict than what they are telling us explicitly.
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Goblin Squad Member
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From the most recent blog:
Having a negative Reputation will mean that certain settlements will be off limits to you. Having a Reputation below -2500 means you cannot safely enter most NPC or starter settlements. Player settlements can set a minimum Reputation to enter safely; if your Reputation is below this value the guards will attack you and none of the NPCs will talk to you. Higher end structures, like tier 2 and 3 training and crafting facilities, require the settlement have its minimum Reputation set to certain levels to function. So if you want your town to have awesome training and crafting facilities, you have to set a high minimum Reputation to enter the settlement. This means characters that do a lot of PvP outside of wars, feuds, and such will be forced to visit less developed settlements that are wretched hives of scum and villainy.
So I don't think that a high-end settlement with a few negative rep characters will even be possible; in fact, low rep characters can't even enter such settlements.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@ Mbando
Your use of the term "Craftytown" is the epitome of settlement leaders making meaningful choices and command decisions to allow for doing what needs to be done, should circumstances call for it.
Exactly--like winding up with a really low settlement rep, low DI, and crappy training facilities ;)
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Shane, what I would want to add is that we might not want to have a 1-1 relationship between settlement DI and minimum Rep--that could be an unworkable bar at the top level of Rep. We might want to have some room for variability and error so that a genuinely limited change doesn't have really big effects at the margin.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Exactly--like winding up with a really low settlement rep, low DI, and crappy training facilities ;)@ Mbando
Your use of the term "Craftytown" is the epitome of settlement leaders making meaningful choices and command decisions to allow for doing what needs to be done, should circumstances call for it.
No, as you suggested, the diluting affect of having many more high rep, then lower rep would still likely produce a higher rep average than "averagetown".
At this point, based on Dev Blogs and Dev (Ryan)posts, it appears that very few if any activities will actually result in low reputation. That may also be part of their plan. There could be so few actions that can cause rep loss that they can claim, "You see our system is working, few players have low rep."
Its like setting the speed limit at 20 MPH above what the fastest car on earth can reach. "Hey look we have clamped down on speeders, we did not have to write a single speeding ticket last month."