Reputations again!

[triska]

I dont care what those of you that dont play often say but I say

REPUTATION SUCKS!

It is very annoying time consuming and boring. Those that agree with it obviously do not have to content with it on a regular basis.

I dont want to start a debate on this subject am registering my complaint about it so it can be noted.

[tessa]

I'm curious if anyone else has as much difficulty with it as you do.

[triska]

Tessa asks

I'm curious if anyone else has as much difficulty with it as you do.

Yes they do, which is why I got angry and posted. I know of plenty of others if you were to do a survey I am sure you would know on a yes / no basis if people are getting frustrated with it.

[Delmon]

I have not liked the reputation system for various reasons of frustration as well, however, it would not be a reason to not play the game or anything.

[Delia]

Instead of plainly lashing out with your frustration, some ways to address the problems could be offered? As we all know even if it can be understandably slow, new good ideas will ultimately be implemented into the game. Some of those ideas might even remove most if not all of your grievances towards the reputation system.

One idea I've mused for a while...manners & being polite, that is where applicable greeting, bowing(appropriately), speaking the race language and some other stuff I cannot visualize due to morning grogginess affected one's reputation as well, albeit minimally.

[anglachel]

What are the various reasons of frustration?
What does not work correctly?
What should be improved/changed?

[triska]

I have tried to address this before in other Postings but I will try here as best I can because I think there are two issues involved. One reputation and Two Karma

Frustration.
1. You do not know if your reputation is falling until it has fell sometimes fell far.
2. You have to leave sensible and interesting role play to run about gather 'loot' to sell in the shops.. to donate the coins to the beggar.. or try and kill dark elves which for a halfling alone is not recommended.(not sure if doing the jobs done already for such as the stable man or Kelric would work in raising reputation)
3. Cannot team with people with good reputations or you bring theirs down too this is not fair if you know your reputation is going to affect theirs so possible team events are not joined.
4. When eventually you managed after a lot of senseless repetitious role play managed to get the reputation back to acceptable or good then your god 'Asral' in my case tells you because of your 'good deeds in giving coins' you are a terrible person and have horrible Karma.
5. In Elvandar I cannot no matter what I do raise my reputation after some real weeks huge amounts of coins , selling and giving of scalps. Unable to order custom items.
6. Eventually you find out your reputation was brought down by another supposedly good person who also had not known their reputation had fell or they had been trying to fix it and failed and carry on regardless.

What does not work correctly.

1. In Elvandar at least for me the selling , scalping, giving of coins to beggar has not worked for me enough to raise my reputation to good enough to buy custom wear.
2. Karma for donating coins should not be affected but only killing of the wrong things. One can be warlike without being evil which Asral is regarded as evil although I consider evil to be killing good things like shop keepers or unicorns and fauns.(another topic I think this brings up)

What should be improved/changed?

1. A warning similar to losing faith perhaps when you do something or associate with someone affecting your reputation. Your reputation is changing (The warning would pull you up to it and make you aware of it as it is happening it is up to you to know which city it is changing in.)

2. Give beggars items such as food for his family that has to be brought from certain places maybe.

3. Ask volog (beggars) repair reputation job.(similar to giving him a beer for gossip)
Let him have a list of jobs maybe even repetitious but a job that is acceptable to him for raising your reputation and maybe several jobs to be done if you are really terrible with your reputation.

Suggestions :
bring me to give Markia the herbalist 10 Elvenhair herbs
bring me to give Klest 3 woolen shirts
bring me to give Kassal a longsword
bring me to give Roptat a certain Armour

Volog keeps the items but your reputation is raised on completion of the job.

4. Stop Karma being harmed for Asral followers when they do a good deed. Killing good things is not something Asral promotes he promotes an honorable and warlike fight he does not want his followers to go and be evil by doing bad things.

[Delia]

Currently the means to raise your reputation are inadequate when compared to the pace in which your reputation gradually degrades(or so it seems). Giving a massive amount of coins in Elvandar made Delia 'nice' in that city which took around an active week to accomplish after which I lessened the pace and amount of coins a bit and the reputation degraded back to neutral quite fast. I haven't tried tossing piles of gold around but somehow that seems rather...odd to do for various reasons. I can safely say that being busy as she is...there should be little to none radical impact from other characters -> reputation stays neutral even with coins and all.

Occupational guild people with good rep all around like the crusader/taniel combo in Elvandar feeds itself so all those actively teaming with each other tend to feed each other's reputation -> good rep all around the circle with little else required(verify, someone?).

As for knowing when your rep is falling...I think a better solution could be random reputation room emotes like "A passerby glances at Triska suspiciously." than just auto-magically knowing that something is going wrong while you are worlds removed from civilization.

As for ruining your or other character's rep accidentally or otherwise I say leave it as it is. There should be timers and stuff so the nasty accident should not theoretically happen, but if you are caught unawares, are being naive or just choose to act the way or the other you'll get hit.

There could be a quest from Xuchal which would yield bit of rep and a chance to order one item without the reputation requirements. What that quest could be eludes me. Ideas?

Can't say this or that about Asral stuff but if giving coins make you a lousy follower in his eyes some other means of gaining good rep is needed. Don't see why giving coins should affect Asrals the way or the other. Unless it is donating in OTHER cities(read: inside the dominion of other gods).

One idea for positive reputation gain: Being an active craft/layman guild member/member of society. Seeing all that hard work bearing some other kind of fruit also could be rewarding. After all the city benefits from productive artisans and skill/results should be in high regard.

To sum in up(my impressions)...currently it is primarily up to coins(for most characters) what your reputation is and that does not ultimately affect that much UNLESS you throw around those huge piles of gold(?). Reputation degrades easier than it is gained, which is good, but there are not sufficient DIVERSE ways of gaining and sustaining reputation. All ways of current reputation gathering are not applicable to every character there is due to chosen RP. So just post those rep ideas, maybe some of them will appear in-game someday.

[tessa]

2. Karma for donating coins should not be affected but only killing of the wrong things.

The problem with that is that there are several ways to gain evil karma, and only so many ways to improve it. By removing donations as a source of improving karma, you'd be limiting average people to less practical and more exclusive means to do so (ie, slaying large amounts of undeads).

4. Stop Karma being harmed for Asral followers when they do a good deed. Killing good things is not something Asral promotes he promotes an honorable and warlike fight he does not want his followers to go and be evil by doing bad things.

Asral doesn't care if you give a couple coins to a beggar. What annoys him is being a saint, and that's the type of aura you gain if you practice giving coins to others on a frequent basis. There are ways to improve karma/reputation without ever touching beggars, but I don't think it's my place to give away the workings of reputation as I've learned it.

Lastly, what makes Asral a slightly evil god isn't that he promotes the death and murder of good things like Sathonys or Lilith, but rather that he promotes chaos and violence, which are consider darker concepts (in light of nicer things like law or harmony). Ultimately though, I'm not sure if Asral cares one way over the other in regard of good and evil (unless you act too much in the image of another god), but rather sees the world as 'me (and his followers) vs them (everyone else)'.

Anyway, I haven't played for a while, but I'll put in my two bits:

I've never had a hard time maintaining a decent reputation, and usually I knew exactly why my reputation would fall when it did. I did, however, find some gray spots which might be considered:

1. The Satho plague can really hurt people's reputations. I'm not sure if this was tweaked in the past few months or not, but plague constantly drifting about can really be a hassle to work around for some.

2. Apparently socializing just outside of Asador's gates with certain individuals makes you considered absolute scum in Elvandar. If this is the case, I think Elvandar's gossip network shouldn't extend past the gorge or, at the least, the scrag bridge.

3. If you're not allowed in the towns, you lose access to a lot of the ways to improve reputation. It would be nice to allow some out-of-town methods in this case.

I think there were a few more thoughts I had as I was typing this, but I can't quite put my finger on it now. If I remember them again, I'll add them.

[Grindel]

Maintaining a good rep seems to be easy for a tanielite. But as a zhakrinite Grindel faces the same problems as does Triska.

Raising reputation raises the karma more than one would want, this leads to the need to do equally extreme counter measures.

Maintaining the reputation became a little game-in-the-game. And it only makes me to RP badly:
Normally Grindel would not donate anything to beggars, nor would he sometimes "accidently" let his hand slip to dissect a corpse. Donating is just bad RP for Grindel, dissecting to lower the karma is even worse.

Charakters act in such complex ways that trying to judge it with code results in rather inscrutable reputation changes, that are often impossible to correct without a bit of wrong roleplaying, which is not fun.

[triska]

Thanks Grindel that was one point I had forgotten.

My karma is so good not only does it upset Asral but Zhakrin would not even open his temple gate to me.

Now if I had wanted to change to follow Zhakrin by doing what has to be done in his temple I could not even get in to begin doing it.

Tessa

There are ways to improve karma/reputation without ever touching beggars, but I don't think it's my place to give away the workings of reputation as I've learned it

.

Making statements like this when I know I do and have done and I know other players I(do not mention names because they may not like me to ) have done and continue on a daily basis to do everything possible to keep that reputation good just adds to the frustration of it. Yes we have talked about it in game to try to resolve it and had that been done I would not have needed to be posting here to ask for help.

[tessa]

My karma is so good not only does it upset Asral but Zhakrin would not even open his temple gate to me.

I'm thinking that may be due more because of your favour with Zhakrin than karma.

just adds to the frustration of it

Well, I apologize for doing that, it wasn't my intent to rub it in. But, at least, this brings up one of the points that I wanted to mention earlier:

4. Once upon a time, everyone was pretty much a saint, reputation wise. Something was changed to make it harder to achieve this, and rightfully so. But, while I say it's easy to maintain a decent reputation (which is to say, more towards neutral than actually decent reputation), it now seems near impossible to casually pass 'trying to do the nice thing' without drastically going out of one's way (which itself takes a bit of work to get). To that, I could feel it could stand a little readjustment again.

Perhaps a happy medium could be found, or perhaps it could become progressively harder to gain better reputation after you reach a certain threshold (to allow people to be considered good people without breaking their backs, but make them actually have to work if they want especially distinguished status like saint or so).

[anglachel]

The reaction of the cityguards should give you a good hint about your reputation and the reputation of the persons around you. And there is always the possiblity to ask the npc about an other person.
The count of actions which raise your reputation should be increased. But it is not so easy to find something beside a boring 'go two rooms, take a iterm, return, give item'-tasks.
It should not so easy, so that in a short time everyone has max-reputation and on the other side it should no so difficult and make a bit fun.

[Staltos]

I was thinking, what if there was a command that players could use to rate their opinion of a character so that the character's reputation is also adjusted by that. This way someone could role play being a nice guy, and if others are impressed by it they could rate it so that their city may have a higher opinion of them. Sorry for my convoluted writing... whiskey would be to blame.

[Grindel]

Good idea, Staltos!

Why not use the built-in emotes for this? Every emote could be assigned a value that represents the amount of reputation it gives (positive or negative).

So being greeted could increase reputation, handshakes or friendly nods could have at least a little bit of positive effect.

One could even compute the effect based on the existing reputaion of both:

* An honoured citizen greets you -- strong positive effect for your.
* A bad guy spits at you -- even less reputation for him
* You spit at a bad guy -- makes the average npc-joe like you better
* You bow to a highly ranked citizen -- good for you and him/her...
* etc.

[Cuetlachtli]

I definitely agree that reputation is too hard to increase.

In Elvandar, where my character is a citizen, I was donating quite a few coins (for a newbie) that I got from massive amounts of scalps for a pretty long time and I never saw a change in my rep there.

IC time, I suppose it would be a few gold in one IC day and then nothing for the other IC days of the week (because of RL work and sleep and what not).

And there's also the scalps turned in involved, and I was selling herbs and other items at the time.

The only thing that ever increased my rep there was doing certain tasks. And I found myself OOC saving some of these tasks in case my rep fell again.

Once I raised it I've been pretty careful of several things, and with some donations and things seems to remain pretty stable. But I have no clue if it is really staying stable or falling, as It's only been a few weeks (OOC) since it went up.

But once I am out of things to do there, I don't know if I'll be able to maintain a reputation good enough to order items from Xuchal or not.

I like the idea of it being easy to get a decent reputation in the cities and be progressively harder to raise it further.

I also think it would make sense, in a business sense, for the blacksmith to serve people who have a neutral reputation in a city, and only refuse those with a bad reputation. But maybe I just don't understand the complexities involved in running a blacksmith shop in an Elven city, I dunno.

Anyway, sorry for no real constructive ideas, I don't really have too many beyond what has already been suggested, and I feel I don't really know enough about muds in general to help too much with that.

So this is just a perspective on this feature through the eyes of a pretty young character player.

[tessa]

I think services should be given to neutral people. After all, isn't that going to be the majority of customers? I doubt every VNPC that visits the shops is going to be known as a role model for good.

[Cuetlachtli]

My feelings exactly.

That would cure a lot of my frustrations with reputation, personally.

But also, my character in game does have motivations beyond that for wanting to appear at least above neutral in the eyes of the npcs and pcs. So some concerns remain for me yet.

But, then again, I am probably missing something completely that I could be doing to aid that. I continue to find little details in this game that aren't apparent to me immediately...or even apparent to me after a good deal of time. Which is, of course, why I haven't played any other muds in a pretty long time. (Meaning this one is the neatest one I've played.)

[Grimforge]

So can someone spell out what I would need to do as a newbie Tshahark to gain enough reputation to be able to do the newbie jobs and/or walk past the guards without being forced to throw my weapon away?

[triska]

To Grimforge

I am sorry reputation is my main hate of the game and tirelessly complained and campaigned to get it working properly because the frustrations it causes are real.

I hope someone listens and helps you with it cause I have no clue how to offer help of it myself.

Trish