Feature: Reputation

One of our main goals is making the world respond to players in a personal way. A wealthy trader will be praised by the craftsmen, but despised by the thieves. A talented hunter may impress the Warrior's Guild, but won't mean much to the noble politicians. This behaviour is made possible through our reputation plugin. In connection with NPCs, reputation delivers a unique game experience for every player, one that they are personally responsible for.

The game world hosts a variety of factions. Some large and prestigious - such as the Elpidan Traders or the Warrior's Guild. Some much less known - a circle of herbalists or a group of beggars. NPCs have preferences for factions, often sympathising with one or two. As players interact with NPCs belonging to a faction, the faction itself will develop an opinion of the player. In turn, this may change the way a faction responds to you quite dramatically.

Reputation Points
Players gain reputation points with each faction separately. Positive actions improve your standing, while negative actions decrease it. Most factions are neutral to you by default and have ten possible reputation tiers. As you interact with a faction's NPCs, your points will shift in the background. You may not know your exact standing, but you may usually ask an NPC for the tier. Below is a breakdown of the tiers for most factions in Elpida:



Progression:
One thing we wanted to avoid is grinding for numbers. That is, doing the same stuff over and over again to gain reputation. For that reason, a player does not have one overall reputation, but a standing with every single faction in the world. Your actions will often influence multiple factions at once, some in a positive way, some in a negative one. Slaying wolves will make the hunters appreciate you, but may anger the herbalists. Selling goods off-shore might impress the trade office, but the Elpidan nationalists may frown at you.

This means there is no "good" way of playing the game. You can never be the winner in everyone's eyes. Instead, the reputation signifies your unique standing in the world. No other player will have the exact same reputation pattern to you, making the world respond to you in a slightly (or greatly) different way.

Impact:
The NPCs are scripted to recognise reputation and respond to it appropriately. In most cases, only one or two reputations matter to an NPC. A trader won't really care if the beggars like you, but will care about your trade guild standing. Having a positive standing with the NPCs has many benefits. These may include:

• Access to shops or special goods.
• The ability to learn secrets and gossip.
• Having influence and control over groups of NPCs.
• Getting to areas otherwise inaccessible.
• Learning crafting recipes.

Overall, having a positive standing will make NPCs respond to you in a more positive way. Having an extremely positive standing (the very top tiers) may mean NPCs view you as sort of a celebrity. Drinks on the house, guards trusting your judgement, voters wanting you as their politician. It is always advised to try and improve your reputation standing when possible.

On the other hand, having a negative standing may make your life more difficult. You should always avoid the most negative tiers, as that will cause NPCs to attack on sight. A slightly negative standing may lead to more expensive prices, closed doors where others are welcome, little information in dialogues, or overall unpleasant attitude from the NPCs.

The system is designed in such a way where pleasing everyone is impossible. But it is a good rule of thumb to try have a positive standing with the "Citizens of Elpida" at least. This faction represents the overall feeling of Elpidan citizens towards you. Having a negative reputation among the citizens will make the game very difficult. If you want to be an unlawful citizen, you'll need to be smart about it.

A Personal Touch:
Our goal is to let you play the game your way. The world may appear the same to everyone, but it will respond differently. It is very likely your reputation profile will naturally reflect your play-style, enhancing your game even further. If you spend a lot of time crafting and trading, you will access some very tempting crafting perks, from priority imports to Mastercrafted recipes. If you hunt animals for rare trophies, the hunter's guild may reward you with a legendary sword. Helping our the Elpidan guard defeat bandits may land you a sweet spot in the Elpidan army - how about a personal guard watching over you?

As with all of our plugins, we will constantly keep on adding more unique behaviours sensitive to reputation! We have big plans for reputation, from robust guild communities, to NPC nobility throwing wild parties in their villas.

Let us know what you think!

 

There is space for a lot of complexity, it is a very flexible system. The NPC system is even more complex, so there are a lot of possibilities.

The reputation number with one faction won't directly shift based on a reputation number with another faction. The fact that you are at 10.000 with traders won't make your 750 reputation with Warriors go up. However, in practise, they will influence each other indirectly, in two ways:

1. When you perform an action, it will often influence several reputations. If you make a big trade deal, the trade guild will increase significantly, crafters may increase slightly, thieves will drop significantly. For that reason, it is unlikely that you will be 20.000 with one faction and 0 with all the others. Even if you only do stuff closely linked to just one faction, your reputation with similar factions will also increase/decrease to varying degrees.

2. Certain NPCs may have mixed faction preferences. Someone like a baker (who doesn't have a baker's faction) may sympathise 60% with the trade guild and 40% with crafters. In that case, the NPC would look at both your trade reputation and your crafter reputation. This would result in what you are describing. You might be unknown with crafters, but extremely well known with traders. So this specific baker would see you somewhere in between.

 

I think this is a dream @MisterErwin and I have had... Right now though, we are looking at Minecraft to do it.

A list of faction will most likely be posted on the wiki when we have compiled an official list. However, our aim with reputation is you are not playing the game to grind for reputation with everyone. The idea we are trying to get is it occurs in the backgrounds without it altering your playing style.

One player would not be able to directly start a war necessarily, but I believe our aims in the future are the elected officials of Elpida can begin to make decisions somewhat close to ideas like these.

 

I will try and answer what I can.
1) No, you won't be able to start wars for two reasons. One we don't really encourage wars and two, that would influence everyone else's story, so that isn't possible unless approved through official lore.
2) Not completely sure on this one.
3) Not at the moment, but if it's approved by the staff, we could maybe do this in the future, but it's uncertain as of this moment.
4) Everyone starts off at the default value, which is 0. Which way you decide to go is up to you.
5) Depends on who's perspective you're asking. His reputation would probably increase with the guards and maybe other NPCs who work in Elpida and want to be safe, but his reputation might drop with bandits or assassins, as their job will be harder now.
6) We have two miracle workers called @tcvs and @MisterErwin.
7) We are getting there. We should hopefully be back online in around a month or less.

Best of luck!

 

Great to see some discussion around the systems.
Here are my two cents:

If you have a good enough reputation with one faction, say a bandit faction, and a bad enough reputation with another faction, guard/town/merc. Could you make the two go to war against eachother? Cause, personally, I think that'd make the whole world feel a bit more alive, *cough* Also because a war in Elpida would make blacksmiths rich due to the demand for weapons. *cough*​

On the higher tiers, you'll be able to make substantial decisions. They will mainly affect yourself, give you an advantage/disadvantage compared to others who don't have the high tier. In terms of affecting large groups of players, there are three political positions in Elpida, specifically built around those ideas. Those are elected, to keep everything in check.

In terms of guilds fighting together, as others suggested, those events will be structured by us. That way we can make it really memorable and impactful. That is not to say players won't be relevant in our events - you can imagine events like watching bits of a movie and deciding what happens next at key points in the story. We will announce those later. But I can tell you we already have the 3 story arcs fleshed out, each one scheduled to last 6 months. Those will be starting in Prototype 3.



Is the craftsman faction encompace blacksmiths as well? Or are they their own faction as a whole?

We will start with very general factions at first. The thinking is that we want our players to interact with one another. 20 players interacting with 4 guilds is more interesting than 20 players interacting with 20 guilds. As the playerbase grows, the number of factions will as well. We will definitely be starting with the Warrior's Guild, the Explorer's Guild and a yet unnamed crafting guild.

The other reason is that we want to make each faction stand out. The way you interact with the crafting guild will differ to the Warrior's Guild. They aren't simply copy pasted groups with different labels. Therefore, we will focus on polishing a small number of factions first.​

If players have a high enough reputation with the people of Elpida could they start their own faction? Or just in general if players have enough gold could they start their own guild?

This is one of the most demanded features - and also one we aren't considering. For similar reasons to the point above. Our goal is to make a fun dynamic world, where players poke and prod their surroundings. We want players to cooperate and compete over factions we put in place. Allowing players to create their own guilds would mean people break up into smaller groups, something we don't really want to promote.​

Will character bios' with the "Theif" or "Assassin" proffession start off with more negative reputation with everyone except their rightful factions? Or does everyone start off the same and work their way up?

Everyone will start equal. In this upcoming prototype (Prototype 2), the criminal gameplay won't be supported to a deep level. We have big plans for the criminal gameplay, but they are too big to deliver with everything else. It is one of our planned updates.

I am very keen on implementing strong moral decisions. Using Minecraft as our platform, we have a unique position, where we can reach tons of interested young people. Part of our project is delivering an experience where your decisions matter. If you attack an innocent citizen, it will provoke a very serious response, one that you can't simply undo. When everyone starts equally (and you end up a criminal), it is crystal clear you were responsible for that outcome. Becoming criminal due to your biography would be much less impactful.​

If persay, a simply blacksmith, were to donate weapons he made to the Elpidian Army would his reputation increase?

That is definitely the plan. For each faction, there will be several key areas where you can gain/lose reputation in a consistent way. For the army, that might be fighting for them, destroying banding camps, or supplying them. We will be adding more opportunities as we go. But we are definitely considering all of our playstyles - if anything, crafters are considered above else (due to our economy).



How in the world does all of this run off of plugins? Am I missing a modpack or something? Because this seems a bit much for just a few plugins.

We have extremely talented developers. Tom has put together a development framework no proper company would be ashamed of. He has also delivered some incredible plugins. And Alex has done an awful lot of research into NPCs and the Minecraft code, allowing us to do things most devs say are impossible. Keep in mind the project has been in the works for around 2-3 years, so some work has been put into it already. I have also considered making an indie game. Minecraft has such a large community though, that it makes it far easier to make it happen.



Finally, any ETA on when phase 2 will be a go? Or is that still a few months away.

I believe we have just finished the remaining plugins this week. Now we need to bugfix everything, as well as add in the actual content (items, NPC spawns, dialogues). The ETA is towards the end of this month!​

 

If you are interested in crafting an influencing others, you might love the Trade Minister political position. They basically manage the economical standing of Elpida. They are able to set taxes; manage import/export of goods; reinvest the money to open new trade routes. In the future, they will manage banking policies as well as shop permits.