This is an idea that has been floating around in my head for a little while. For lack of a better term, I will just deem it "Faction Points".
What is this?
Quite simple and probably easy to implement. Every person in the game gets ONE Faction Point (FP) PER ACCOUNT, PER SERVER, PER MONTH. It would renew on the same day and time that your account was started each month. Also, the FP would be on a use or lose basis. If you dont use your faction point for that month, it does NOT roll over. You would lose it. This would prevent accumalation of FPs and mass spending on any 1 player at any time. You would, of coarse, not be able to use this FP on yourself or any characters of yours on that account. You would not get an FP the first month of your account. Instead, you would have to wait a month before getting your first faction point. This would be to prevent mass account creation just to give yourself a positive faction and such. These FPs would also reflect on ALL characters on your account when a person "considers" you. So if someone wanted to steal something from you claiming that they are going to provide a tradeskill service, all their characters would reflect their poor decision. This person would not be able to simply log onto another character and con more poor souls.
What would this "FP" actually do?
As far as the "playability" of your character, it would do nothing positive or negative to your skill, stats, and ect... Instead, your FP count would be a reference to all players on how "good" or trustworthy you are. If you have a negative faction, it would be harder for players to trust you. Obviously, you would have to do some really bad stuff for someone to use their one and only FP for the month on you and possibly convince others to use theirs too. IE: A team of people may give the "ninja looter" on their team negative faction points. When said person would next try to get on a team, the prospective team could look at that person's faction and turn them down due to their bad faction. A "bad" person could be denied by other players for teams, services, trades, ect...
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
First the Good things about this. There's alot to say about how this could be good so I'll just list them:
1. As said before, a decrese of "ninja looters"
2. A decrease is stealing.
3. A decrease in camping. No one likes a person continually camping a "unique" mob (except maybe that person's own guild). A known "kill stealer"/camper/line jumper would most likely earn some negative faction.
4. Easier selection of guild applicants. If a person has a good faction, obviously they are a good/active player and would be accepted over a person with a negative faction.
5. Better PVP. A ganker or group of gankers would accumulate negative faction over time. Also, arena gankers (in most cases there would be several witnesses as to an arena 'gank') would accumulate negative faction over time.
6. If someone had honestly changed and wanted to become a player who has a positive faction, they would have to pay some serious retribution. "Buying" a person's FP by giving them rare item(s), helping out low lvls with $$ problems, ect...are a few examples.
The Bad:
I've pondered several different senerios and couldnt come up with too many bad things that would come of this. I know there will probably be several others who can though. Only possible thing I could see would be 2 people spitefully WASTING their FP on each other each month.
The Ugly:
There's only one real "Ugly" scenerio i can think of. A guild decides to WASTE their FP on one person either as a joke or out of spite for that person possibly assigning a negative point to one of their members. This would be a waste of the points of coarse. The guild could have instead distributed their FPs throughout their own guild to improve their PR. An ARK or GM could likely easily handle such an extreme situation.
Misc thoughts:
-Possibly adding a guild FP to the guild leader. One guild could vote another guild good or bad depending on that guild's actions. Same rules as for the single FP.
-Also maybe a command like /faction [name of person] or /guildfaction [name of guild] to view that person's/guild's faction status.
-Possibly not knowing who assigned you the FP but FC being able to track it if needed in the extreme. This would be to prevent scenerios of retribution spending.
I dont -think- that this would be too hard to code in and I think it would greatly improve the over-all quality of any MMORPG. Please feel free to post on this or bump if you like the idea, I will add more if I remember anything I overlooked. I apologize if someone has already brought up an idea like this, I probably overlooked it. HOWEVER, PLEASE READ and UNDERSTAND this post before you add to it.
