Breaking the Link Between Reputation and Justice in Mortal Online 2: A Deeper Look

Jan 5, 2025
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🔒 Breaking the Link Between Reputation and Justice in Mortal Online 2 🔓

First things first:
We are not advocating for the elimination of reputation in Mortal Online 2. Reputation remains a vital and engaging system—it tracks faction standings, reflects how others view you, and rewards or punishes you based on your actions, including PvP interactions. We fully support this system. What we are proposing is a separation between reputation and justice status.

⚖️ What is the Change We’re Proposing?
At its core, our proposal is simple yet impactful: justice status should not be influenced by reputation. If you’re red, it’s because you’ve committed crimes against other players, and your status reflects that. If you’re blue, it’s because you haven’t. That’s all. We want to preserve reputation in its current form, but justice must be regulated solely by player actions and restitution.

In practical terms:
  • Killing another player of the same faction? That can still affect your faction rep, and we have no issue with that.
  • Killing reds, bounty targets, or players of opposing factions? Reputation changes accordingly.
  • Reputation adjustments for PvP actions remain intact.
But the key change is that justice status—whether you’re red, blue, grey, or brown—should strictly reflect your actions towards other players, not your standing with NPC factions.

Note: The brown status identifies players who have atoned for their crimes but still have an outstanding bounty on their head. For a detailed explanation of how this system works, and how it maintains balance and fairness, refer to the thread titled "Sparring, Not Exploiting—Fixing Duels, Wars & Relic Free-For-All, Local Grey Revisited, and The Suicide Nonsense."

🎭 The RP Layer: The Logical Foundation
On the roleplaying front, this change makes perfect sense. Consider a high-profile figure—a CEO, a respected landowner, or a philanthropist—who commits a heinous crime, such as murder. In the real world, their social standing doesn’t absolve them. They would face the consequences of their actions, regardless of their reputation.

Currently, in MO2, the system allows high-reputation players to escape justice simply by performing menial NPC tasks, like delivering goods. A criminal can wipe away their murder count by completing these tasks, which makes no sense from a roleplaying perspective. The system is broken when it allows a murderer to go unpunished because they completed a simple chore.

Imagine this: A criminal commits a murder but, instead of facing punishment, goes to the local distribution center, delivers packages, and has their murder count wiped clean as if the two actions are related. This is an absurd scenario, one that undermines the very concept of justice in an RPG.

🌍 The Meta and System-Level Impact
At the meta layer, the disconnect between players' expectations and the game's justice system is stark. "Ganking" and non-consensual PvP have long been accepted by veteran players, but for newcomers, these systems are confusing and frustrating. They see players who engage in criminal actions walking freely into town, selling items, and even committing more crimes without facing meaningful consequences.

New players often ask, "Red players can walk into town??!" and "Blue guys can gank me, then walk into town and sell my stuff?" The fact that a criminal’s status can wear off in as little as five minutes adds to this confusion. But the real issue isn’t just the surprise—it’s the underlying problem of how social status has replaced justice.

In the real world—and in RPGs like MO2—justice should be about actions and consequences. Reputation, on the other hand, should serve a separate purpose: tracking and reflecting your standing within factions. This is a principle that applies to all sandbox RPGs, where players have the freedom to engage in different playstyles—PvP, PvE, crafting, and more.

Some members of the entrenched MO2 community argue that PvP should be the dominant experience, sidelining all other playstyles. They believe that those who prefer PvE, crafting, or solo adventuring are "playing the wrong game" if they object to being ganked. They only believe players are “playing the right game” if they accept being attacked. However, this view is a misunderstanding of the essence of MO2, which should foster diverse playstyles, not one dominant type.

The real issue lies with the vocal minority of PvP players who enjoy forcing non-consensual PvP on others. These players argue that everyone must be a willing participant in PvP, effectively reducing MO2 to a gimped, lop-sided version of a medieval Counter-Strike, where the game is centered solely around PvP. They put forth this argument to dismiss all efforts to create a balanced justice system, demanding that everyone play the game their way—without regard for the variety of experiences the game should offer.

đź’ˇ Improving the Reputation System with Meaningful Incentives
The reputation system in MO2 can be significantly enhanced by making it more rewarding for players to improve their standing with various factions. This would provide a much more meaningful gameplay experience, making reputation a valuable tool for all players—not just for roleplaying.

By decoupling reputation from the justice system, SV would have the flexibility to enhance the reputation system without being constrained by its interactions with justice. For example, reputation could be used to unlock better rewards from tasks, such as:

🏆 Higher rewards from faction-based tasks as your reputation with that faction improves.

đź’¸ Discounts on items from faction vendors as your reputation increases.

đź’Ž Access to rare or high-value items at lower prices.

Furthermore, the rewards for tasks could vary based on the faction you’re interacting with. For example:

🏹 Hunting tasks in the Khurite tribes region could offer better rewards compared to those in the Tindremic provinces.

⚔️ Soldier-related tasks could yield higher rewards in the Tindremic provinces, while other types of tasks would benefit from improved reputation in other regions.

This system would create a dynamic, immersive economy where players need to build relationships and reputation across multiple factions to maximize their rewards. This creates meaningful choices in gameplay, encouraging players to engage with the world and the factions within it.

By decoupling reputation from the justice system, we allow players to focus on earning in-game benefits through faction interactions and tasks while making sure that justice stays strictly linked to actions and restitution, unrelated to NPC reputation.

đź’¬ Conclusion
In conclusion, by decoupling reputation from the justice system, we open up the potential for a more immersive and rewarding gameplay experience. Justice should be about actions and consequences, not influenced by faction standing. Meanwhile, reputation can stand as a system that rewards players for positive faction interactions and offers meaningful gameplay incentives. This approach would strengthen the sandbox RPG experience, allowing MO2 to maintain a balanced and dynamic world where all playstyles can thrive.