With the potential introduction of outposts, it seems like player interactions with factions will become much more common, however, the system for faction reputation and interactions still feels clunky and frustrating.
Firstly, are there plans for a rework of that system in the near future?
I also had some ideas about a potentially better system.
The idea would be to slow the spread of reputation and lessen the impact of actions that are far away. I think there was a thread discussing this a while ago, but I will outline the idea nonetheless. Basically, every station (or maybe just the main station in a system) has an individual relation with the player and those relations are affected by nearby faction systems as well as player actions in that system. Player actions would immediately alter the local reputation but adjacent systems would not be affected directly, and instead 'see' the event through propagation of reputation. I envision a system that recalculates the reputation every few days and takes into account nearby reputations to simulate the propagation of information. A simple formula might be
(new reputation) = .9*(current reputation in system) + .1(average adjacent reputation)
Since this would be recalculated every few days, reputation would generally tend towards the average of all reputations but it would be more intense near the location of an event and less noticeable far away. This would also allow local systems to go hostile to you if you attack their patrols (as they should) without the overall faction necessarily hating you. A potential problem with this is that it creates a generally decentralized feel to reputation which might not make sense with every faction. A way to remedy this would be to add a 'faction capital' who influences reputation at all faction stations. For the hegemony this could be corvus, and every other station would have a .1(corvus reputation) term. This would make for a more centralized system where *** off corvus affects reputation everywhere meaning you have to be a lot more careful near corvus, but if they like you, then you might not have to worry so much at hegemony outposts. The values I suggested would have to be tweaked based on how often the reputation is recalculated and how fast you want reputation to propagate, but I think it would create a much more nuanced system. It might also create one more space for player action in that you could occasionally fight a faction (maybe to defend your outpost or to bully a station into establishing a trade partnership) without ruining your overall relationship instantly. The game is centered around combat so it only makes sense to make combat a viable option for interacting with factions instead of an instant reputation killer.
