Contact Rep vs. Contact Influence, redux

[athios]

Jun 20, 2017 13:18:54 GMT -5 fallen said:

- Contact Services now cost Reputation, not Influence

Wanted to bring this up since the new change was just enacted. We in the Alpha group sort of get it, but this will be confusing to new players. Do you think in the long run it's better to just have a unique term for the thing that we spend when using Contact Services?

e.g.
Reputation == always refers to Faction Rep only
Influence == Contact Influence within their Faction; reflects the ability to offer certain Services
some other term == what we gain when helping a Contact, what we spend when buying Services; reflects the willingness to perform Services for you

Some candidates could be: Relationship, Closeness, Karma, Indebtedness, Favour, Obligation

[fallen]

It is "Personal Reputation"

You have Faction Reputation.

When combined, they are Effective Reputation.

Contacts have Influence which is their score in the political competition within and the between Factions.

[athios]

Yes, I understand that's how it works. To be clear, I was suggesting to switch to a new term for "Effective Reputation" that does not have the word 'Reputation' as part of it.

[Cory Trese]

I don't think that is a good idea. Since it is a type of Reputation, and uses the Reputation system and rules, I believe that we should use consistent terms.

[grävling]

I think that the CK experience gives us a huge amount of evidence that people find 'Heat in a Zone' vs 'Global Heat all over' really, really confusing. And saying that 'your effective heat == your heat all over modified by your rep with the faction that owns the zone you are in' does not make things any clearer for the confused people. I think what they wanted was heat to only mean one thing, your heat in the zone, and your 'global heat all over' to be called something else.

I think the problem is that having coined the term 'Effective Reputation' and used it for who knows how many years now, you think of it as a very descriptive and meaningful term. But for people who are new, this term is well inside the realm of 'insider's jargon'. They'll get used to it, but perhaps we can do better.

I'm kind of partial to the word 'Kudos'. But then people around here are talking about 'social networking and the new kudos economy' a whole lot around here. see: www.kimbieler.com/2009/03/11/the-kudos-economy/

It's always seemed to me to be exactly what we are using in the game. If you called it that, around here at any rate, everybody would get exactly what it is that you were talking about, without an explanation, at least if they read newspapers or watch the news on tv. (Or read Iain Banks' science fiction novels, or a whole series of books by Paul McAuley that uses a kudos economy as a background element.) But I wonder if this is something local to Sweden, or if this is true other places.

[bobc]

I like the term Kudos.  You can have heaps of Reputation with a Faction but it takes Kudos to open doors with a Contact.