The fall of standing

There is an absolutely fantastic way to screw with your player base. This first part ain't it, but it's the basis on which you can go on and really make them suffer.

Have factions, more than two though. A dozen or so would work just great. Have each one occupy a physical location, with the major ones being in most of the interesting spaces. Create now standing, a value to indicate your relationship with them. You can call it fame, notoriety, reputation, whatever you feel like, I call it standing for the sake of this post. These things by themselves are not bad. They can be implemented horrible but I come to that a bit later. It takes a lot of very special incompetence to screw up this part. There are consequences, like being shot on sight with bad standing and so on, but I don't even have to go into that here.

The next part already gets tricky. Now you could opt to add a co-dependence between the factions. If you gain standing with Faction A, then Faction B will lose standing, because they hate A. Maybe if you gain 10 points in standing, you loose 4 points in the other faction. Tricky but not impossible. Now to really make players go bonkers.

First of all, don't explain it to them. That would be too easy. A simple message or graphic showing that if standing goes up here, standing goes down there, would be so simple, nobody would want that.

Then give them quests that will damage their reputation significantly with one faction. Preferably very early on in their game life, like within the first hour or so. But damaging standing with one faction wont raise his standing with the others, he simply just loses standing magically in only one way, the most negative there is. Don't show them that they lose faction standing. That would be too easy. Just let them discover it themselves, in no less than 2 clicks, preferably more. Also do it in a section of the data output from the game, where you never have showed them in a tutorial how this works to begin with.

Now after they have screwed up badly thanks to your devious setup, and get killed by one of the factions a few times, give them possible quests that will result in standing gains. But those are of course as described above, where a large gain will also result in a small loss for the other factions. Overall you should come out ahead, so all faction standing added up, should be higher than it was before. Or at least for the important ones. Mark those quests that give standing, while not marking the ones where you significantly can loose standing.

As they try to climb out of the gutter you pushed them into, put the crowning jewel on the entire affair by making any values utterly confusing. Have one set of scale for the display of the standing, round it in three different ways for different displays, then add a list where you can see what changed your standing recently, in what way, and use yet another scale and rounding principle there.

If your game is by now not inhabited by a large number of players who are homicidal maniacs that elevate the destruction of things to their highest goal, then you might have not screwed your players over enough. Add some meaningless achievements that are pretty much impossible to get, that should do the trick and push them over the edge.

Sounds familiar? Well this is a collection of how multiple games handle the issue. You probably played one or are playing one currently, that does exactly that.

It is my hope that sarcasm is still something that can be comprehended, despite all the best efforts in making everyone doubt the sanity of some in this industry.