Gonna bore grind

I think we would benefit from alternatives to gaining rep. We have 3 primary sources the give out personal rep and Territory Bounties will provide Cartel Rep. 

Territories currently are very lackluster and offer very little to cartels and individuals alike. I think that Territories should be re-looked and consider small individual reputation rewards after a certain amount of time spent with a cartel, 6 months + to prevent Cartel hopping for boosts and greater rewards for the Cartel that holds the TT increasing those rewards per week held say by 50%. This would incentivise wars, long term commitment to your Cartel and so on.

I think another untapped potential for Rep gains are our expeditions. Adding rep gains to those would help all players move at a steady pace as the race to the final location is fairly common. It wouldn't be a lot. Say 10 rep per hour and maybe a university course to eventually double the rewards from expeditions. That way if I do a 17h expedition at most I would get is 340 per.

I don't think we should nerf the rep from attacks, but maybe adjust how it is calculated. I don't think level should hold as much weight as it does, I think it should be responsible for approximately 20% of the rep gained from a fight. The true effort would be attacking people with a 3xFFM. I Dwarf a lot of people in our small rep trading circle when it comes to stats so it makes sense for me to be a good target, but for me to still average 1200~1300 rep on people less than half of my battlestats because they are a higher level is kind of a problem. We so often tell new players to level hold so they don't get farmed, but tge reality is now we have older high BS players who hide behind that mechanic and reduce the number of viable rep targets available. Level holding should be discouraged as you don't get the additional health and hurt yourself and others in the long run.

I think if we did move forward with your suggestions, we should alter the change of rep calculations and make the level of another player a much smaller variable that way we could open up attacks to more players and have more fair fights. 

The current rep grind system has meant that people have completely and utterly trivialised production prestiges from something that should have taken years to weeks/months. That just isn't healthy for the game long term.

Vaelinn made it clear this wasn't Fait accompli but a discussion and thats healthy

Every game needs balance and finding that is probably the biggest thing each game faces. You can't take away from one type of player to appease another type. Making most people mostly happy is the best you can hope for. The idea will most likely be implemented in some shape or form it's a matter of finding the right shape or form.

I have ran out of cliche's

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of the rep farming playstyle and this would make it if not obsolete, a lot harder and more complicated to do.

There's currently an interesting alternative between either being a gym maximalist, or investing energy and/or jobs heavily into speedrunning productions. They both have their pros and cons and different kinds of players find it each on engaging in turn.

The two problems raised are that:

* it doesn't lead to a variety in targets - I don't see why this is an issue, especially in a game with such a small playerbase
* rep gains are too fast whether for cartels or for players, especially on church boost days, which the rest of the game ie. non-rep farmers can't keep up with it - that's true but they're also not sacrificing energy for it and gaining stats instead

I'm a good example, being very close to max prods right now. Most of this rep came from attacks, 17k to be precise, which if trained would have added about 4.25b stats. Rep farming has gotten more efficient since I started, so maybe for a smart new player it'd only be 10k attacks, or 2.5b stats never gained. Rep farming with a willing target also costs money, 10k hits would be around 20b.

In my book that plus the hundreds of extra active play hours needed for farming compared to gym is a fair tradeoff for unlocking prods early. 

The production update has been added with the new meta in mind and I think 15m rep for all maxed is a high enough number.

I would agree that when it comes to cartel rep, the progress does come too fast and too many cartels have maxed or are near maxing already. Adding a global multiplier on cartel perks and resetting them could be a solution, or maybe more aggressive scaling on the higher levels of them. There are also current suggestions on new cartel perks too which would further push the 'maximum' out.