When it comes to the wishes of the player base of World of Warcraft, there are many ideas and suggestions that have accumulated over the years.
There are many suggestions and improvement ideas that players have brought up in World of Warcraft over the years. Some are often heatedly discussed, as rarely is every idea purely positive. One of these points is the idea of account-wide reputation. This would bring many benefits and make playing alternative characters easier. It is a desire that has been increasingly heard from the community in recent years. But is this really just a good idea?
What would account-wide reputation be? Account-wide reputation would essentially mean that players would only need to earn reputation with a faction on a single character. Once that character reaches the “Exalted” level, all other characters could also benefit from this reputation level and enjoy corresponding rewards and advantages.
What supports account-wide reputation? There are several arguments in favor of account-wide reputation. The most commonly cited argument is that farming reputation represents a significant barrier when a player has to play another character.
Those who have farmed all currently relevant reputation factions to exalted with their main character will think multiple times about whether this effort is justified for another character as well. Since farming reputation is generally associated with quite simple and often tedious grinds, this presents a massive hurdle.
This would not be a problem if the reputation factions were not tied to player power and only provided cosmetic rewards.
What speaks against account-wide reputation? However, there are also some peculiarities that speak against account-wide reputation, particularly in cases where players have to decide on a faction.
The best-known example would be the Aldor and the Scryers from Shattrath in The Burning Crusade. Players can only join one of the two factions and are hostile towards the other. Here there would need to be exceptions so that characters do not suddenly become popular or unpopular with both factions due to account-wide reputation.
Furthermore, there are also players who want a true fresh start with a new character and enjoy grinding reputation multiple times. This possibility would disappear if reputation were forced to be account-wide.
This is how the community discusses it: In the WoW subreddit, a post has surfaced again that revolves around the account-wide reputation.
Vitrudian sees a clear advantage in it to keep more players engaged in WoW:
I wish they had done this a long time ago. Remove the barriers that prevent players from wanting to play alternate characters. They could have retained so many more players.
Wheelywagon also wonders why this has not been worked on yet.
The real question is why this hasn’t been introduced into the game yet. Why hasn’t the absolute minimum been met and at least the increased reputation bonus [from Pandaria] been granted when a character is exalted.
The user malignantmind already has concrete plans:
Make it so that if one character is exalted, all other characters on the account are also exalted. If no character is exalted, then each has their individual reputation progress.
This ensures that they do not have to create account-wide limits for daily/weekly reputation farming and should resolve all issues, such as alternate characters not being able to return to loot bay just because one is farming the title “The Insane” on a character. It would probably make the title easier in the long run – but who cares about that anymore?
What do you think about account-wide reputation? What are good reasons for it? What speaks against it?
