If we look at the distribution of attention - whether by music sales, google hits or academic citations - it is extremely uneven. Justin Beiber (whoever that is) gets 263,000,000 google hits, while me and every other person with my name in the world gets 88,100 hits in total, and the handle Mesmoria gets 1,790 hits. I think it is likely that rep will have the same extreme distribution. Hence there will be rep super-rich too: the people who founded Extropia, the Commonwealth superstar musician, the criminal who stole the master certification key for Bank of Kaguya. The reputation economy might well have tried to limit the extreme inequalities by making services more egalitarian, so these rep super-rich are not quite as rich and powerful they would have been if their rep had been money. But it seems likely that they would still be amazingly more able to get what they want. Just consider how many people are willing to do nice things for a celebrity just because they are a celebrity. Sure, Dr Cho Hong of Extropia might not be able to afford a new space shuttle every week without reaching into his credit wallet, but he can always find somebody willing to give him what he wants in exchange for a chance to talk to a living legend and boast that they gave him a ride. Game-system wise I think extreme levels of rep should be treated as almost a profession. You don't maintain 95 g-rep by having done a few cool things, you have to be a godfather and defend your position from contenders all the time. You are *expected* to perform massive services at a regular rate. High-rep Firewall proxies have to save the solar system every month or at least make sure it is saved, otherwise they lose rep. Another interesting realization I had was that the rep-monster of the PCs (made before the cap on rep spending in the errata) was so famous that people were blogging about his comings and goings constantly. "OMG! *Mr Spade* is having breakfast with *Jasper Warren* *right next to me* at the Erato Hilton! They are having omelettes, and now a swarmanoid is talking to them!!!" Having extreme rep ought to have some downsides. But the downsides are tied together with the upsides: fame and reputation, like wealth, are two-edged.

Yerameyahu wrote:

What's this rep spending cap?

Ah, it is in the core book (but I did not notice it until my player made his monster): "No individual Rep score may be raised above 80, and the maximum amount of CP that may be spent on Rep is 35 points.", p. 136

I think the Rep cap is an implementation of a house rule my group has for Shadowrun: "Keep the runners poor" When a player has access to all the goodies, there tends to be few consequences to their actions, and the game loses it's lustre. If you keep the players relatively poor all the time (especially if you can get them living from "paycheck" to "paycheck") then you will find your game sessions to be more fun. As pointed out above, I think that super rep individuals will exist (I even think they can live rockstar lives), but in the Rep Economy, they will be the hardest and most influential individuals in the Solar System and as such with their super rep comes super responsibilities (insert Spiderman joke here). These types of individuals don't make good PCs, "What, no I can't go saving humanity at the moment, I need to make sure I'm present for the vote at the Titanian Council meeting. We need to push through the budget increase for sanitation."

If you are determined to have the reputation rules reflect how the fluff portrays the general public (A mistake I believe, they are intended for players after all, and players are special cases and do not tend to be the bazillionairs. They tend to work for them.) then you can probably just hand waive it away as them burning ludicrous amounts of reputation. Individuals who are that famous can earn so much reputation so fast that it doesn't matter that they lose some here and there. Or you can use some of the house ruled reputation options that appear on these forums (And soon in the Fanzine!) that changes the reputation network to make the higher ends of the reputation scales to be much more powerful in terms of the weight they can throw around. A quick forum search should bring them up likitysplit.

TBRMInsanity wrote:

When ever I think of Super Rep scores I tend to think of Richard Stallman. He doesn't care about money beyond paying for his way of living, but he will freely accepts gifts from people. I guess a lot of Super Rep individuals would have the same mentality (taking what they need to live and nothing more).

The more stuff you have, the more time, energy, and compute cycles you have to spend worrying about it. That translates into less time actually enjoying what you have.

Sheesh, I've been away a while... While I agree that there will be individuals with Super Rep, I think the rep economy was largely influenced by the idea that there SHOULDN'T be people with the kind of pull that the likes of Bill Gates et al. have. Yes, the ultra-"wealthy" can get neat toys and command very pleasant estates for homes, but the point is that no-one should ever command a staggering amount of resources to the point of ridiculous excess or to the detriment of others. The exceptions to this rule are the use of it in government control and corporate matters, which is largely outside the intended rules in the game, and people who have what amounts to astonishingly ridiculous political pull; the kind of people who, with a word, can fill a town square with thousands or more. These people, however, are not going to be able to access more resources directly in the traditional sense; they'd have to actively ask people to spend their OWN resources for them. Such people would be of the movie star/media identity varieties, but there's limits to what they can do with their Super Rep. I like to think that Super Rep is a rollover form, which allows lesser favours to recharge faster, but does nothing in terms of allowing more exceptional ones. Reputation economies work because people appreciate you, but they're inherently built on preventing resource accumulation towards one person.

The best way to represent someone with the sort of ultra-wealth you might see in traditional economies within the context of a reputation economy is to exploit the favor-burning mechanic of the game. The basic premise of that element is that you lose reputation, potentially with great quickness, whenever you call favors at too rapid a pace. However, a person with enough pull and renown likely has constantly-refreshing sources of reputation. Such a person might have a reputation constantly in flux among the top numbers (hopping around rapidly in the high 90s). In order to be able to constantly spend their reputations to prevent them from capping off, they might even have proxies which act in their behalf, expending their reputation where it is desired. You might even see the reputation equivalent of hypercorps through some sort of organization reputation... where groups of people have a joint reputation score separate from each members' individual reputation score.

IMHO, there's a clear separation between celebrities economics and rep economics. The way I see, being widely known actually has a negative effect towards reputation. To keep the Justin Beiber example that Arenamontanus brought up: yes, almost everyone knows him, but for every person willing to give him a ride there's someone who simply wants to give him a knock behind the ears. I actually have one of my PCs with a very high fame rating, but quite low rep. She is well known, of course, but this just means that whenever she makes a mistake, the vultures fall on her FTL. However, I see reputation more as a give-give situation, similar to a barter economy of favours, with the added factor that "not-being-available" would impact negatively on your record. This means that gain would be exponentially harder to come by, because as you get more and more reputation, more and more people are going to be demanding stuff from you as your fame grows. Once you get to the point when you have to start turning down people, your rep drops, so it's nigh impossible to become rep wealthy. Also I found this extremely funny:

Arenamontanus wrote:

High-rep Firewall proxies have to save the solar system every month or at least make sure it is saved, otherwise they lose rep.

Firewall rep looks down as a black hole he couldn't stop starts consuming Sol and the solar system and thinks: "Damn, my rep's gonna dive after this!"

I guess, by who would bother? 80's in the same tier as 90. :)

Obviously, but that's a pretty small niche use. I think they're interesting suggestions, and the 10BP one is very in-line with existing Qualities. I just can't see taking it.

Mesmoria wrote:

The comments have had a focus on the individual, what about corporations?

I don't feel like they would use it. They could trade with some specific individual who would then use his own rep to solve it, and maybe rep acquisition could be on the job description of Community Managers and Public Relations representatives for Hypercorps dealing with full rep economies. I also seem to recall (from the top of my head, with no books to reference) some banks around Mars that offered a change rate between creds and rep, so they might work something using them.