My take on the different Reps is, you are what you can get: small favours with the people you live with are mostly a bare minimun, think about what you would do for a neighbour that doesn't help you directly, but "does his share" of communal work in the neighborhood (keeping his "territory" clean, don't bothering others with loud noises at rest times, paying his part of the communal services either in money or time, etc...). Just that behaviour means you would warn them if you see strange people lurking around, or if something broke whike they were on vacation, getting a shipment for them while they are at work, etc... After some years of such simple "don't bother, don't go out of his way to help more than he has to", you would have a hard time refusing "medium" favours that cost you little, but demand more responsability from you, like babysitting a child or recommending him a cleaning service. Now imagine someone who really wants to be able to ask for more, like piggyback your WiFi, help with an extermination problem (moles, or rats), or even ask you to lend him one of your videogames/movies/books (or make a copy!), and think about what would he need to have done to warrant such "privileges". Then escalate, and keep making some connections. The point is, the basic "roll and lose no value on your rep" means to chash not on favours, but on the goodwill of those you know (or of the people who knows someone that knows you and vouches for you, "he's a nice guy, he helps a lot in the hab"), while losing the value would mean to spend one of those "marked" favours ("come on, Jim, I helped you last summer to reform your whole basement! I'm only asking you lend me your car for the weekend, I promise you'll get it spotless!") and the like. As for the Resleeving/farcasting, there are two reasons: urgent needs and routine needs. For most people, farcasting is something they do because they have no other option, and it also involves resleeving on both ends (if they wanna come back), and we are talking long flights there, not short ones, which means at least weeks of travel compressed into hours or less (so in the USA, that would mean getting really out of the states, usually to another continent), which means interplanetary travel (or going to a very far asteroid in the Belt). Accidents, end of the life for the morph, and the like are other "urgent" needs for resleeving. Routine resleeving is mostly common when we talk about common farcasting: hyperelite who want to be somewhere in person (and trusts both ends of the Farcasting... closed hardware is always safer than any software transmission), bankers/high level workers who need to skip delays, etc... As for communities who live mostly disembodied and then sleeve for some work, remember most cyberbrains come with a puppet sock, meaning they don't really "sleeve", they use the morph as a remote controlled body even if they have to reside "in" the morph instead of remotely puppeteer it. In the end, remeber the players are exceptional people. Most NPC's lack the skills, motivation, or willpower to go through excruciating ordeals that for a PC are just "routine gaming session" (also called "farming resources" in one way or another... be it experience or development of stuff). Just think about it: would you like to spend several months designing something from scratch just to use it once and then release as an open source template for the autonomists? That would mean spending time in accelerated VR (meaning you need power, and a powerful computer... and spend the time inside that bubble doing nothing but drawing). Sure, for the world it has been a couple of days, but you just spent 60 times that long designing stuff from scracth, or even not so much from scratch. As a comparison, look at games like Minecraft or Space Engineers, and thing about spending two whole months playing 24 hours a day nonstop on creative mode in order to create some sort of contraption that will churn out something, and then releasing the map for anybody to copy, modify and use for free, without even monetizing the video on your youtube channel. Sure, you will get rep (in that community, that is the group of people interesed in such things), but you just spent 1440 hours designing that nonstop, and you have to pay for the rent of those two months (which in EP can come out from the rep you just gained, reducing the income a little!). Yes, you can fork yourself to make that copy churn out desings. But an Alpha Fork will think the same you do (what a chore!) and applying psychosurgery to it can be dangerous (do you turst that surgeon? Are YOU that surgeon? What makes you thing you excised Psychosurgery from that fork, and that the operation was successful?), or you can use a beta fork (which also needs to be psychurgery'ed... and it's more likely you have cut his creativity a little), etc... And if you are successfull, welcome to a world where most people does the same! So your Rep gains barely net a gain, unless you are developing truly new stuff and making steps not already done by corps or other people (who might het pissed about losing the edge of no one else having that). In Cyberpunk 2020 there was a combo for making money "fast", which involved a driving LAI (you could choose at least one skill... go for the Infosec equivalent!), a computer, batteries and solar panels (or some sort of energy generation) and left it churning out hacking programs (people have suggested a similar scam for getting +30 to their Infosec rolls in EP, due to have the very best and latest intrusion suites from forks doing the programming in the background all the time... to that a GM might answer "everybody does it", or "everybody important to the game does it" downgrading their claim to "you'll get the bonus I want you to").