There's something called durability on gear. See, when you use your gear often and don't lose it you end up having gear which degrades over time. Your armor and weapons can break, the items you use such as arrows, bandages, and potions dry up.
Sure you'll argue "WELL JUST LOOT IT FROM SOMEONE ELSE!" but you fail to realize there is no systems in place to sustain gameplay outside of town in-case of death.
What happens if a PK'er dies? Oh, just fuck him right? He DESERVES IT. This is a stupid and flawed view point some people take on.
Here are some things players are missing..
- A way to craft outside of town.
- A way to store things. (Sure, a player home provides a single chest but any player will tell you a single chest is not enough.)
- A way to purchase specific items (Reagents, books, materials, etc.)
- A way to process & refine materials.
These are four big ones, and if you're not currently living in a red town (aka a lawless town, which even those don't have everything needed) you currently can not sustain a life outside of town.
I also think you're getting to caught up in trying to white knight an idea that has suffered from a terrible execution.
Let me re-iterate for you what a lot of people are saying:
The system it-self, in plan, is not a bad one. It's the actual settings within it.
Why is it to build reputation you can only, and I mean ONLY deliver things? How does that make sense? Why can't we turn in heads from hostile mobs such as bandits or risars, or even turn in the valuables they drop such as risar rings (and perhaps bandits could drop fingers or something alike). Why is there not material orders such as "Turn in X amount of Y material for Z amount of reputation, gold, etc." There is an obscene lack of depth to the system which makes much of the gameplay around it extremely narrow and boring.
The second problem to it is the fact that caps are extremely low for most races, even for humans. The max reputation cap for humans currently is 100, with one of the lowest rep caps being for Thursars which is 10. I think these caps should be raised flat for all raises, even if lore says thursars are hated; 10 reputation cap is awful. That is 10 player kills, mounts, or pets.
The third problem is this system needs to have an NPC INSIDE of the city, and a NPC OUTSIDE of the city. You shouldn't be permanently banned from a city, it's stupid for simple reasons such as it's a video game. Players should be allow to fix their reputations rather then just suffer being barred indefinitely.
Those would be my big three fixes, then I'd say the system is fine.
It still suffers from the flaw that all types of players can abuse or suffer from the system, such as how
@Evelyn pointed out their guild suffered rep loss due to a guild prompting an attack on them twice. Smart players do not stand and let you hit them to win a fight.