Whether I am correct or not really doesn't matter. Like I said i'm a new player and I didn't really realize how the game was until I tried it. It wasn't as bad as you would think from a cursory googling. My point is, over 40K players signed up for this beta and if you take a look at steam charts about 500 concurrent play. Hardcore PvP only games is a very small niche of the gaming community and very few PvP MMOS get a decent player base because of it without also including a lot of non PvP orientated content to appeal to a much larger player base. I assume this reputation system is taking a little from column A the PvPers and giving to column B the PvE crowd to develope a more diverse and wider player base. I don't think thats a huge sacrifice for the PvP community.
So just to address your points:
- The players currently are much lower then during the beta because it was free, and there were trial keys players could give to friends. This meant more players were playing without paying for the game. Of course it was going to be more populated.
- The servers simply couldn't handle the amount of players coming, and many are scared off due to the fact it's a single server; rightfully so. Henrik is wanting 8k players but the server would probably shit itself. I'd love to be proved wrong.
- Sure. It's a niche genre, but I guess the advantage of MO2 right now is it's the ONLY title that really is in it's genre. Anything else is a carbon copy that is privately hosted.
People had a thread a while back about defining hardcore. What is hardcore to you? Losing items on death? Losing structures? Losing things you gathered for hours and hours? Rust falls into that category, but I don't really believe Rust is Hardcore.
Hardcore to me is a game that has danger in it around every corner, and that heavy time sinks can be taken away in a few minutes or even in a matter of seconds if you stumble into the wrong place. The game doesn't guide you much after the tutorial, and you have to figure a lot of stuff out.
A lot of the issues players have with the reputation system is the fact that it's set up to deter players from PvP'ing which is the wrong direction in my opinion. People -think- if you deter players from PvP'ing then griefing will stop, or that new players wont be bullied out of the game. Players will always find a way to push new players or to grief others out of the game, you can do that in -any- game.
It goes deeper then that, the system is just fundamentally busted because if your guild engages another guild you can take rep loss even if you're not the aggressor. You could be the holy of holy guilds, with absolute saints for players; that do no wrong to anyone else and -still- lose rep and suffer the consequences of the rep system due to other players attacking you.