Reputation decay is toxic for gaming communities because it forces minimum number of hours needed to be played. Now there does need to be an alternative to this since the goal of reputation decay still needs to be met. CIG's stated goal is that they don't want people sitting at max reputation. It should take work with one particular faction to be at the highest reputation and that work should be rewarded with having reputation higher then anyone else. The solution is make reputation harder to maintain at higher reputations. For example, helping faction "B" while at rank 3 reputation with the UEE will not hurt your UEE reputation but if your at rank 8 with the UEE, it could lower your reputation with the UEE. Essentially, reputation becomes harder to get and easier to lose depending on your actions as you have higher and higher reputation. The benefit of such a system is that it doesn't matter if you barely play or stop for six months. Only your actions can change your reputation so taking no actions means your don't change your reputation. edit: Here is an example of how minimum play times can be toxic to those playing the game. https://soulkerfuffle.blogspot.com/2006/10/view-from-top.html edit2: I will expand on my one liner on why it is toxic then. I originally said: it forces minimum number of hours needed to be played Different people have different amounts of time. For CIG to use reputation decay, it assumes everyone plays the same amount of time which couldn't be further from the truth. Some play more and some play less. CIG will have to measure how much time people spend and then pick a minimum weekly work load to maintain reputations. Thus it is over tuned for some people, undertuned for other people and at the intended amount of work for everyone else. This can be extremely destructive to the lives of people just trying to keep up in the game becaues of real life. There are studies you can look at from how minimum play time numbers was toxic to the lives of people playing World of Warcraft. Here is one person talking about their experience. https://soulkerfuffle.blogspot.com/2006/10/view-from-top.html edit3: It case it is not clear. This system will make 100 hours of work yield the same in game reward whether you did that work over 10 days, 3 months or 1 year. edit4: A concept for what an action based reputation system that you have to work toward would look like. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/action-based-reputation-system