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The context in which I heard this is lost in the mists of history, and I'm likely mangling the quote anyway, but consider this:
If we are sitting around in a pub, you and I, and the town drunk runs in exclaiming that a naked woman on a horse is roaming about in Trafalgar Square, we would laugh at him and go back to our pints. Should a respected business man burst in and cry out that a unicorn is prancing through the Square, we would pick up a phone and seek help for him. If it were the Pope to stumble in and breathlessly proclaim that a naked woman on a unicorn was parading through Tralfalgar square, we would run out to check for ourselves!
We know it is foolish, impossible, absurd... but coming from a voice of such authority we must verify with our own eyes what we know must be true before we'll cast aspersions. Any 'realistic' system must take this into account.
This isn't to say that any system adopted by a mud must be realistic, and in the case of Achaea where in-game rewards are auctioned for RL money, NO system is better than a system that can be manipulated by the players. Thus 'realistic' gets bumped down the priority list even further.
Taking the situation from above as a lesson though, perhaps a viable system would involve giving players a number of points which they can distribute as they please. Clan/guild/faction/nation/whatever leaders would recieve the most, their underlings a bit less... newbies the least of all.
From there, one of two systems propose themself to me. Either dissallow assigning them within your own guild/faction, arguing that you already trust your clanmates as much as possible, and the points are to be awarded to players outside of your circle. Otherwise, allow the points to be passed around without restriction, but weight their value according to where they came from. A point given to a guild leader from the guild steward might be worth only 1/4 or 1/8 of its real value.
In either case, hide the actual value of the point... perhaps giving the player some vague message to gauge with 'You note the look of respect directed at you from your peers', but make the steps between new messages wide enough that it would take all the points of several people to change the message.
In the first case it would be imperative that the rewards of membership to a faction is clearly superior to the rewards granted by being highly respected, and that the factions themselves are either highly competitive with each other, or numerous enough to counterbalance the effect of a few alliances.
Man! it is way too late for me to finish this, but I think I got the skeleton of the idea out there.
Silrathi, will try to come back to this later
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