Reputation as a way to measure char progression
Reputation has been mentioned several times on these forums but usually in connection with factions you can earn reputation with. Although I think this is a good idea, I want to turn the attention towards a different form of reputation used in SR: The street-cred. It's a value that would reflect how well known your char was and/or how good and professional a runner (s)he was considered. Usually, you would simply gain one reputation point for each karma point you earned. However, after the karma was spent, your reputation would stay, thus giving an overview on how much you have been playing that character in the past. That value would, too, be objective to modificators: if you'd do an extra spectacular run, it could go up. If you'd behave in an especially immoral way, that might hurt your reputation as well as failed runs would. Often, this reputation was split: For example it could actually help in interrogations if your runner would be known for being especially cruel (something that might hurt the reputation normally) and if one of your runs would be shown in the Trid that would boost your popularity rating but drag down the professionality rating. However, I do not think that we need to go that much into detail for SR:O. I would suggest to have reputation linked to the karma earned by the characters in runs, modified by a few multipliers (e.g. earning achievements should grant extra reputation). That rating, too, could be hurt as a part of the death-penalty: If a char dies during a mission, (s)he will not be granted the reputation for that run. If the whole team gets wiped out / fails the mission, the reputation of everyone in the group gets hurt and so on. It would create an extra incentive for people to actually try and succeed. Especially since the idea of SR:O, as I understood it, isn't to let players simply brood-force through missions, giving it several dozends tries a day.
That rating could be used in several ways: It could be used to unlock non-faction related missions on a higher level. Clearly, trying to break into, let's say, a dragon lair can't and shouldn't be an option for starter chars: People would just get very demotivated and frustrated if they'd try. So what could be done would be that, e.g., you need to earn 50 reputation first, taking around 10 runs, to move up to the more serious buisness (from gangfight to bank raid for example), to move to even more difficult scenarios at 150 reputation or so. If you include modifiers into that value that would mean too that experienced players who are able to cope with the content much better would be able to do some achievements at the first time of doing a scenario with their new char, thus increasing their reputation quicker and being able to move to the endgame quicker. I am not sure, tho, whether it would be a good idea to let people loose access to missions they unlocked earlier when they mess up too much and their reputation drops. After all, it might feel bad for the players that they cannot run the missions anymore they have been trying before. On the other hand they obviously weren't quite ready for them yet and in the P&P version you, too, find yourself stuck to the less attractive jobs if you went havoc on your reputation.
A similar rating could be utilized for the matchmaking in PvP too: Clearly, it's not a good idea to have a team that lost their first ten games go up against a team that won the last 50. What I think should happen is that there is a PvP rating that reflects on how well a player did in PvP and which then should be used to create PvP missions with characters on a similar power level. Since some of the PvP scenarios might actually play a lot like PvE scenarios, just with maybe cleverer opponents, it might not even be necessary to have a dedicated PvP rating. In any case the PvE rating should be the basis of the PvP rating when you first start to play PvP, else you'd have chars who just started playing and went for PvP directly go up against chars at a very high powerlevel who just never started PvP (a freshly created char with some minor cyberimplants and a shotgun vs. a 0,1 essence streetsam with a gatling gun couldn't exactly be called fair). And PvP probably should be unlocked after you actually have the means of getting your dead char back � if you can die in PvP at all and if death isn't treated very differently in PvP than in PvE.
Last but not least I'd suggest that the top 1, or 0,5, or 0,1, or 0,01% in reputation of the charpopulation should be awarded a title like "Streetlegend" to show just how kickass those players are (maybe the titles should be awarded ones a month or so). I think reputation is a good way of ranking the players since it wouldn't be able to be bought and even if you'd be able to boost your char by micro-transactions, that wouldn't change that you need to do runs to actually increase your char-rating � although that of course would be easier to do.
There is a minor risk of implementing 'Tiers' of playing: when new content gets added, it usually just adds to the endgame. Characters who just started often don't profit as much of it as chars which play in the highest tier of the game. However, that is the case with almost all MMOs and no one really seems to bother, as long as the starter content is sound everyone plays it and eventually reaches the point where (s)he gets to see the new content. Afterall, the start content usually motivating enough for new players, but the veteran players on the highest tier of playing are at a much higher risk of running out of content they find attractive.