Fame is a number carried on a character, separate from level and from every combat stat. It is the game's reputation figure: it does nothing to damage, HP or accuracy, and a character with high fame hits exactly as hard as one with none.
Fame is given and taken by other players, one act per day, and some quests will not start without enough of it. That combination is what makes it more than a vanity counter: a number nobody can farm alone, gating content.
Contents
Earning it from quests
Thirteen quests award fame at launch, and between them they are worth 23 fame in total. They start at level 21 and run to level 48.
Three givers account for most of it. Shumi pays 1, 2 and 3 across a chain of three lost-money quests; Rowen the Fairy pays a rising amount for collecting 50, 70, 100, 150 and 200 cursed dolls; and Sabitrama pays 1 and 2 for two medicine quests. Working all three chains is most of the fame a character can earn from questing.
Giving and taking it
Fame does not only come from quests. Players give it to each other, and can take it away as well: a character may raise another character's fame or drop it.
The limit is what makes it scarce. A character gets one fame action per day, and the limit is global rather than per person. Faming someone spends the day's action outright, so it is not a matter of faming each friend once a day but of choosing a single recipient. Dropping someone's fame spends the same action.
There is no per-person restriction. A character can be famed at any time, by anyone, as long as the giver still has that day's action. The limit lives entirely on the giver's side, so a popular character can gain several points in a day from several different people while each of those people spends their one action.
Fame can go negative, with no known floor. Enough drops put a character below zero and nothing observed so far stops it going further. Some technical limit presumably exists in the way the number is stored, but no one has reported reaching it.
Fame as a requirement
Some quests will not start until a character has enough fame. This is the practical reason to care about the number: quest fame accumulates slowly, at one to three per quest, and the player-given kind arrives one point at a time from other people.
The requirement side has now been extracted from the client, and exactly one launch quest carries one: Building a New House For Blackbull needs 10 fame to start. Every other quest in the launch build has no fame gate at all, so the number matters less as a key than the volume of quests above suggests.
What is still unconfirmed
- The level a character must reach before it can fame anyone.
- When, exactly, a player's ability to fame is reset.
Trivia
Because the daily action is worth exactly one point to the person receiving it and nothing at all to the person spending it, fame became something players bought and sold for mesos in the original game. The seller spends their action on the buyer, the buyer pays, and both move on.
Nothing in the game brokered that. There was no escrow and no trade window for it: one side acted first and trusted the other to follow through, which made buying fame a small exercise in reputation of a different kind. Sellers with a name to protect got repeat business.
Defaming was sold the same way. A player could pay someone to spend their daily action dropping a third party's fame instead of raising anyone's. Since fame goes negative, a co-ordinated group could push a character a long way below zero.
Not everyone minded being on the receiving end. A deeply negative fame total was itself something to show off, and players collected defames on purpose to get one.
See also
- Quests: every quest, including the ones above.
- Party: the other social system, and a better-documented one.
- Guild: the persistent grouping.
- Experience and Meso: the rewards that are not fame.