I wouldn't mind if you got rid of the scores ingame, but the like the Player Ranking list. It's handy for finding out is anyone else is bounty hunting.

electric27: a pk/d ratio effecting the ranking might be a very bad idea, for two reasons:

1.) It encourages newbie-killers. People who want to have a huge score will go after newbies. Furthermore...

2.) It encourages the coward type of players: they attack someone (usually newbies) and run away if someone succeeds to hit them.

Both cases (usually combined in one person) are very annoying - when certain players are online, you have to stay in the home sectors to prevent newbie killings - and you can't score a hit because those cowards run away if attacked.

Regards,
Mark (Commander Jameson)

Phaserlight: sounds good in theory - however, there's a flaw in it:

Pseudo-Newbies - i.e. vets disguising as newbies. This is becoming quite annoying - because they endanger the real newbies. Anyway, a pseudo-newbie could rapidly gain score by killing newbies who just got score by botting.

A better thing to rate a player (and eliminating the pseudo-newbies) would be a display of "game-time" (I suggested this before) which should be the same regardless of the character you're playing.

Regards,
Mark (Commander Jameson)

I agree with electric27 that botting is a rather bad indicator of skill and I agree with Buckaroo that a pk based ranking system would also be a bad idea. I think that you should still get points for botting, but that you should get a lot more points for pk'ing someone of a similar rank. The formula would look something like this:

if (Your score) - 12,000 < (Victim's score) then
Points gained for PK = (12,000 - ((Your score) - (Victim's score)))/10

if (Your score) - 12,000 > (Victim's score) then
Points gained for PK = 0

That way you would get no points for killing someone if you were ahead of them by 12,000 or more points. For every 1,000 points difference after that point, you would get 100 points. So for killing someone the exact same rank as you, you would get 1,200 points. If I managed to kill Blaster I would get about 200,000 points. If I killed a newb I would get nada. I also think you should get more points for trading. Say:

points gained from trading = (money made from selling widgets)/500.

That way I would get 288 points for one trade run of precious metals in a maud.

Feel free to poke holes in this theory (I can already see a few but I'll leave that up to you to find) or offer a better formula(e).