Well yeah I figured I needed teams of players and npc factions so why not join them together when they have a strong overlap?
I didn’t intend to gate any content behind arbitrary ranks (as players can easily define their own ranks) but rather use this as a mean to help players to selfgovern. It can’t prevent anarchy alone, because actions against the user defined laws do nothing but reduce a meaningless reputation value. But it allows players to at least track who is their friend and who is not. This allows random players that come along to participate in a group.
I imagined basically players being able to create their own political setup, do they want to elect their islands leader? Do they want to let people build anywhere or do they want to sell claims? Do they collect taxes in exchange for protection? All those things have to be enforced by the players themselves, but they obviously need some interface to define those rules (outside the game would break Immersion a lot more). The reputation is intended to be an all seeing eye so places don’t get lawless just because the owner is offline.
But yeah, obviously a feature for later, just wanted to mention it before it’s too late.
About your neighbourhood arguments: I designed a personality system with 201^5 different personalities so each npc reacts a bit different and less predictable. But that was basically mostly used for interpersonal conflicts and fitness for different tasks. Might be a different direction that what you plan, I intended to make a first person colony survival basically