How does Reputation work?

[Himars-TT]

I only seem to get 3 per customer. I also seem to be losing 20-30 randomly despite being fairly certain I'm selling what the customer desires.

Edit: Does it have an effect on sales? Gameplay? Quest types? Prices from other merchants? Was this in the tutorial but I skimmed / forgot it because I was too excited to make potions?

[Djelighoti]

Be sure to read carefully what customers are asking for. Some will drop subtle (and not so subtle) hints indicating that they are going to use it for not so nice purposes. If you refuse to sell anything to these people, you'll gain 20-30 rep instead of losing it.
eg: If you want high reputation, maybe you don't want to give poison, acid, love, necro, etc to just anyone.

[madzai]

But will you lose popularity stars for refusing "evil" clients? Because it's really hard to gain.

Also it seems not all evil deeds are evil. I think i sold poison to woman who wanted to poison her husband and i got some positive Rep. Her husband supposedly wasn't very nice, but poison is still a poison...

[Djelighoti]

Originally posted by madzai:

But will you lose popularity stars for refusing "evil" clients? Because it's really hard to gain.

Also it seems not all evil deeds are evil. I think i sold poison to woman who wanted to poison her husband and i got some positive Rep. Her husband supposedly wasn't very nice, but poison is still a poison...

You will lose popularity, yes. If you want to get popularity quicker, don't haggle; just take the sell price.

Her husband might have been one of the unfaithful ones that get mentioned every now and then

[madzai]

Wow, thanks for "no haggling" advice. Total not worth it to haggle for 5-10 gold instead of stars.

[Sozig]

So what is reputation purpose? I have 100 but i'm not sure how it is affecting the game. I might also start selling to anyone entering for more gold

[Djelighoti]

Originally posted by Sourge of Stars:

So what is reputation purpose? I have 100 but i'm not sure how it is affecting the game. I might also start selling to anyone entering for more gold

No idea if it does anything right now. One of the planned features on the store page is "reputation-based dynamically generated queue of visitors", presumably meaning if you have high rep you are less likely to get people asking for potions for evil deeds (just don't quote me on that; its pure speculation).

[Himars-TT]

My internet cut out for a long while so I wasn't able to respond until now, thank you all for commenting and asking questions and answering. Like @Djelighoti, paying attention to what people are saying / wearing is a great indicator of who's going to lower your reputation after you sell them what they ask for. Potions of acid, poison, libido, etc. etc. can be used in both nefarious or beneficial ways. Think a farmer asking for rat poison vs. an assassin asking for poison that can be absorbed through skin contact.

@madzai, I have noticed that once you create a strong version of any recipe (Tier 3 potion) you'll gain popularity regardless of whether or not you haggle for it. If you don't haggle it seems to give you 3 popularity per potion regardless of what it is, but if you do haggle it can drop to 1 or 2. This isn't confirmed it's just what I think I've noticed and it may also depend on reputation / who your customer is.