The mod had a similar system (humanity-system with hero/neutral/bandit-classification), but it diddn't work. There where to many ways to circumvent it:
E.g. one member of a group of bandits became a hero by playing accordingly for a while and then acted as a bait for unsuspecting survivors for the rest of the group.
After a short while nobody trusted the system anymore and the distrust between the players grew even more.

Yes, I think the humanity system from the mod is comparable to the system used in Ultima Online before the current one (as mentioned above) was introduced. However, this one is not linear. Commitig harm to a blue or helping a red makes you grey, so you can be killed without changes for the one killing you. It's quite nifty. It works on servers with more then 1000 people online at the same time. Every system can be circumvented somehow, that is no reason to avoid it. Or would you avoid BattlEye just because some people can still hack the game? :)

No, screw this artificial morality bullshit.

They tried in the Mod and this isn't a click to attack kind of a game. You fire at someone, miss, they kill you, they lose the morality points.

Beside the fact that a humanity system would be unrealistic like nexdemise stated, you pointed out the main problem of such a system: "Every system can be circumvented somehow".
But if you can't trust the system, it doesn't gain you anything; it doesn't give you any additional information because every player you come by might know how to circumvent the system and kill you even if he is flagged as hero/friendly/etc.
In the end it wouldn't change anything.
And like nexdemise pointed out, such a system could mistakenly punish someone for selfdefence.

IMHO another system could help to "replace" the humanity system:
The often requested introduction of beards:
The longer you live, the longer your beard(and/or hair?) grows.
If someone has a long beard, he might be either really lucky or he might be very cautious and KOS. Or he might tend to be friendly but cautious and if you don't approach him he might ignore you.
If someone has no or only a short beard he was recently killed and might be just unlucky or he could tend to deathmatch around the cities and you should shoot first.

You would need to interpret the information, but this system couldn't be circumvented.

I think in the end a (non-ideal) humanity system would give you more of a false sense of security than real security.

That you would suggest morality or NPCs at all is indication enough that you haven't been listening to the Devs and are out of touch with what DZ is supposed to be. The only things that should tell you if a stranger is nice or not are their actions. You won't get any magic badges that tell you how many people Joe Survivor has killed and eaten today, that isn't something you can tell just by looking at a person.

http://steamcharts.com/app/221100#All

This game needs a deeper sense than "you cannot know anything for certain, just go and kill if you wish".

There is not any sense in this game, nothing constructive or productive to do. And as long as the game is promised to be an early access where I can make wishes to changes, I will do so. There are private shards with rules like "no kill on sight". However those rules cannot be enforced and breaking the rules cannot be punished because there is nothing ingame that supports it. A flagging system like mentioned above would help in this, for example by an additional respawn delay of 10 minutes per murder count (remark: killing a grey would not increase the count).

For any kind of constructive or productive gameplay (i.e. evertyhing besides killing the remaining humans) we need an engine to punish destructive gameplay. This only works throug a flagging system or anything comparable (which I will call flagging system, as long as it supports a plausible way of counting murders of innocents). If tha flag is visible to players or not is less important. The flag must be presented server-side to be worked with.

PS: I like the idea of the character growing hair and beard (especially for females ;-). Of course, as every system, it could be circumvented. In combination with the flagging system, the character could suffer increasing hair loss according to his murder counts (remark again: killing a grey does not increas the murder counts). Leave me a link to the proposal for hair-growth and I'd be happy to upvote for that :)

Artifical fixed morality systems do not work as they just codify a particular behavior and can be abused (see first comment). Not to mention that it tends to give way too much free information when meeting a complete stranger.

So instead of having the game put a label on players according to their actions we should have better ways to identify characters or players and let real notoriety take over.

It works pretty well in the original game for more then 15 years now. Statements like "any system can be circumvented" (or "abused") are void, they have no meaning because nothing is perfect. As long as there is no way to punish absolutely destructive gameplay, this game will continue to die, and that is pretty sad.

Oh, and according to "giving away to much information": as I already said, the flags do not need to be visible to players; at first it would be helpfull to sanctionise murderes with, for example, increased respawn time.

Wait... why would you sanctionise murderers? It's a legit playstyle and not really destructive as it creates villains who make the game interesting and add threat.

What needs to be changed is players having no reason to be friendly or cooperate. So there should be more rewards for this without artificially punishing the killers. They are part of the game as well.

There's only ONE play style in this game.
That's KILL or be KILLED - PERIOD
so we're all villains, unless they implement a visible honor trait.

No one can be trusted otherwise.

That's DayZ, to trust someone you have to spend time to know that person and decide if he's trustble or not. That's fucking DayZ, a hardcore game, one of the best thing of this videogame. And you wanna play like an RPG? Really? You can go play hybrid games for casual gamers that offer what you're asking, without annoying devs with this ticket.

One of the greatest problem in DayZ SA: too many newbies who wanna the easy package, too many newbies who cannot play hardcore so play like bandits camping in Cherno. Just go play another videogame instead of screwing up this one. No one will miss you.

regarding "sanctionise murderers"@Evil Minion:
I don't want to sanctionise them always or directly, just the /ability/ to enable such a thing on private shards. This change actually enables us to motivate friendly and cooperative gameplay. Without becoming grey for theft or attacking someone or damaging someones base/stuff, how would you sanctionise that? Non-rewarding friendly gameplay is implicit penalising of non-friendly gameplay. The flagging system would make the server recognise that.

@Spanky:
yes, that's my problem with this game. There is nothing to do then just shoot people. I wish to finally group with survivors to build a wooden Fort ("Wellington":) that upon finish defines a spawn-point for fresh players that are blue (so, no spawn point for reds=murderes). How do you do that without constantly verifying who is "allowed" to kill whome (i.e., without increasing murder counts) or allowed to take what?

regarding insults @Argaf:
if you cannot express yourself politely, don't post here. Just go and screw up another discussion. No one will miss you.

That's super unrealistic dude. Checking someone else's pulse and all of a sudden knowing their name is too. This ticket needs to be erased and forgotten

The answer to this is for you and some friends to make a group and set up a "Police Force" (The uniforms etc. are already in the game) where players on a server can report "Crimes" to your police force and you go out, hunt them down and put them in one of the Jails or some other similar punishment, Its all part of the game, not some artificial tagging system.

By definition, any game is unrealistic in some kind. For example, you can play again even if you get killed.

You can even log out and disappear from the world, for example in order to flee the "police" ;)

The whole idea behind DayZ is the game supply's a world with loot and Zombies etc.

And then it is entirely up to the players how they play it, There is only one Goal and that is to "SURVIVE" by any means you see fit. Therefore a notoriety system goes against this principle. Who is to say one game style is any better than any other, It goes against the principle of the game.

^ Makes total sense!
I will play the ONLY SINGLE STYLE that promises survival...
KILL EVERYONE ON SIGHT. Thanks :)

...you're a genius -1PARA-Gramps

Thanks :D

If you want to regress that far, your entire life cannot be verified to be 'real'. You could be hallucinating everything you think you know from inside a coma. You could be in an elaborate simulation. You could be an artificial intelligence in a computer program.

DZ has been designed to be as realistic as is possible for a computer game. It's intended to simulate a brutal survival scenario where resources are scarce and you have to make hard decisions about who to trust. Magic popularity badges are out of line with that design.

This is true ^