A bounty hunter system would be a perfect fit!

TranquilOasis

I'm probably too late for this suggestion to be super helpful as this would be an alternative to the corruption system, but I'll throw my idea out there anyway to see if others like it too.

The bounty hunter system would be a player driven disincentive to player killing or "illegal" activity within a node. As players do things that negatively affect the development of a node, the node can assign bounty rewards to other players for killing them. It can start simple bronze, silver, and gold for flat rewards on basic crimes like stealing from an NPC or attacking a guard or something. Then more enticing rewards can be offered for players who really wanna go GTA inside a nodes territory. That being either more money, items, housing, mounts, cosmetics, crafting mats, anything really.

This system would somewhat encourage this bad behavior because there are those who would take their bounty as a badge of pride, but it would give an equal or higher incentive to tracking those people down for the rewards. Criminals would have to be careful in node territory where they have an active bounty, and would treat their home node as a safe heaven. At the same time it would create an entire mini community of bounty hunters in the game as people would want to spend their time going from node to node hunting down the people with high bounties. It's a natural way to encourage PVP and could lead to unlimited story building within the community.

Random ideas:
1. Allow guilds to place bounties on players heads or even other guilds members. "Bring me the heads of anyone in pirate alliance guild and we will give you 500 gold, or 2,000 for higher ranking members"
2. Allow people to make and use disguises so they can slip into a node undetected but it can break on the first hit revealing them.
3. Make their level of bounty visible for random players to notice and attempt to collect the bounty in the open world.
4. An asylum or extradition system could make this a geopolitical game as well.
5. Titles and cosmetic content for progression in this system would basically write itself.
6. It could evolve into a mercenary system as well. Guilds/nodes could pay for players to defend/attack a node.
7. NPCs in that node would act scared of people with a bounty or refuse to do business with them.

Plenty more could be thought of but that's what I got so far. Feedback?

REGE

+1