Any player-driven system where players click a button to rate other players will, intentionally or not, end up creating/reinforcing cliques and groups. Players will rate their own realm members high, in order to give their realm the special powers/bonuses. Your realm mates are also the ones you interact with most, and will have the most opportunities to rate or develop favorable opinions of. The medal system tries to get around this by making it easier to give medals to people that are not in your realm. But the medal system also doe snot have any real IG effects.
M&F has a reputation system for characters. You can leave 'rumours' regarding character behaviour and others can rate the comment all anonymously. This was something that players were desperate for on the forums, but I am yet to see more then a handful of comments actually made. My experience is exactly this, a few active groups have given each other rather nice comments and ratings, while doing the opposite to anyone they are against. How useful any of it ends up being to the rest of the player population is questionable. If the system had any in game effect I suspect this would be even worse.
