I was on the look out on how to "join" a faction but I don't seem to find any help here =). But i will definately agree that this is an interesting thread. The 2 reasons for me wanting to "join" a faction is that I want to buy those weapons/ships et.c that demand that you are in that faction (or how do I do that otherwise?) and also it's quite nice havin their tag in my name.. gives respect aiiigt? =)

I was friendliest to the Hackers (full bar bottom of list), Universal shipping had not alot to do with me, they were slightly hostile........... yet my friend said that i had a Universal tag :
yes your a freelancer, no you dont join factions.... we know this............. would still be kool :/

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You just washed up here or something?

yeah =). I once had the bounty hunter tag but after a while it dissapeared.. dunno why though.. i have almost full reputation with them and always had.. Are there allies of the Bounty Hunters that I should stay friendly with??

I think this is an incomplete feature that wasn't entirely removed before the game went gold. There seems to be a lot of strange and inconsistent happenings with the "tags", some of which I myself have noticed. Last night I was in a group of 6 on Elite and we were doing missions for the Corsairs in Omicron Gamma, and suddenly one of the group members asked another one how he got the Corsairs tag appended to his name, he said he didn't know and a few more people flew over, looked at the guy and said that he had no tag to them. Weird. Really sounds like a buggy/incomplete feature.

Shoot, I was hoping that there would be a way that someone knew about in here. I think that tag thing was a nifty idea, and I've been trying to get the Bounty Hunter tag for who knows how long. About 98% of my missions are bounty hunter missions, and I don't think I've ever once gotten this tag. I found it funny though when I started a pirate character and did lots of missions against the navy, and killed police for the fun of it. And though my navy rating was red, I was still in it

There probably is a way to join each faction, it just seems there's no hints at all on how and what's the correct path to succeed in doing it

There was this time I was on full red bar with the Liberty Navy, and they still labelled me as "Navy"

Very strange.