@personalc0ffee you say that "RNG loot value role has no bearing on reputation though so I'm not sure why you said that." but do we know this for sure?
What I know is that I get a better rep gain for a boom boom that is on a merchant voyage than I do for one that is just sold for a hundred gold. There doesn't seem to be a wealth of information surrounding rep either online, but if we have something from Rare that says otherwise fair enough.
I have always assumed that there is no "fixed" value for an item for rep gain and just presumed that it was linked to the variable used for gold gains. Saves on programming, which is what I would assume most folks would go for.
If I'm wrong I'm wrong though - would just like some evidence to the contrary! :)
[EDIT]
Just having a look back through previous messages from Rare, at the launch of the game we had an issue with the reputation and/or gold not increasing properly, with a patchnote saying:
- Due to the volume of players, our services that awards players gold and reputation when cashing in rewards can be delayed. Players should expect to see these rewards eventually come through, as they are queued up in our message service.
Clearly there is a service, probably a subroutine within the server itself (given the delay we had) that handles player statistical changes, such as rep, doubloons and gold gains.
I would doubt that there is more than one subroutine as this would be really inefficient, but instead one function that takes a couple of arguments from the calling code as parameters (amount to be increased and item to increase), with the necessary changes then being made to a player save state server-side, which the client then picks up.
[EDIT 2]
ALSO:
https://www.seaofthieves.com/forum/topic/59535/are-reputation-and-gold-values-similar-or-equivalent-i-may-have-found-the-answer
SOOO... perhaps rep changes are static, or perhaps they are linked intrinsically to gold collected, perhaps the changes are so minute, especially at later levels, that we don't even notice the difference between them.
Anyways - RNG sucks and there is too much randomness in the game.