In my game, some of my sims want to have a bad reputation and I'm at loss. In fact, I don't get why they wanted to.
I get why a mean and outgoing sim would want such a thing but what's about a shy sim.

So did you implement a system based on reputation levels in your game?

A good reputation comes with interacting with a lot of other Sims and townies, and a shy Sim will probably prefer to not have to do that.
Mean Sims, beating up others and winning the fights, also get good reputations

You mean bad reputations Petro. I've only had grumpy sims who already were on the low end get that want.

Maybe if they have a bad reputation then people will leave the shy sim alone.

No, Jo, my Mr No Nice Points is not only beating up Sims left, right and center, his reputation goes up all the time! He can influence anybody at the moment, his influence bar is full. He got quite a boost in reputation after beating up a bride at her wedding too. (He does have a number of close friends, though, who he never beats up )

I just ignore it to be honest. I'm not even sure what it does...

What reputations do is trigger benefits (most commonly, free coupons) and penalties (slower promotions, paying more for goods and services, even higher rent) based on the reputation level. They're based almost entirely on counting positive vs. negative interactions on community lots, though there may be subtleties. Winning a fight may count as a positive interaction, although attacking someone is negative, for instance, and possibly the system makes a distinction between who starts a fight and who participates in one. Just Petro's Mr. No Nice Points may be benefiting from some such subtleties in the conflict system, or may be performing enough positive interactions with his friends to offset his negative ones with his enemies.

Most of my sims have stellar reputations, largely based on their willingness to perform romantic interactions in public. As far as I can tell, there's no negative effect on a reputation if a sim is caught cheating, as long as no hostile interactions take place, so if you woohoo three partners in a photobooth in rapid succession and go home before any of them can poke you for cheating, your reputation is going nowhere but up. This won't keep the angry partners from showing up to kick the trash can, though.

The only sim I've played with a bad reputation for any length of time is Esteban Casa, the Grouchiest Man in Drama Acres. He has three nice points, as opposed to his son Estebanico's 0, but Estebanico has a fairly good reputation in spite of/because he started as a Romance teen and switched to Family/Romance in his junior year, and takes his male privilege very seriously. So he performs a lot of romantic interactions with people other than his wife on community lots; and then when the women he cheats on his wife with date other people, Esteban sees them, is furious, and acts on his fury. So that's a large component of his negative reputation. Another component is that he got off to a bad start - Esteban is tidy and his wife is sloppy, and when the family came out of CAS they lived in a one-bathroom, two-bedroom apartment: two elders, two adults, two teens, a child, and a toddler. Esteban, a Fortune sim, also had restrictions on the jobs he could take (I was experimenting with the feasibility of a Simmigrant challenge), so his sources of satisfaction in the early days were few, and he would take his aspiration failure out on strangers, stealing newspapers and kicking trash cans just for the hell of it. Between these two factors, by the time I got the family on a sound footing that would keep Esteban's aspiration levels fed, he already had multiple enemies and a bad reputation, which he relished. I interpreted this to mean that he regarded his reputation not so much as "bad" as "for not taking any guff off anybody," which he counts as a positive thing.

Although making enemies with the wrong person may raise apartment rent or block a promotion, and their trash can basically lives on its side, where this reputation has hit Esteban hardest has been in the business when I set him up to run Casa de los Widgets after he retired from his minor-league sports career. Esteban has bad habits and if I don't watch him will approach potential customers to poke them; but even if I prevent this by letting his wife or children work the sales floor and don't let him run anything but the register, if he picks one too many fights in between sessions at the business, I'm likely to arrive to a notice that his bad reputation has caused him to be charged a higher wholesale cost than other business owners or something of that nature. His daughter-in-law Lily, on the other hand, as an excellent reputation and her wholesale costs at her business are much lower than his.

I've recently noticed the talk option "good reputation" in a few of my sims. It seems like a nice, safe social for others to use on them. Who is going to mind someone telling them how great they are? I wonder if there's a "bad reputation" social too.

I've purposely given one of my sims a bad reputation in town. He started fights pretty often on a few community lots but it was story driven.

Another sim of mine hated his apartment neighbor. They kept getting into fights on the apartment lot and eventually my sim got his rent raised because of the continuous fighting! I don't even remember if his reputation dropped or not.

I never actually go enough negative reputation with a Sim to experience any of the penalties and only even got some of the lower levels pf positive reputation. Probably has to do with me not playing community lots a lot...

I never saw a wish for reputation levels...

I was rather relieved to find that you didn't have to go around beating up other sims and having them stalk you, kicking over trash cans and stealing newspapers in retaliation. Discovered it quite by accident actually, had an outgoing, almost fully nice points and maximum playful points sim, who on a community lot (not playable at the time), kept pulling pranks on different sims after meeting them, sure they got crapped off at her for it, but not furious. When I went to play her lot on rotation, found she'd rolled the want to have a bad reputation, when I checked she was a 'rotten dirtbag' or some such.

Always learning new things in this game, love it when it occurs by accident to.

That's rather strange, my hated sims who pick on others and have lots of enemies have bad reputations, and they get wants to have a bad rep anytime it goes up! Other sims don't like their shop and sometimes indicate that they smell.

Sims with bad reputations get kicked out of the League of Mystics, if they are in it (Sims with a bad reputation are unlikely to be believed if they say they will only do magic for other people's benefit). Other than that, the only consequences to reputation in my game are the ones that come with the game.

The bad reputation social is called "bad mouth".

I don't know, I mostly ignore it as well. But if a sim rolls a want to have a bad reputation I take that to mean they want to be infamous and start lots of fights etc.

I sense some challange vibe from this. The most inhospitable place challange

My Mr No Nice Points may not be very nice, but he is very outgoing, very fit (10 body points), very enthusiastic about his hobby and even has a couple (I am not sure he should get married ) of girlfriends, so perhaps that is why his reputation goes up (he does always win)! after fights. Initially, when he started beating up Sims, his reputation took a knock (Abhijeet Depessie is tough as nails, beat my p#ssed off pixel up more than once, so he has only started losing after Mr No Nice Points gained his 10th body point) - but now that he is winning everyone, his reputation seems to follow suit. going up

I don't tend to pay too much attention but I find it's too easy to go up or down.

I ignore it until someone gets the lamp and then I hide the lamp in their backpack.

I play with the reputation levels.

I have specific Sims who are mean (as all the others tend to wind up nice), and I mean a good old snake venom mean of 0 nice points. It's great to see them excited to do not-so-nice things to the other residents as I usually play a nice rose colored glasses game. I also make a point of using the SimVac on any Sims that happen to be stupid enough to walk past their lots.

I also have a house of Sims who exclusively make friends with townies just for the POSITIVE reputation perks (in lieu a "job"). They have plenty of extra money from selling those PCs and flatscreen TVs, I'll tell you!