The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

First of all, apologies to Calvar for hijacking your thread system like this. I intend this to be the same kind of topic. I hope you don't mind.

Introduction
So, notoriety. To be honest, the notoriety system in ACII and AC:B was... bad, yeah. You could high-profile kill a guard on a tower where no-one could see you and gain more notoriety than killing him low-profile. Hiding bodies had no effect whatsoever, blood just disappeared from your clothes and it was way to easy to reduce your notoriety, not to mention the capes which kept it at zero.

Seen/unseen
First of all, addressing my main complaint with ACII's notoriety system. Killing someone where nobody can see you should not raise your notoriety as much as killing a guard where people can see you. A very basic distinction would be between three types: high-profile seen, low-profile seen and unseen. By 'seen', I mean that there are people around to witness the action. Not just guards, any type of people. This is pretty easy to implement, as every character in the crowd has to be modelled and simply attaching a 'seen'-attribute to the player as soon as he comes in an area with people should take little effort. It's also pretty simple to have 'seen' take a certain value, based on the number of people watching. Due to the speed of processors these days, they should be able to easily handle these few extra operations. If that sounded a bit technical, all you need to know is that a 'seen' attribute is easily to implement and even can have several levels in a simple way.
Killing someone in whatever way unseen will raise your notoriety less than killing someone in whatever way seen. Killing unseen allows you to get away, and it'll naturally take more time for the body to be found, because there aren't any people around. Finding a body later on has less of an impact than someone just suddenly dropping down next to you, dead. Even more notorious would be high-profile killing, since this event is immediately linked to you. The others take time for the to be linked to you, and this will go faster and faster as you kill more people, which brings me to my next point.

Exponentiality (I hope I spelled that correctly )
In my eyes, notoriety should be exponential[/b]. What I mean by this is that as your notoriety goes up, it goes up [i]faster, making it harder to reduce it. This makes sense because the more people are aware of you, the easier they will link any event to you. Like my 'seen/unseen'-suggestion, it's also easy to implement. All that has to be done, is adding the current notoriety into the formula for adding notoriety. If that was too technical, same principle as 'seen/unseen' applies here: it's easy to implement.
While I'm at it, I'll also address my second most major complaint: the levels of the notoriety system. There's about twelve, measured in picking pockets, which gain the minimal amount of notoriety. I think it should take more than twelve pockets picked for you to become fully notorious. Once again, easy to implement.

Hot zones
Basically, a hot zone is a zone where your notoriety goes up higher according to your actions. This might be sensitive locations, like a carefully guarded building, or crowded areas, although an implementation of the seen/unseen system with levels seems better to me in the last case. If only two people witness an action you perform, you won't become as notorious because it's only two people being able to tell others about your actions. On the other hand, if you do something while many people watch you, rumour will spread very, very fast. I'm sure most people could come up with some numbers of people for levels of this system, so I shall leave that out.
In any case, back to the hot zones. We kind of have this already in the form of forbidden areas. However, this does not have an effect on the notoriety. While at it, it may be a nice idea to implement several 'levels' of this notoriety. Again, this makes sense because some areas aren't as sensitive as others. Again, this is pretty easy to implement because adding a value is all it takes (instead of a simple 'true' or 'false').

Positive and negative actions
Whatever you may think, this is not a moral choice system. What I'd like to see with positive and negative actions is that they both raise your notoriety. I mean, if you donate a billion euros to the Red Cross, you're bound to attract attention, aren't you, even though the deed will be well liked by many. In the same manner, positive actions in the game (throwing money comes to mind) will raise your notoriety as well as negative actions (killing people).
Maybe it would be a good idea to implement different crowd reactions based upon the type of action. This would've to be managed seperately, because guards are hostile, it doesn't matter if your actions were good or bad. The reason I'm a bit hesitant on this is, again, a bit technical. Implementing this would mean having two seperate systems for notoriety, which seems a little bit odd. Also, how is the crowd able to identify you? I mean, most of them won't have seen you, so how would they know it was you? The whole point of the Assassin's Creed games is to be one with the crowd after all.

Assassination aftermath
Remember in AC1, after you killed a target, the whole city was up against you, the guards were alert and you had to be careful in order to get back to the bureau safely, then lay low for a while? (Yeah, too long a sentence, I know.) You can't say you didn't love that aspect of the game, compared to ACII and AC:B, where all you have to do is get out of the area and hide for ten seconds? Or worse, the assassination of the Baron de Valois, where you didn't even have to escape, but the mission just ended?
Bringing back the alarm bells would be a great improvement. The code's already there. However, what would be even more awesome, in my eyes, is a bell runner. After an assassination, a guard runs towards the alarm bells, to get them ringing. Your job is to catch him and kill him before he can make it. (Feel free to replace 'he' with 'she' and him' with 'her' ) This, naturally, would involve a difficult course, twisting and turning so you can't just shoot the target (what was done in the tombs, disabling certain weapons, was just a quick way out). If you catch him, the bells won't sound and you'll be able to make your way to cover in a relatively short time. Word of mouth travels fast, you know.
Of course this would take a lot of game designing (the course) and more work overall than the other suggestions. Furthermore, the alarm bells beginning to sound as soon as you've killed a target is very much justifiable. I just think a bell runner would be more fun. A second option would be to implement this on a few targets, but not all, which also would add variety.

Hiding bodies and bloody clothes
I can be short on hiding bodies. Hiding a body takes more time for it to be found, making escape very much possible and making the event even less likely to be linked to you. Of course, you have to be unseen while hiding a body as well. Implementation is a bit thougher, so this suggestion doesn't have top priority. It's also a more minor change, but it would be nice to properly do something with the hiding bodies-mechanic for once.
Bloody clothes is also a more minor addition. Notice how sometimes the blood just spurts out of bodies, yet Altair's/Ezio's/Desmond's suit is always clean? There's blood on it for a short period, then it just disappears. What I'd like to see is being noticed faster when your clothes are bloody. Again, there can also be several levels of 'bloody', but this seems a little bit pointless. People will either notice it or not. Being noticed would've to be determined by the actions you have performed. A low-profile kill ought to leave little blood (not noticed), while entering a fight would leave a lot of blood (noticed). Getting rid of this blood could be done via washing clothes at fountains or rivers, going to an ally's house to change clothes, or go to a secluded spot to change them. I'm a bit opposed to washing, because blood doesn't wash out easily. Also, changing in a secluded spot should have limited uses, like one. You can't carry an infinite amount of clothing sets.

Conclusion
This is the conlusion of my post. My congratulations if you actually got through all that. Integrating these suggestions would make for a notoriety system with actual depth and realism, while still being pretty easy to implement Going technical again, a formula for calculating the added notoriety might look as follows:
Added Notoriety = Action type * Area type * Seen level * Body Hidden * Old Notoriety * Some Factor
As long as only multiplication and/or addition are used (and their inverses, division and substraction, of course), there's only need for one factor to regulate the amount of notoriety. This would make for very easy tweaking of the system, which greatly reduces the time it takes to actually implement it.
Note that I didn't include blood or the ringing bells in the formula for notoriety. I did this because they are merely a crowd-mechanics and aren't related to the level of notoriety that is added. They more or less belong in the Guard AI and crowds-topic, but that's very deeply intertwined with notoriety in my head.
In any case, do mind that for this system to work, more levels of notoriety are needed. I also suggest tweaking the action type more, so that pickpocketing gains a minimal amount of notoriety. Maybe pickpocketing a lot of people would gain more notoriety? "Pickpocketing notoriety" would also be exponential, so to speak. I can talk about that some more, but I haven't thought about it yet and I've written enough. What do you think about this and my other suggestions?

The nitty-gritty, legal stuff
Disclaimer: As poster, I have copyright on these ideas. However, I have gained some of these insights during discussion with other people and their suggestions may or may not have made their way into this post. I had no intention to steal their ideas for my own use, it only seemed logical that they wished for their ideas to be implemented in the game and, as such, to be implemented in other suggestions. For this post, I concede any rights on the ideas expressed therein to the creators of the Assassin's Creed franchise, currently Ubisoft, who are free to do with them as they please.

The reason for the disclaimer is simple: Gabe has mentioned that they aren't allowed to take player suggestions because it is something of a legal issue. I hope to have circumvented this legal issue by writing this.

P.S. There was a forum thread on the official forums on this. It was quite good, so here's the link.
http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/5251069024/m/9071099578