First of all a big sorry to OP for falling onto his nerves!
Did some more testing together with Martin Forlon and SilverFox and.... It's working again!
I still don't understand exactly where the problem was (and it looks like
I wasn't the only person with that issue) but here's what helped me:
- SilverFox provided me with a copy of his mpnewchar.fl to make sure I have the correct file after the update prior to x-mas, but that was
identical to the one I already had in my installation (compared them with a software). Nevertheless I exchanged them.
- During comparing of files I came across that WIndows had flagged my FL-folder as readonly, alas I *did* change the whole folder earlier.
- After next restart of game, Player-Tags worked as intended again.
- When I look to my FL-folder today, Windows again flagged the whole folder as readonly.
So my best guess is that something during updates didn't change for me due to this (automatic?) readonly-flag of Windows on the folder which influenced behaviour of Player-Tags. Feeling a bit stupid and puzzeled, as I didn't expect that to happen in first place and wonder why other updates (like Gunboats in IC with guns, Train-containers, etc) obviously worked nevertheless on my installation.
So once again sorry for the trouble here, I edited the first post with the same text as here...
***************Here follows the obsolete original post**************************
This thread is *only* on how to influence the so called "faction-tag" which is visible to other players. This has absolutely no impact on gameplay - neither towards other players, nor towards NPCs. The thread is intended as a collection of knowledge of several players in order to make an update to the Wiki concerning this matter.
So if you're not interested in what tag is shown to others, just ignore this thread.
Players can become affiliated with NPC-factions. This is shown by a blinking faction in reputation-list when pressing F8. Other players see this factions name in braces in front of player-name when meeting in space (I'll call this Tag). Such an affiliation/Tag can be changed by lowering the reputation towards the blinking faction ("first" in list - means here: at the bottom end, fully green) a few bars, so that the 2nd faction of list becomes the new affiliation. The 2nd faction in list must be better than 3 bars below max, so 4 bars below right end of scale when pressing F8 in order to be good enough to become affiliated (I'm not sure about that border, could be 2 below max... Maybe someone can confirm or correct? But it doesn't change the following behaviour)
At least that was how it worked for me in 1.9. However, in 2.0 you can come across a situation, where no faction in list is blinking any longer and you can't make a faction blinking again. This has absolutely no influence on gameplay, but your affiliation/Tag will stay with a certain faction. In my case and probably all other, that was a LSF-Tag which oviously had nothing to do with the LSF in my reputation-list. You can even get hostile with the LSF of list, but you carry their Tag in front of your name...
After some testing it looks to me like the highest danger of coming across such a situation is right at the beginning of a new char:
- You start (as always) with a affiliation/Tag towards Liberty Navy
- Now if you start by lowering your reputation against Navy, the abovementioned affiliation/Tag will come up very soon (e.g. after shooting 2 containers of Police or 3 containers of DSE or a couple of ships from Navy/Police)
- And again: this has no influence on gameplay at all - only on what affiliation/tag is shown to others - you can still work on your reputation like normal!
- The only solution to circumvent this i found so far is as follows:
- Before lowering the initial Navy-reputation by any action, you *must* make sure that a second faction in your reputation-list is *above* 1 bar below max (2 bars below right end of scale).
- You can do so by bribing a faction of your interest or shooting ships which don't have a negative influence on Navy-reputation.
- Once you have another faction (or several) in your reputation-list which is better than 1 bar below max, you can bring down the initial Navy-reputation. But again you *must* make sure that the second faction in list stays above 1 bar below max until the affiliation changes to it. You can check this by looking for the blinking faction when pressing F8 or there is a text-message when affiliation does change (however: that text-message didn't show up for me every time)
I hope the crazy players who take care of what tag they carry in front of their name understand what I wanted to make clear here...
Greetings!
... we not intend to do any more headaches to you here 
