Choas Covenant get's you Chaos pyro spells - also Servant roster is just a leaderboard for who is the most devout member - do wish Sunbro's had a similar one to see who has had the jolliest co-operation
yeah I get that of course, it's just that the act of collecting humanity is so totally generic as an activity that it serves no real roleplay purpose. I mean, obviously if you really want to roleplay as a member of the daughter of chaos covenant then you can diligently collect humanity to feed to your deity given fleshly form, but doing so has no significance to roleplaying. sure, it has a lot of lore behind it but that's a different thing.
my point is basically that you can do any number of things to collect humanity and level up your reputation with the covenant, and that none of them really share a specific mode of behaviour. like you could farm rats in the depths (or the guys in the dlc area near the last boss), you could white soapstone a lot and collect it by doing co-op, you could red soapstone a lot and collect by defeating invaders etc. all very different, but all effective ways to level up with the covenant.
that's really different from, say, the darkwraiths or sunbros, where the former proscribes a malicious mode of behaviour and the latter a (jolly) helpful one in order to gain covenant levels.
That's an amazing amount of information to infer from three or four lines of dialogue, and a notice that you've joined a covenant, whose benefits you won't know at that point. The next covenant you'll come across as a player is the Warriors of Sunlight, who used to have a 50 faith requirement to join - but there is nothing on the location, or the broken statue, itself to indicate this. Some of the covenants were obfuscated to the point of non-functionality; stuff like the Gravelords weren't usable for the first few months of the game, and even now there are many who've never had their worlds infected or have had black phantoms spawn. They are poorly explained - the requirements are cryptic, the rewards even more so - and even worse, most of them are useless and thus go ignored.
it's not really that amazing!
look, I'll happily admit that the covenants can be really obscure, but I'd also point out that there is nothing stopping you from exploring the whole game and killing gwyn without ever joining a covenant. there's an argument to be made that this is in itself problematic, but it's not one that I really buy-in to.
perhaps it makes more sense when you know that alpha protocol is one of my favourite games. despite all the time I've spent playing that game I know of several things I've never seen, and it revels in creating quite convoluted sets of conditions under which certain events will occur. that to me is actually really good design, because it rewards seasoned players who enjoy testing the limits of the simulation in front of which they've been placed.
