With Eve’s latest expansion throwing the spotlight on Faction Warfare, it’s time to address the elephant in the room that is creating an extreme barrier-for-entry. And that is faction standings.
Specifically for the Empire factions. Couldn’t care less about pirate standings.
I have recently come back to Eve after 7 year hiatus, and almost 13 years since I was last involved in Faction Warfare. I managed to convince a small group of former bitter vets to come with me, and we had grandiose designs to join the rust-loving freedom fighters of the Minmatar militia. I figured I might have bad standings, but surely in the 13 years since I was last in FW, CCP had introduced some mechanic that would make grinding standings so I can take part in their latest expansion easier. Afterall, when I left FW in 2010, the ability to turn in pirate tags to CONCORD to fix sec status had recently been introduced. It was only a matter of time before they did the same for standings.
Oh how wrong I was. I’ve spent a lot of time the past week since my return researching my available options, and I am absolutely shocked that not a single iota of progress has been made. My outreaches to ingame community channels were met with responses like “it would be easier spend billions extracting all your SP and injecting them into a new, neutral-standing character” and “Eve is a game about consequences”. I found the last type of response bitterly ironic given how easy it is to reverse virtually every other formerly “permanent bad choice” aspect of the game - the aforementioned tag hand-ins for sec status, skill extractors that let you repurpose wasted SP, so on and so forth. And the more I thought about it the more I realized that the standings system as it stands today is a dead legacy of a version that Eve that hasn’t existed for over a decade.
So, it’s time to change it.
The simplest route would be to use the same system as sec status. In fact ,these pirate tag hand-ins are already available - but are one-time only. The simplest little fix to everyone’s problems would be to allow them to be repeatable, up to and until a character is 0.0.
Your service can repair faction standings? That would be news to me:
Once you get to −2, you can again access agents with whom you have a high corp standing. Both corp and agent personal standing can be shared in missioning fleets, so this can be the fastest way to start doing high level missions for that faction. You will never gain or lose faction standing from other people’s storyline missions when in fleets.
I have a feeling most of the people replying didn’t actually read my post, and just responded to the title as if I were looking for advice.
When I started this endeavour I had around -9 Minmatar Republic standings. After following “the plan”, running every data center, circle agent, career mission arc and everything else available to me, I have managed to raise it to -6.5. There is nothing left, except to run hundreds of Lvl2 Gallente missions to get proxy standings or thousands of Lvl1 Minmatar missions just to get my standings to 0.
This is a design flaw that no longer exists anywhere else in Eve. Security Status can be quickly raised with tag hand-ins, so why doesn’t a similar mechanic for Empire faction standings exist?
If you actually followed each and every step in ‘The Plan’, you should have way higher than -6.5 standing with Minmatar.
The first thing mentioned in ‘The Plan’ is making sure Social Skills are all trained up since that’s a very important part in gaining maximum standing increases.
Since your Minmatar Faction standing is tanked, you should be running Gallente Agents to gain derived positive standing increase to Minmatar Faction.
There’s 3 sites of 5 Career Agents available for each Faction to gain Faction standing increase. The same applies to the Data Center’s as well. Once all of the level 1 Career and Data Center Agents are done, run the Circle and level 1 Cosmos Agents.
After running all of the Gallente level 1 Career, Circle, Data Center and Cosmos Agents, you then run the Gallente level 2 Data Center and Cosmos Agents, then level 3, etc. Always check standings after running an Agent and eventually when Minmatar is above -5.00 standing, can then run all of the Minmatar Level 1 Agents, then level 2, level 3, etc.
Also have the Level 1 Epic Arc which can be repeated every 90 days.
To add to that, having the corporations that control the L4 arcs at 5.00 will give you access to the empire arcs when you get back to 0 faction or maybe slightly less than.
I think that is not what the OP wants. He wants a rather qick & easy way to repair a -9 faction standing himself in like a handful of days to at least 0.
Well, to simplify this thread, just allow all Event Agents = Career, Circle, Data Center and Cosmos Agents = to be repeated each year instead of being a one time run.
That would make repairing negative and or boosting positive Faction standings much more easier…