So… I’ve been running a few Cosmos missions with one of my trade alts to raise his Faction standings. Today I noticed after completing 4 missions that the incremental increase in standings dropped significantly from one mission to the next (all 4 missions were through L3 agents):
0.33 faction standing increase
0.25
0.10
0.04
The missions were all similar - 3 or 4 tier, encounter/courier/bring back stuff.
Of course, I was taking shortcuts - referring to guides and buying the stuff I needed through contracts in order to complete the missions more quickly.
Do I need to limit the number of missions run within a given time? Wait more time between completing the various mission tiers? Other need-to-know tips in order to maximize the faction standings gain per mission?
Thanks, C., I should add that, for this character, the base faction standings went from 5.24 to 5.96 over the course of these 4 missions. The rolloff in incremental gain from 0.33 to 0.04 seems to be much steeper than the adage that you quote would suggest, particularly given this character is in the midrange of faction standing growth. Other factors seem to be in play…
The main thing with gaining standings is to make sure you have Social skill, Connections skill, Diplomacy skill, and if you’re working Pirate Factions, have Criminal Connections skill trained up. Negotiation skill and the Divisional Connections skills for LP’s are also good to have trained up.
Waiting between missions won’t do anything to increase rewards. I do remember something about completing the mission too quickly, think it pertained to the Bonus time for the missions and or amount of reward gained.
Let’s say you get the items before hand and then quickly complete the mission right after accepting it, over time that action is cumulative with others who run it the same way, eventually causing the Bonus time amount to be lowered.
I also vaguely remember something about getting better reward by waiting to complete the mission till just before the Bonus time expired. Can’t remember if that pertained to ISK payment or Standing gain.
Anyway, all of that was from years ago and since then CCP has made a lot of changes. As far as I know, CCP has never released the formula currently used for calculating standings.
For a little background, missions aren’t really my focus in the game. My goal is to lift the Faction Standings of my trade alts in order to reduce Broker’s Fees in major NPC trade hubs. As a large-scale producer and trader of Skill Injectors (and related items: PLEX, MPTC, Extractors), a trade alt in a major trade hub can pretty easily do a trillion ISK in gross sales in a month’s time. Shaving even a tenth of a percent off of Broker’s Fees can produce meaningful cost savings. That’s important in an extremely competitive market with very tight profit margins.
This is what I was doing. From one of the very good guides, I was finding out what items were needed to finish each tier of a mission. The items were readily available through contracts. I would stock up, then fly out to the agent and rapidly accept and complete each tier of the mission literally in a matter of seconds. By the fourth mission, I only gained a 0.04 point faction increase.
I would go further to speculate that there may be a built-in “stacking penalty” in play, similar to the stacking penalties imposed on various ship modules. And, judging from the 4 L3 mission results I experienced, a very steep stacking penalty, at that.
As time permits, I’ll try running some missions the old-fashioned way, by actually doing them instead of buying the stuff. Also, maybe try just doing one or two missions within a given game session rather than four or more. I hope this has a favorable impact on standings gains!
Buying all the mission objective items before talking to the agent is fine. Actually running the mission to get the required items takes a lot of time and the only impact it could have on standings would be negative hits for ship kills.
I was talking about after accepting mission from agent, wait for the Bonus time to run down before completing the mission with agent.
Say the Bonus time is 6 hrs, complete the mission in 5 hrs instead of 5 mins.
Course the only way to know for sure if there’s a difference is to have 2 characters, both have same standings, have both of them access the same agent, then have one character complete the mission after accepting it and have the other character wait for the Bonus time amount to complete the mission.
Then compare both characters standing gain. If the same amount is gained, then it doesn’t matter how long it takes to complete the mission.
I may, but first I want to gather more observations and experience with this issue.
There are some great guides to running these missions. Check out DeMichael’s thread below on repairing Faction Standing and/or Google “Eve Cosmos Missions” for links.
Over the years CCP has only done small minor changes to Cosmos Agents and their missions. Doing a google search should list some newer more recent guides. Back when I ran Cosmos these are the guides I used. Even though these are old and pretty much discontinued, the info contained within is still close to being current:
