Mission against other empires in High Sec

No… not even close… have you heard of the -2.0 Deathline™? It is one of the most dreaded mechanics in all of EVE. Once you drop below -2.0 faction standings, you are restricted to L1 agents for all corps in that faction even if you would normally have access to higher level agents via corp/agent standings. You could have a perfect 10.0 base standing with every corp and agent in that faction, but if your faction standing is below -2.0, you are stuck with L1 agents only no matter what. This implies you are stuck with L1 storylines for boosting faction standings until you rise above -2.0. You also won’t have access to the epic arcs either. COSMOS are one-time only, so once those are done you’re looking at doing almost 200 missions (literally - I speak from experience) to rise above that -2.0 line before you regain access to higher level mission agents and being able to do L4 storylines.

How do I know this? Again, I’m the Co-Head of the United Standings Improvement Agency [USIA]. I cannot possibly quantify how many nullseccers come to us in hopes of raising their faction standings for the purpose of getting gray/blue with diamond rats. The majority of these nullseccers aren’t willing to do 200x L1 missions, just to rise above -2.0 and then do several more to get gray/blue.

I’m also going to disagree with @DeMichael_Crimson, author of The Faction Standing Repair Plan and whose knowledge on this subject meets or exceeds my own, in his liking this simply because there is no good reason to suicide empire standings, whereas pretty much any other faction standings more readily expendable… UNLESS you were to get a faction boost on completion, which is not the case with existing burners. So basically you would, for example, lower Caldari to raise Gallente - but for this to be sensible, you’d have to raise by a lower %-toward-10 than you lose. (This tradeoff isn’t as bad as it sounds; I have mathematically determined it is possible to have all factions simultaneously positive and developed a protocol for achieving this using existing methods.)

@DeMichael_Crimson CCP did away with there being several categories of corps. Other than R&D corps being unique and epic arc corps being semi-semi-semi-unique, I don’t think there is any reason to reintroduce corp categories or giving corps special treatment in regards to “empire faction burner” availability and standing boosts/penalties on completion based on the kind of corp they are. All L4 security agents should yield an equal probability of yielding burner - nice and simple.