How about we remove the standing loss “surprise” from STORYLINE missions BY CLEARLY STATING all the standings changes to your faction and the side faction and the gorillian faction points loss on the competing and relative side faction? It will remove the ‘surprise mechanic’ once the player gets below -2.0 but i’m sure most people won’t mind TO BE INFORMED IN ADVANCE about the risks vs reward and can “deny the mission and take a non destructive one” if you just like to not be “negative standings” to any empire faction.
Something that clearly states the standing loss to an empire faction would have saved me learning the hard way. Still, I did learn from that mistake to carefully look for which factions are involved and to tell the agent where to shove their mission.
I do not support removing standings loss either, I just want it to be clearly indicated in advance. I have also edited my original post for better clarity.
Imagine you play missions for one npc. You in general do not loose/gain with any of the four factions. You get a popup that links you to the above ‘bonus’ mission. Shall I post a before and after picture of the stats? Suddenly from one bonus mission 5 positive and 5 negative factions are affected most of them you never heard of as you imagined just four empires…
You don’t care about your standings, that is ok, some play an intergalactic edgy teen who is just misunderstood by all the old factions who don’t know how it feels to clone…
However I like to keep my standings tldr to ‘engaged with a select corporations of the Caldari empire’ in stead of “it’s complicated”.
And thus it would not hurt any feelings if the agent informed you about the parties involved in the conflict. Or not? Would it be ignorant to ask for who are the stakeholders?
I understand that. But… there are mining missions with guristas rats or drone npc ships? Are you saying that for the timespan of one storyline mission Gallente and Minmatar (and three other mini factions) allied briefly (with these pirates/drones)? Because they didn’t care about the thousands of them I wrecked before and after.
Whenever you complete a storyline, you get a shot to the agent’s faction standing. for example, a 2% increase when you are +5 means a +0.1 gain with this faction.
What is not written, is that the gain induces a loss proportional to teh gain with factions that are ennemies of the one you made the sotryline for. I that +2% gain was for amarr, then I will have a loss with eg minamtar and gallente. if this loss is 50% of the gain (can’t rememer the correct values) and you already are +5 with minmatar, then you will lose 1% with matar, that is 15/100 = -0.15
As you can see in that case you lose more faction that you gain. (in that case you also have to add the gallente loss, and know that the caldari gain is 0 once you reached the standing value of amarr to caldari. so eg once you reached +3 with amarr, and assuming caldari have set amarr as +3 standing, then you gain 0 with caldari but you still can lose standing if you refuse a mission from amarr )
the equilibrium is around 3 with empire factions IIRC. add pirat faction and it may be around 1 or 2.
There is no warning in the game that getting any positive derivable standing incurs negative standing for factions on opposite standing.
Also the derivable standing LOSS does not incur a gain with factions on opposite standing.
