If you drop below -5.0 in sec status, you are permaflashy and can be shot by other players without consequences. This can be restored by killing pirate NPCs or by turning in security tags.
If faction standings drop below -2.0 you lose access to agents of the faction. This can be recovered by grinding level 1 agents, although mining missions are probably inadvisable since apparently NPC miners care about your faction status, although I haven’t seen that. The flaw with this is, say you are -8.0 with Minmatar due to shooting their NPCs in Ammar security missions and 4.0 with Ammar Empire in 2020. You come back to the game in 2023 and decide “you know what, I’d like to dock at Hek without these NPCs decloaking me every gate jump” and start grinding Minmatar missions so that you are allowed in their space again. So you start doing Minematar storyline missions to raise it but then Ammar standings drop. So you grind those missions to raise it and… it’s kind of stuck in a loop. When raising sec status you don’t treadmill but when raising faction status you do.
Also I think agent standings should be reworked. I understand why players lose standings when declining or failing missions. So if a player declined a bunch of missions in a row, it makes sense for them to lose standings. Getting below -2.0 means a player cannot interact with the agent… forever. I think they should be punished for declining that many missions, but not forever, there should be some way to recover. I’m not a fan of Permanently Missable Content even if I understand how to read mission reports and not be dumb enough to end up in such a state myself, I think the possibility of it should not be in the game. If you were terrible enough to decline or fail a bunch of missions that corp standings fell that much at least you could go back to level 1s.
There is. You can run for allies of those you seek standing for, you can ask others to share mission- or epic-arc rewards with you until you can talk to the factions agents again. There even is a public standing-repair service. Besides this, you can trade Pirate Tags at Data Center Agents to get faction-standing and do COSMOS missions (careful, thats one-try-content!). You can also run the Sister’s Level1 Arc and receive a standingboost of your choice on completion, in a fast ship thats done in around 2-3 hours.
Agent/corp/faction can be regained. @Syzygium pointed out several ways… Run missions with a friend and share the rewards, pay the USIA to do it for you, or run for other agents etc.
Consequences matter, and CCP wanted faction to be hard to gained for that simple reason.
its not so much declining missions, but when you run the same one 3 times in a row, you kinda don’t wanna do that, so you make the choice to either run it again, or decline it, or move on to another agent of that level.
Another absurdity I have come across is losing NPC faction status as a result of killing or podding a suspect in highsec. I mean, if the guy is a criminal and it is perfectly legal to shoot them with Concord’s blessing, shouldn’t Concord be dealing with whether some faction likes that or not ? I don’t get any increase in Concord status for shooting suspects ( I really ought to ) , so why should I have the negative impact of loss of some NPC faction status. At least balance it out by increasing Concord status.
Then a person should stop being a suspect the minute they are in a pod in highsec. It is absurd for Concord to still label them a criminal and still allow you to shoot them, yet somehow Concord doesn’t like it if you do shoot them.
I think my main objection is that in performing PvP…which is ALL I want to do…I am then indirectly forced to engage in some PvE to make up status.
Like any thread about lost standings even from a well-meaning OP such as Tiberian the classic line is that standings (trust) hard to gain and standings (trust) can be lost very easily just like in real life.
