Hi
yes, it is possible but takes quite a bit of doing. I will give you some pointers here. When I 1st strated playing this game X years ago, on my 1st character I figured I’d repeat the missions to get frigates and some extra cash so I have ships / modules to spare to try out PvP, but I had no clue how factions work. Imagine my surprise when on my very 1st trip to the biggest market hub in the game (Jita), I got blown up by Caldari Navy. Other then the tutorials. This has been improved since then, you’ll still lose standings but will no longer get blown up like I did back then.
Anyways, onto the faction standings.
While docked at a station, open your character window, and then Interactions Button, then Standings Tab. Here, you can select different factions, corporations, etc. and see what your actual standings are. This is a very important thing, just select different factions / corporations and check it out.
So the following are my recommendations about how to initially raise the standings, note that these are my recommendations, other peoples will vary.
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Train Social and Negotiation up to level 4, you can leave the other ones wherever you like as it suits you. Do not train these to level 5 as you will end up needing it for that extra boost later on when your standings take a serious dip either from PvP or PvE, so save a bit of it.
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Train Caldari Industrial to 3 or 4 for teh Badger. Trust me, this will help you a lot. Buy a Badger and fit it with 1 warp speed rig, 1 cargo expand rig, 1 alignment time rig. Put Inertia stabilizers in all lower slots, but keep a couple cargo expanders in your ship to switch as needed. The remaining slots are up to whatever you feel like. This will be your “supplemental” ship, not the main. It helps.
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Open the Agency and select security agents for one of the factions, best start with your weakest one, and then within that faction, select the corporation that owns its major trade hub. Basically, you want Caldari Navy for Jita, Federation navy for Dodixie, Emperor Family for Amarr and whatever it is for Hek market. Start with the weakest one, look for its security agents, you will often have to start at level 1 missions, luckily, they are very quick and require least faction standing to go higher.
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Get a combat frigate or destroyer, package it, put the frigate / destroyer in your badger along with all its modules, weapons, ammo, etc. Your rigs will be destroyed each time you repackage a ship, but its no big deal really, you will more then make that ISK back and for lvl 1-2 missions, you can even do just fine without using rigs on combat ships alltogether if you like to.
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Fly your Badger to the trade hub and operate from there. This will maximise your ISK while you are grinding out the standings cause you can sell loot on the spot.
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Every 16 missions, you will get a story mission. You HAVE to do this mission to gain standings, if the mission target is in low sec, its up to you if you want to do it or not, just be ready for PvP.
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When you get tired of fighting waves after waves of NPCs and just want to get to your next story ASAP, hop onto that Badger, and do distribution missions instead of security. The rewards are very measely at these levels, you do this only for the purpose to get the 16 missions to get the story one. Hence the Badger is a very important ship, supplements your grind as well as lets you transport your own basic stuff around.
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Once you reach your set desired standing, rinse / repeat for the next weakest faction, etc. etc. Its a freaking grind. Everytime you do a story mission for one emipre, one more will raise faction (derived) and 2 others will lower it, BUT the amount lowered is a lot less then the amount gained, so you go in circles and all of them will average out and go up.
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Try to get one of these corporation factions to get to 5 ASAP. This is important as it does 2 more things. First, it lets you make jump clones at their facilities, and believe me, you want jump clones. Second, it lowers the taxes and fees at those trade / market hubs, so you make more ISK. This is also very important.
Things of note:
Do not decline a mission from same agent more then once every 4 hours, except anomic missions, but you won’t get those yet anyways. If you do, not only agent will take a hit, but there is a slight hit faction wide as well. If you need to decline more then 1 time per 4 hours, just move on to the next agent.
There is no way for agents in this game to give you pirate missions only. You basically have to just go to teh station, speak with agent and either accept or decline. Likewise, there is no way to get High Sec missions only. Maybe not at low levels, but later on you will get missions into low sec, be prepared.
You only get + entire empire standings for completing the storyline missions, not regular ones. However, you get - empire standing if you kill empire ships. So the advice to “skip” story missions is incorrect as those are the ones you need to do. Also, like I said above the + you get outweighs the -.
There are 4 types of story missions as they are affecting faction standings. First is the regular missions, either security or distribution or mining etc. Which will grant you a story mission every 16 completed and that story gives you the positive empire wide standing. Do not decline any mission that says at the top of its window “completing or declining this mission will greatly affect your standings”.
Second are individual agent story missions, with these your faction to a particular agent increases greatly, then they will give you higher level missions these can be different and will have different positive and negative impacts, you can look them up, if you need to just do them if you dont need to, skip them.
Third are actually regular missions, but in a story like parts for example Recon, I recommend looking them up before you commit to one as some may start with pirates but go vs empires down the line etc. Recon you can do safely, but the others not so much, check them out 1st.
Fourth are epic arc missions, you don’t have to worry about those now, but later on you will. By then you will know how all this works.
PvP affects your faction standings greatly, in particular, most of all killing pods in low sec will give you big penalties which stack up real quick. This is why a lot of us have seperate toons for PvP and PvE or often high sec Pve / trade toon, and null / low sec toon. So we don’t have to worry about these sort of things at all.
On the flip side, you can choose to go kill some players to raise your faction with a ceirtain empire, especially in FW. But just remember to stop before the navies start getting agro on you.
Hope that clears things up a bit.