Security Relations Skill

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
#1

I would really like a skill to reduce the penalty delay for declining missions that have a faction penalty.
16% per level would reduce it to one per hour instead of one per four hours. Since I often get them back to back I’d spend less time twiddling my thumbs waiting for the timer to count down. It’s one thing to have a productive timer like in industry or trade, but a timer that impedes the player from doing anything for four hours is not fun.

Granted, I might be able to go a day without needing to decline a mission, but sometimes I get a string that I have to decline each one in turn, or just accept the standing loss. Anyway, please consider it.

1 Like
#2

What is forcing you to do that …
… instead of something else?

#3

Just get faction standings above your mission lvl requirements and don’t care about standings loss. Drop on faction standings for decline mission is minimal

#4

Yeah, mission blitzers will decline unprofitable missions all the time, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I’m not an expert on this,however, so I’ll just leave it to someone like @Archer_en_Tilavine or @Anderson_Geten to explain. What I will say is that you should probably train up Social and Connections in order to help keep your standings high when declining missions.

#5

as @Lis_Torin said, once you have faction above 5 you can just ignore agent and corp standing. Doing only 11 missions among those from the agents is enough to keep standing > -2 and you only lose -0.01 faction per refusal.
When I did missions in NS I only accepted those that were either in my system or doable in an inty and it lead to standing increasing with agent/corporation.

#6

Thanks for the ping @Shipwreck_Jones :+1:

Co-Head of the United Standings Improvement Agency [USIA] here. For 12 years now we’ve hired mission runners to service our clients. Here’s how most of our veteran runners view this topic:

  • First, an important correction to what Anderson said: the faction loss is actually -0.001 rather than -0.01 (just checked on Sisi to be sure). That extra zero makes a HUGE difference, believe me. For all intents and purposes, these standing losses are negligible relative to the gains from storyline missions that can be used to repair these losses.
  • Do note, however, that the -0.001 loss also applies to friendly factions as well, so if you incur the decline penalty with Gallente, for example, you would end up incurring the same penalty with Minmatar, Sisters of EVE, and a few other factions. Not terrible, but still worth mentioning. So the net loss across all factions could be closer to -0.01, but not for an individual faction.
  • Many veteran runners are more than happy to incur the decline penalty repeatedly because they feel the gains far outweigh the losses. This is particularly true if
    • (Good) agent availability is limited (eg. with pirate factions)
    • You are chain-running burners, esp. in nullsec where literally more than half of missions offered are burners, so you want to skip non-burners in favor of burners
    • You plan on running awarded storylines, thereby gaining more from the storylines than you’ve lost via decline penalties
    • You work for USIA, in which case you are paid by performance and you know that accepting shitty missions or wasting time changing agents can cost you more in salary than the standings penalty is worth
    • You want to skip missions known to incur megahits to faction standing (eg. -0.4 for destroying repair depot missions) and would rather incur the far lighter -0.001 penalties instead.
    • As Anderson said, if your faction is comfortably above a certain threshold, then your faction standings will enable mission access even if your corp standings drop below the requirements.
    • etc

I should note that it is not always practical to have faction standing determine mission level access (for high level missions at least), particularly if you want to be able to mission for multiple factions at the same time. It is possible to raise and maintain all factions above -2 (and even above 0) to maintain access to all mission levels with all factions at all times (I will not go into how this is done here); however, it is too impractical and in some cases impossible to maintain sufficiently high standings with a one or a select few of these factions to have to serve in place of corp standings for determining mission level access if you are also trying to maintain the rest of the factions above -2. If you find it to be too impractical or outright impossible, then you need to carefully monitor your corp standings after every decline to make sure you don’t drop below the threshold needed to access a certain mission level.

Would EVE benefit from decreasing the decline penalty window? I can’t say for certain, but I do think that EVE’s standings mechanics need to be re-evaluated from the ground up. Among other things, if the -2 threshold (which we here at USIA call The Deathline™) were removed altogether, this thread probably wouldn’t even have started. There’s a good argument for removal, too: EVE is one of the few games in existence where a brand new character can enter the highest level content (eg. incursions, 10/10s, high-class WH sites, abyssals, etc) from the moment of creation (regardless of ability to ‘engage well’), and missions are literally the only content in EVE where this is not possible, and there’s no good reason for this exception to exist. Why should players be forced to grind low level content just to get to high-level content? This isn’t required for any other content, so why should it be required for missions?

3 Likes
#7

As a former USIA mission runner, Archer is on point with everything he mentioned.

1 Like
#8

Because the younger a character, the more specialized they are. If a character is specialized for mission running, then that is what they are there to do.

#9

Ok, you raise some good points. If the standing loss from refusing a mission is only. 001 then it is not as bad as I remember. I recall the standing loss being more significant than that.

Since the whole Trav thing, Jita-Amarr now goes through both Minny and Gallanty space, so where I used to not care about my faction for those two, now I’m finding myself caring.

#10

So you can’t use the character for anything else?

#11

I really don’t understand the point of this question.

If I’m there to mission…in a game…why would I go do something else. A normal person would either wait their turn or put the game down and play some other game. If someone goes to a pool hall, to play pool, so what if the dart boards are open. I’m there with my personal pool cue ready to play pool. I didn’t bring darts, because I don’t like darts. If the tables are taken, I’ll wait my turn unless the line is too long, then I’ll go elsewhere.

Whether or not one can do something else is irrelevant. If a player is emotionally and financially invested in a given game-play, then even if there are other things to do, they are not other things to do that would be worth the time and effort, even if the player might like it, which is a big assumption. Sure, I could also mine. Not that I have any mining skills to speak of, and I’d have to go find a belt to mine, and I’d have to get the equipment to mine, and all this takes time and isk. By the time I’ve done all this, the timer would be over and I’d have to slog back to the mission site, when it would have been more productive to just stay in place and wait.

#12

Ah, I see. It’s a self-imposed problem asking CCP for correction.

Thanks!

#13

There is none, this guy is a usual troll. He will cherry pick your words to make it say something else and then claim that this something else is your point, AKA strawman.

#14

Her char doesn’t just look ugly …
… it suits her personality too!

#15

if you find yourself with low standings and you can’t get them fixed, you can always hire Archer and his team to fix your standings up. They can raise your gal standings without affecting any other standings.

I mainly always ran missions for caldari only, and the occasional amarr agent in caldari space, so yea my min/gal standings are shot. and im ok with that.

1 Like
#16

Nice. I just thought that watching my standings by avoiding some missions might hurt my income more than it really will, from the comments of others. So I’ll give just declining anyway a try and see if it makes much of a difference. It sounds like it only makes a difference on the edge of rank.

Thank you.

#17

It will make a difference if your faction standing can’t give you access to the agent.
Until you reach +5 the L4 agents need to be taken care of. Then you can press the NOPE-loop button.

#18

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