Some Questions on Standings Change Mechanics

PvE Gameplay Center Missions
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Ok, This may be an issue with the new UI for Standings or its an issue with my understanding of how standings change… either way Id like some help understanding it.

To test how things work I am running all the Amarr Career Agents, currently I have 2 sets done and have completed the Exploration Line of the 3rd and last career agent.

To lay the groundwork of my question, you should know a few things… I have max social which is the only skill that affects how much of a change you should get, the rest happen to the actual amarr standing, not the change itself. I had a Social V from the first mission till now so that has been static… in fact all my social skills have been static throughout these findings.

I also copy down the Change Value from the Interactions page in your character sheet. I copy down every single change value at the time of change, as well as subsequent changes.

This means that not only do I record my first storyline mission for exploration, I record it AGAIN when I do the military storyline, and AGAIN when I do business Storyline, and so on… Unfortunatly I dont know how to make a table in this forum so I’ll have to try my best here.

So to start off I’ll show only my change from the exploration storylines… but each change I show after that happened at the time that another change was added to my table… There will be 4 missions between each new Exploration mission… with every single mission that initial value changed.

Mission # | Explore Mission 1 Value | Explore Mission 2 Value | Explore Mission 3 Value |

1    |     +.165   | N/A   | N/A
2    |     +.159   | N/A   | N/A
3    |     +.153   | N/A   | N/A
4    |     +.147   | N/A   | N/A
5    |     +.142   | N/A   | N/A

------------- Career Agent Zone 2 ------------------
6 | +.137 | +.15 | N/A
7 | +.132 | +.145 | N/A
8 | +.127 | +.139 | N/A
9 | +.122 | +.134 | N/A
10 | +.118 | +.129 | N/A
------------- Career Agent Zone 3 ------------------
11 | +.114 | +.125 | .137

That is as far as I have gotten so far but it should demonstrate whats going on with my change values.

So my questions are as follows…

1.) Why are the values changing every single mission, to me it seems like when you finish a mission that change should be added and that should be that, no more messing with it

2.) While I do not know the % change for the career agent missions, I do know that the amount changed should stay the same from 1 career agent to the next, at least when you are dealing with the same catagory and same race… So Exploration Agents and Amarr… So why are the various changes from exploration agents Different? Shouldnt Explore Agent Value 1,2, and 3 all be the same?

3.) If this is not an error can someone explain the math behind this please? Essentially I would like to be able to figure out how much impact various storyline missions give and how they give it so I can translate that into a spreadsheet or a program so you can, for instance, that could take a given standing and predict what your standings will be if you complete 1 career agent zone, or 2, or 3… and how much data centers will add or circle agents, or cosmos…

To do that I NEED to understand the math behind change column when completing storyline missions.

Thanks! If you need more data, I can edit this post as I complete more missions… after this set of career I’ll be doing circle then data center, I plan on recording everything until I understand what is happening.

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The Math

Standing gains are derived as a percentage change of the difference between current standing (unmodified by skills) and 10. The formula ensures diminishing returns on standing gains the higher you get to the maximum of 10. Standing gains can be calculated with the following formula:

ns=((10-s)*i)+s

where:
ns=New standing
s=Standing
i=Increase percentage in decimal form

A 3% increase would work out the following way in each situation:
-10 standing: 10-(-10)=20. 200.03=0.6. -10+0.6= -9.4
0 standing: 10-0=10. 100.03=0.3. 0+0.3= 0.3
5 standing: 10-5=5. 5*0.03=0.15. 5+0.15= 5.15

A standing loss works the same way, just using -10 as the target point.

ns=((-10-s)*d)+s

where:
ns=New standing
s=Standing
d=Decrease percentage in decimal form

For instance a 3% decrease would work out the following way in each situation:
10 standing: -200.03 + 10 = 9.4
5 standing: -150.03 + 5 = 4.55
0 standing: -100.03 + 0 = -0.3
-5 standing: -50.03 + -5 = -5.15

Skills

Several skills will affect your standings and standing gains:

The Social skill directly increases all standing gain percentages.
The Diplomacy skill adds a permanent bonus to all standing values from NPC entities towards you that are below 0.0 (negative standings)
The Connections skill adds a permanent bonus to all standing values from non-pirate NPC Entities towards you that are above 0.0. Non-Pirate NPC Entities are all members of NPC Factions that CONCORD holds at neutral or positive standings.
The Criminal Connections skill adds a permanent bonus to all standing values from pirate NPC Entities towards you that are above 0.0. Pirate NPC Entities are all members of NPC Factions that CONCORD holds at a negative standing.

The Diplomacy, Connections and Criminal Connections skills simply add a permanent standing gain of up to 20% to the respective standing values. If Diplomacy has been trained higher than Connections or Criminal Connections, it may come to a standing drop if the standing value before the application of the skills crosses 0.0, meaning that Diplomacy no longer applies and Connections or Criminal Connections take over with a smaller bonus.

Derived Standings

Completing a storyline mission will have an impact on all faction standings for the character. They will appear as “derived standings” within the standing transaction history, which is available by right clicking any standing entries in the character sheet and selecting “Show Transactions”. Those derived standings reflect how other factions perceive the faction for which the important missions were completed.

Nobody can actually say how Derived standings are calculated since CCP has never released that info. Now I know there’s been a few different standings graphs and equations posted by players. In my opinion here is the most current updated correct chart for reference information about NPC Faction standings in-game :

http://www.eve-wiki.net/index.php?title=Standings#Standing_Relationships

As for Derived standings, they are calculated after the increase of social skill bonus has been applied. More info and math about that can be viewed in this thread :

https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/topic/330283/2/

Hope this helps, good luck and may you have much success.

DMC

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Thanks!

But Shouldnt the storyline mission for the exploration agent in conoban and Deepari be the same change?.. (unless its showing the final result after it multiplies in the %) but thats not really the issue

I get it would be diminishing returns sure, and if that is what is reflected in the Change col then I completly get that the first time I ran the mission it would show a higher change than the 2nd one and the 3rd one after that…

But if that IS the case, then why does the value of the very first one that I did days ago change as I do more missions? Shouldnt it stay the same as when I first finished it?

I mean to say IF the change col is showing me how much my base standings increased or decreased as a result of THAT mission then why does it change when I do a mission 3 days later.

I would completely understand what was going on if they stayed the same once entered… but they dont so I dont know exactly what is happening here.

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I guess the old system showed % so it may of done this stuff back then too… I’ll play with the math I guess, that % in the equation may make all the values dynamic… just not the simplist way of showing this stuff lol

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lol Im not even sure how they even determine base standing from that exactly

My Base standing atm: 1.83
Here is my column

Changes: + .114 | +.13 | +.132 | +.135 | +.137 | +.125 | +.142 | +.145 | +.148 | +.151 | +.137

Which added up comes to 1.496 So assume thats before social … 1.87
Rounded the changes: 1.51 if no social then 1.89
If all are rounded down: 1.45 no social then 1.81

sometimes I feel like Im pounding my head against a wall when it comes to ccps programming for standings

another example of base standing not adding up, here was everything I had after my first career agent zone:

changes: .142,.161,.165,.168,.171 that was after all 5 agents in that zone My ONLY missions at that point My Base standings at that point were .88 Base Amarr

that adds up to .807 social has to be included since it would be over 1.0 if you add it

Figure that out

Just a side note on my last example… At the time I ORIGINALLY did every one of those missions without changes that happen after each completion it would of been:

.165,.181,.178,.174,.171 which adds up to .869 a lot closer to the .88 base amarr lol

Such a headache

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The new standing user interface in the character sheet shows standings after being modified by Social skills. Personally I haven’t really spent a lot of time investigating and examining it.

All 3 standings (Faction, Corporation, Agent) are affected by and are tied in with each other in one way or another. Granted the 3 Amarr Exploration Career Agents all have the same ‘base’ standing increase for completion, but there’s also other factors involved besides Social skills which have an impact on the actual amount of standing received, such as Agent effective standing as well as Corporation standing.

Standings in this game is a rather large deep Rabbit Hole that will rack your brain when trying to make a connection so that everything matches up. Also don’t forget that ‘rounding’ up and ‘rounding’ down of the initial numbers will also make the amounts significantly different.

All I can say is it takes time to actually wrap your head around it, best to do a google search and review all the available info you can about the math pertaining to each of the 3 different standings and how they affect each other, then include the effect of skills as well…

Personally I’ve racked my brain way too much in the past on that topic and to be honest I don’t want to do it anymore. As such I wish you good luck and hope you have much success with figuring it all out.

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CCP voodoo code

/thread

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Makes me wonder why ccp never has given an adequate explanation for all things standings…

Wonder if its one of those parts of the game thats too widespread to really mess with, much less explain… legacy code probably lol

Simplify standings and nullsec will blow up or somethin lol

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Yeah, it’s all old spaghetti code that’s interwoven with a lot of other stuff.

Probably the best thing you can do is just get the basic equations down and then allow some variance for little inconsistencies which are probably attributed to ‘rounding’ of the initial input numbers.

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Do you know if there are any esi or api or whatever that will show payouts and standings gains from various missions?

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Not offhand, I suggest consulting CCP about it via a Support Ticket, I’m sure they could point you in the right direction.

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I will, ill let ya know if they somehow explain everything lol

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Cool and good luck, just remember it may take them a while to answer the ticket. Also not all Dev’s will know the answers and will probably try to quickly close out the ticket. Escalating the ticket to a Senior Dev may provide more info.

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Well, CCP had the stunning idea to just remove entirely from the UI, all the % gains/losses from transactions with standings, which is the actual thing that matters the most when it comes to calculating new standings whenever a transaction occurs.

Now, you need to back-calculate those % gains/losses. It’s stupid and unnecessary but whatever. CCP wants to dumb down the scary UI for the babies, so deal with it:

%%% Gains = [ New Stnds - Old Stnds ] / [ (10 - Old Stnds) x (1 + %social skill) ]
%%% Loss = [ Old Stnds - New Stnds ] / [ (Old Stnds + 10) ]

All of this is bad enough, but regrettably I must also inform you that the stench of Legacy coding is still very much alive and well with this standings system in other ways. Agent Quality is no longer “a thing” but Standings Quality based on Corp is still very much a thing.

What this means is that not all NPC corps give the same % standings gains/losses for the exact same missions, even if they’re part of the same faction. The standings will alternate between what I call High, Mid, and Low, with High being 25% higher than Mid, and Low being 20% lower than Mid. For example, corporations will give the following standings for Anomic Missions, entirely depending on whether they are what I call High, Mid, or Low:

High (example: Guardian Angels ): 5.7375% with Social zero, 7.1719% with Social V

Mid (example: Serpentis): 4.5900% with Social zero, 5.7375% with Social V

Low (example: Archangels): 3.8250% with Social Zero, 4.7812% with Social V

Don’t worry, there aren’t really any practical consequences to this other than making some corps take longer or shorter to grind standings for, and also confusing the players and making them entirely unwilling to continue trying to make sense of this broken system.

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Interesting, unfortunately I thought that the amount changed would be relevant so that is what I recorded, I didn’t record my base standings after every mission… I did however after every set of missions.

I started with no standings
So After Conoban I had a .88 Base amarr with a social skill of 5…
After Deepari I had a 1.69 Base Amarr with same social skill.

So assuming I didn’t make a basic math error here is the system and % increase:
Conoban 7.04%
Deepari 7.105%

So with what you said about them liking different corps differently that would fall within that margin

Now the extremely aggravating thing for me is that the every value in the change column gets updated after every single storyline mission…

I believe that the Change column is bugged and shouldn’t be constantly updating every value like it is currently… I think that the column should represent this equation: ((10-s)i) Then I could kind of understand what CCP is trying to do here, It’s trying to simplify things for the player, they just screwed it up.

I’m going to throw some raw numbers at you guys to support my case, I’ll summarize after this section if you don’t want to see the raw format

Agent | Change at completion | End of Conoban | End of deepari
Con Explore | .165 | .142 | .118
Con Military | .181 | .161 | .134
Con Adv M | .178 | .165 | .137
Con Busin | .174 | .168 | .139
Con Industry | .171 | .171 | .142
Conoban Totals | .869 | .807 | N/A Base Standings: .88
Deep Explore: | .15 | N/A | .129
Deep Industry: | .165 | N/A | .147
Deep Business: | .162 | N/A | .150
Deep Adv Mil: | .159 | N/A | .153
Deep Military: | .156 | N/A | .156
Tot after Deep: | 1.661 | N/A | 1.405 Base Standings: 1.69

As you can see after Conoban my Base standing was .88 and if you added up the change column at that point it was .807, if you added up each entry as originally reported it came to .869
Same with Deepari which had a base standing of 1.69, if added up I got 1.405, if original entries were added it came to 1.661

Now it is much easier for me to believe that a base standings of .88 is getting rounded from .869 than .807 and that a base standings of 1.69 is getting rounded from .1661 instead of 1.405

I know there is some rounding magic going on somewhere in here, but rounding can only take you so far… Which is why I believe that the change column is bugged and that the original value you see after you complete a storyline mission is the one that matters…. I think what it gets changed to after the subsequent storyline missions is an error.

OFC I could be entirely crazy and not have figured out a damn thing… I guess the only way to be sure is to wait on a ticket to be answered by CCP, so I’ll hopefully have a better idea on what is going on sometime around Christmas :slight_smile: lol

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So My math is failing me tonight

If the change column is the change to Effective Standing Can someone please help me work backwards to figure out base change from that.

Forumulas:

Effective standing = Standing + (( 10 − Standing ) × 0.04 × Level )

ns=((10-s)*i)+s

I wont even show any of my math cause I’m getting some fked up figures when I do the math myself but for now i’ll be happy with figuring out 2 things really

Take an effective standing… say I dunno 3.24 and find out from that what my base standing would be

Then take an effective change of say .145 and find out what the Base Change would be.

Sorry for asking this of you guys, but I apparently cant figure it out myself… I blame the years between my last math class and now lol

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