Standing rewards with NPC corporations based on Sales to emulate regular trade partnerships

I’ve been thinking of a neat idea recently for those more involved with Industrial manufacturing and selling, rather than mission running.

I dont know if it has been thought of or looked at by CCP, I imagine it has in the 16 years of service provided but suggestions, redirections and feedback are welcome from all. Here’s the idea;

Successful/completed Sell or Buy orders with NPC factions grant minor standing increases. Immediately this sounds like it can be abused. Place buy/sell orders with 1 character, log an alt and purchase/sell with that alt. I cant think of a way to avoid this abuse of the system (can you?). With that aside, I thought it could work like a delayed bounty system. Maybe weekly or monthly you’d get a notification to the effect of; “Your total value of sales/buy orders with ‘X’ Corporation has altered your standings by +/-0.002”, where any opposed sovereignty/corporation would take a lesser negative impact.

I like this idea as incentive to sell in desirable stations based on your standing needs, and it also, as the title suggests, emulate a real word partnership where a great majority of businesses rely on regular and reliable interactions with their clients or intermediate partners. It also aligns better with industrial players that may not want to run missions for standing increases and encourages expansion of your industry by moving products to different regions to mitigate the overal negative impact (if you wanted to balance your standings).

If this is a stupid idea, im sorry, but im also interested in any discussion around how this could work/why it would not work and if CCP would have a chin scratch about it.

Fly safe all o7.

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I too think that CCP should add more standing and security feature to the game. Gankers should lose standings with a NPC corporation if they gank a player that is in good standings with said NPC corp. The standings should be set up so that if a gankers standings with any NPC corp gets to low, they will lose docking at NPC corp stations and jump gate use. The ganker could be given missions that would be like, community service, where they made no ISK but they could repair standings and security. I think CCP has already done something like this with the Trig invasion. Don’t remove ganking from the game but add content to the gankers life that would take them out of the gank game for a few hours or so depending on how hard they farm those missions to recover standings and security status. Here is anothing idea, don’t let the gankers sell loot at NPC stations. Put the loot in a bank for 24 hours so that the person they ganked can come back and fight them for the loot. If the gankers win the loot they should get a black market to sell the loot on. You could bring back drug running and smuggling for the gankers too. The black market could be a pirate ran market that the criminals ran from a station they owned. it would give pirates more crime stuff to do and it would give people that get tired of the pirates a way to attack them. The pirates would have to work together to defend their black market station. This pirate station should not be easy to find and it should take honest folks a bit of detective work to locate where the pirates anchored it.

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Can you go one day posting on the forum and not say the word ganker? It’s getting old. …correction… Stale not old…

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There was a lot of that word, wasnt there.

Thanks for your considered response, I appreciate that took you time and thought to write but it’s a little out of scope of the discussion I had in mind for the thread (within Science and Industry as the theme).

I’m not a particular fan of general market activity in an NPC station granting standings - it is pretty gameable and is basically a reward with no effort attached. Granting corp standings for fulfilling NPC market orders might be an OK thing (selling to NPC market order for trade goods, for example) but honestly at that point you’re basically doing courier missions anyway so why not actually just do courier missions for the corp that owns the station you want to do business from?

2 Likes

That’s really constructive feedback, thank you. I agree, it sounds like it can be gamed really easily. And I too would not want it to be rewards for no effort, saying that, I was thinking along the lines that it’s a trade-off between selling your products at a trade hub like Jita or hightraffic junctions where L4 sec missions are located or staging areas for Low to null sec. The effort comes from your industry activities and the desire to spread sales out a little more so they are not all consolidated in certain locations. It has the benefit of opening trade up a little more.

Saying that, thats the role of POS, right? Like you find a location that is desirable and hope to anchor a market with reduced taxes in order to capture that trade. I like your suggestion that filling NPC orders for the standing to prevent it being gamey between players (in the form of the many myriad of loot items already sold at DED logistic stations) but that has no impact on what a player produces to sell. HMMM. Yeah. Good comment, thank you.

They might be thinking about this, the standings requirements in Pochven (gates, stations, services) maybe a test bed for the future.

2 Likes

Tell the MODS to stop locking out post just because a few of our members use personal attack to get the post lock down. The gankers do this to stop any discussions on risk for gankers and the mods will lock down a post instead of taking care of the bad apple. Either the mod is being lazy or the mods share in the same views as the gankers, you decide which.

I get yea but I wanted to show that your idea could be applied to more than what you had wrote.

Because it’s legal what they are doing.
I hate gankers and I know it’s legal for them to do what they do. You want to do something, join the ganker hunting groups

I don’t hate gankers, I am trying to add as much fun to their game play as they have added to mining and ratting.

No its a crime depending on where you do the gank.

I like the OP’s idea, at least in part.

If there were a better incentive to sell in markets far from Jita, the convenience of the whole game might be improved.

I can see the devs are moving in that direction, for example: severing the quickest route between Jita and Amarr homeworld.

But you attract more flies with honey. Vinegar can only get you so far!

We need positive incentives.

Would equal and opposite measures apply to the ganking of players the same corp has poor standings with?

Could you get “assassin” missions against capsuleers?

Why would a corporation care that your loot was stolen, though? Unless they had reason to believe you planned to sell it at their station.

(If anything, getting your loot stolen makes you more desperate for ISK, so maybe you’ll do more work for them?)

NPC corp or player corp? NPC corps should take your side if you are in good standings with them. If your are the criminal and gank someone, you should lose some standings with the NPC corps that the person ganked has good standings with. I think this should only happen if the person ganked has the highest standings you can get with a NPC corp. All of this would only be high sec. Null criminal acts would not effect the pirate at all and low sec criminal acts would take effect in low sec systems that have a NPC station in them, if there is no station it would be treat as null criminal acts. Missions would act like community service or rehabilitation and would take the criminal off the streets until he completes the rehabilitation missions. No ISK payout or rewards would be given out for rehabilitation missions. The missions should only take the criminal off the streets for an hour or so. The rehabilitation missions would only repair security status. Any NPC standings lost could only be recouped by doing missions for the NPC corp that the pirate lost standings with.

Pirate station for criminals could act as a black market for them to sell loot and drugs. To anyone that is not a pirate, the pirate station would look just like any other player owned station but would only be available to pirates. The pirates would have to work together to anchor and defend the pirate station and could only be anchored in high sec. It would be up to the non criminals to find it and destroy. The none pirates that get in on the station kill could get Concord LP and standings.

Pirates should have more criminal activates besides just ganking players. They should get to smuggle drugs like back in the old days. There should be NPC pirate missions for the player pirate with all kinds of criminal missions for the pirate. The NPC pirates missions could pay out LP to be spent at pirate stations. The pirate missions could involve smuggling, drug running and player assassinations (ganks). NPC pirates could pick a random person out, that has bad standings with them, and ask the pirates to gank the player. Depending on how much ratting a player does would determine how often their name could randomly pop up for a NPC priates corp assassination (gank). Pirate mission contraband would not only be able to be captured by Concord but the players too. Players that catch a pirate smuggling would be rewarded with Concord standings and LP.

The loot bank, like CCP created for the ratters could be used to hold loot from a gank and would give the person that was ganked the option to come back and fight for the loot. If the pirate wins the loots it should get a tag on it so that it can only be sold at a pirate station black market or contracts. If the person ganked wins the loot than it can be sold as normal at any NPC station.

How do you pick which standings are relevant? NPC Corps do not own space, after all, only NPC Factions - and the factions already respond to low security status.

Also, what happens if the criminal (because there are more scenarios than ganking that can result in criminal acts) has higher NPC standings than the target of the criminal act?

Oh, and tagging loot would require a massive database overhaul that would result in serious loss of efficiency- I really don’t see that happening because of how damaging that would be to the asset system (which already is a significant investment of resources to maintain).

It would only effect those NPC corps that a player has perfect standings with. If a criminal act was committed against me, all NPC corps that I have perfect standings with would lower the standings of a criminal. The loss of standings should be no more than the loss of standing a player gets for shooting a NPC rat. Security standings loss would remain the same because (correct me if I am wrong) Concord standings don’t drop for an act of crime, only the security standings.

They would lose a little standing for the criminal act. I am not saying to drop them to 0 standing and it would be more like a slap on the wrist that could add up over time. Kind of like when you shoot a NPC rat and you lose some standings with them.

That does not mean it can’t be done but I am not going to speak on coding because I have only a small amount of knowledge about it. We have guys on this forums that have far more knowledge, maybe we can get them to chime in on this post. I see so many people that want to remove ganking which I do not support. I would much rather see the pirate criminal career path stay but with more risk and more criminal options cor their career path. Even if CCP does not add one thing we talk about to the game, its still fun to day dream, talk about new game ideas or what ifs. This should be fun and no reason for anyone to get nasty with each other.

This means almost nobody would be impacted- the effort to reach perfect standings is massive and almost nobody does it - not even Jita traders who want max corp and faction standings for trade cost reduction. Seriously, even just getting to +9.0 is a massive undertaking, because the majority of standing adjustments are percentage based, operating on the difference between your current standings value and the maximum of 10.0. This means you get diminishing returns with every increase in standings, as the delta between current and max decreases.

You are correct that CONCORD standings and Security Status are separate items. Standings and Security Status are completely independent systems; the former reflects your actions toward NPCs, while the latter reflects your actions toward PCs.

I am actually one of those people; I have provided input on inventory changes for a number of suggestions, as I have spent a lot of time looking at how the asset structure works (object classes for repackaged objects vs instanced object entities for assembled objects). In order to flag an object with any unique characteristics, such as damage values, manufacturer, or a ‘stolen’ state, the object must move out of its repackaged object state (which holds no unique data - it is basically a tally marker against a parent object asset database entry that actually holds all the object attributes like ID, name, size, etc - everything you see on ‘show info’ when viewing a repackaged object) into an active object state, which consumes more data resources to house on the server because now it has to have fields for all of the unique characteristics/effects applicable to it. Since it is a unique object, it cannot be sold on the market - only via contracts - until it has been repackaged, and certain statuses prevent repackaging until resolved (like damage).

So it would be technically possible, but it is a huge undertaking - you’d have to add new fields for literally every possible object that can be stolen (vs right now not all items can take damage, or be assembled), and a way to address the ‘stolen’ flags - such as by having NPC ‘brokers’ who launder stolen goods to reset the flag and make them normally usable again. Which would pretty much just be an ISK sink, and ganking overall is an ISK sink already; do there really need to be more ISK sinks on that activity, rather than directly associated with the faucet activities in the game?

As mkikaden mentioned, getting to 10. is neigh impossible. The creator of eveskillboard made a slip up one day in code, and instead of showing the ex. 4.8543 that you see on eve skill, it was something more like 4.56456454564453 it was like 12 digits… so while in game, you may show 10 or whatever the case, you are 9.9923456356 in reality.

as far as traders go, since I run with USIA again, we’ve had few traders go up to 9.99 base standings… some even crazy enough to pay for 9.999. But the effort to go from 8 to 9 is the same as trying to go from -10 to 0 in standings… so you can imagine how much effort to get to 9.9 or 9.99 or even 9.999. pain in the keister…

Does not mean the idea can not be tweaked. Other than that what else did you like or not like about the idea and what would you add? I was just to put activates out their that would add the the pirate career. I don’t gank or do criminal stuff in EVE but I do think they need more risk and more options.

I thought the black market station would be rather awesome. To bad it would be such a drain tagging loot. Would there be a way to tie it with the criminal act thay lowers the players security standings?