Standing system implementation seems out of place

Playing in high-sec I counldn’t miss the fact that standings ruin at least 2 activities for me - missions and FW

  • If I want to run missions, I first must find a system with at least 2 agents to have options in case one of them offers other faction killing quest. After 16 missions I get storyline missions, after witch half of space hates me. Even if i just delivered something! So I can’t do sizeable chunk of the missions. Why they are there?! I can imagine i can mission run for one faction them move to do the same stuff for the other but that is just too tiresome.
  • I want to play FW with my main, but I can’t because it will ruin my standings again. And I either have to make an alt or not play at all

What I want to say is what’s the point in this broken system if it not encourages but prevents ppl from enjoying the game?

in EVE choices have consequences, those consequences can be avoided or lessened with effort and understanding. If you choose to remain uninformed then you only see problems, that’s a you issue not a game issue.

OP: What precise negative value of standings, with which faction specifically, would ruin your „day to day“ gameplay?

Too many people have an irrational fear about some vague idea of having negative standings or negative sec status when both are easily repairable for the majority of factions that people care about, and have little gameplay impact otherwise.

Edit: if your answers to my questions and „any negative movement“ and „all factions“ then you’re looking at very specific mission gameplay that raises (or keeps neutral) all faction standings. If that’s not the gameplay you want, then figure out how to deal with it like everyone else for the past 20 years.

There is no “broken system”, you just have overly convenient expectations.

  • you can decline every storyline mission, no penalties. You don’t get the faction standing boost, but you also don’t lose standing with the enemies of that faction.

  • you can decline missions against other empire faction, one for free. After that you will have to wait or just grab your ship and move to another agent. Thats usually only a few jumps.

  • place a ship and a clone at different agent stations, if you don’t want to run a faction mission for one (and have already declined one within the last 4 hours), just jump to another missionrunning base.

  • run these factionmissions and make sure to have another missionrunning base in the enemy faction’s space as well. just run two days for faction A, then do a clonejump and run a day for faction B - you will gain standings to both instead of losing standing to one.

  • enlisting your char to faction warfare is a serious decision. You can reap great rewards from your militia, losing the standing to your enemies is the price that comes with. No decision is ever without a cost. You can easily repair that standing later if you don’t want to play FW any more. Either by working on your own or by using standing services offered by other players (usually wanting ISK for that service).

Enough options for you? I fail to see how any of that “ruins your gameplay”.

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If I play Amarr, I ruin standings with Gallente and Minmatar (if I take the corresponding missions< of course). If I take storyline missions - Caldary and amarr are happy, the rest are pissed. Can’t tell the values exactly but yeah, the irrational fear is there. And what is that easily repairable way to repair the standings, besides excruciatingly boring bloodstained stars?

What is the point of these unnecessary consequences in application to the process of the game? Where if you just want to run missions, you have to jump hurdles. And in any other game you just come to quest giver - go do the quest, get the goods. Moreover, we’ll leave the consequences for a moment, let them be, but when you have to spend 15 mins in some battlecruiser of BS just to get to the agents and they give you some minus standings mission, you have to spend another 15 minutes flying to the other agent in another system to ask them for the quest. And all of that for quite a stingy payoff (I mean LP) you can earn for a couple of evenings of scanning? Too much effort, too little payout and on top of that - “consequences”.

Yea, this sort of boring mechanic isn’t “normal”. It is just “what mainstream gamer culture expects” which doesn’t mean it’s “good”. It is bad, boring, and not meaningful.

And why is it important for you to have positive standings with all 4 major empire factions? If you can’t answer that question then Gallente and Minmatar standings mean nothing to you, so you should not feel bad tanking them.

Anyway, there are “ping pong” standing strategies you can do to make sure your standings on the whole rise up. I forget the details, and you have to do round-robin missions with specific strategies for accepting them, but you essentially raise faction standings faster than you lose them, so as you go around to each faction on the whole they rise.

Of course your pirate standings go down so if you ever wanted to run pirate missions or join pirate FW your standings would need to be addressed – which is also possible.

Standings are not permanent and the deeper in the red they are the easier they are to fix (the swings are bigger mechanic wise).

Your desired playstyle is a lot of effort. If you just want an easy game that spoon-feeds you missions with boring rewards and no long term impacts there’s a ton of games out there that can cater to your interests better than the boring PvE in Eve Online.

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I just checked two random HighSec systems (one in Caldari Space, one in Gallente Space) where I have chars.

  • in system A there were 21 Level4 HighSec-Agents within 5 Jumps
  • in system B there were 29 Level4 HighSec-Agents within 5 Jumps

The issue you are complaining about simply is none. I know what I am talking about, because one of my reserve-income options are L4s:
2023.10.21.11.51.38

You just have to use your brain a bit and use the mechanics in your favor instead of complaining that everything that requires a bit of effort is “broken”. If you want to “just run missions” than do that, become a professional missionrunner, learn how things work and your standings will look like in the picture above (or even better). And you will never ever have problems with standings.

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This does imply not doing highly lucrative anti-empire missions :slight_smile:

But all choices have consequences. I am nearing -10 standing with amarr and have no problem with that - I don’t ente r that area. As long as I have decent standings with Caldari it won’t be that difficult to fix amarr standings (through derived standings).

There are several ways to fix faction standings.

  1. Dont do storylines or at least do as Io mentioned and keep a JC in every faction space and run 16 L4s to do a storyline for each faction.

Theres an epic arc for each of the main 4 factions. Plenty of guides out there.

COSMOS missions and data centers also provide faction standings

Career agents also.

The only activity mentioned above that you can do without hurting other empires too much are the arcs.

Last thing you can do and its very costly, is to hire USIA to raise your faction standings.

What we (USIA) can also do is unlock the epic arcs so you always have access to them as long as your faction standing is above -2 modified.

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You don’t need to do that. Just find systems nearby. Also you can easily drop two missions in a row without taking a massive faction standing hit. You’ll lose a chunk of agent standing, a bit of corp standing but only like 0.01 actual faction standing for declining a mission inside the cooldown. If you do multiple in a row you can wreck your standing though.

You can decline these without an issue. Also, the faction changes are easy enough to work around. You have two faction alliances, Minmatar - Gallente, Amarr - Caldari. Amarr and Minmatar are directly opposed, as are Gallente and Caldari. Roughly speaking, if you gain say, 1.0 in one faction, you’ll lose 0.5 in the opposing faction, you’ll gain 0.5 in the allied faction and lose 0.25 in the enemy allied faction.

Say you gain 1.0 with Amarr, you’d expect to gain 0.5 with Caldari, lose 0.5 with Minmatar and lose 0.25 from Gallente. So if you just switch back to opposing factions when the rep is getting low, you can constantly be increasing all of them.

Or you can just decline reputation missions.

You won’t ruin your standings. This character has been in Minmatar FW regularly of late. I’ve not lost any reputation with Amarr or Caldari from killing their NPCs, running plexes in their territory or killing their enemy players. I was 0.59 reputation with Amarr on the 7th of October, the last time I handed in a Minmatar story mission, I’m 0.59 reputation with them now after 3 weekends of hitting FW fairly hard.

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Have you gotten promoted, thats where the standings really take a hit as you get promoted

Yeah, I have, seems I was looking at the previous mission hand in. My standings increase on the 7th of October was for being promoted. I lost 0.221 standings with the Amarr.

But the point still stands that from 3 weeks of doing at least 2 days of a lot of FW each week I haven’t nuked my standings with Amarr. I’ve earnt about 1.5 million LP in about 9-10 sessions of doing FW (some days doing a few hours in the morning and a few after), but I’ve not been purely plexing so that might make a difference. I have done a fair few battlefields for LP rather than purely plexing.

Either way, you’re not going to instantly make yourself persona non grata from playing a bit of FW. You’d have to do it intensly, for long periods of time, to completely obliterate standings. You can just pop out of FW, do a few sessions of running L4s for the opposing faction, and rejoin.

I have nuked my standings with the Amarr militia from podding a few people though, so that’s definitely something to keep in mind. None of the changes have affected my standing with any of the Amarr NPC corps that I’ve got high standings with either.

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Yes, its called picking a side.

World of Warcraft makes you choose whether to join Alliance or Horde. I dont remember them giving you the option to simply switch factions at any time.

So, what youre telling me is that you wanna be able to join a war on one side, and then have the option to magically have the other side forget that you were shooting and destroying their ships and assets when you quit the war?

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Who knew :slight_smile:

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Realism.

Whats the reason why you need to be positive standing for every empire?

Why?

It sounds like you wanna have +10 standings for every corp and every empire and every pirate faction, just because you want it, without any real understanding of how the game works or why that would take an enormous amount of effort.

If you want something, then go ahead. But there is no gauruntee, and you are not entitled to get the outcome that you want, nor does the game have to make it easy for you.

Theres nothing wrong with that. Something attained without effort has very little value, after all. \

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I did. I knew. I know all.

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Well, I wouldn’t call eve’s missions exiting. Demanding on the eyes to read the tiny font, yes, but the rest is just as ordinary as in any other games - go there, kill that many stuff, get back. But I’ve heard you about standings being not a big deal generally, ty!

I am guessing I was complaining about Amarr space, because in Caldari space there are indeed comfortable agents spread. Never played much Gallente. In Amarr space I have to do 14 jumps from Amarr to get 2 lvl 3 agents in some armpit system and the same goes for lvl 4. Lvl 2 missions are great though.

Again what I don’t understand is why jump through unnecessary hoops, when the process doesn’t make game interesting or meaningful. I don’t mind all these consequences system, I am surprised that trivial stuff like missions require so many efforts to run them.

Now these are good news, thank you!)

that would.ve been great!

Ok, if eve is so big on realism, how come that suicide losers park right outside of main trade hubs or inside some crossroads system and flourish? I mean, you have the biggest trade hub amongst known systems and right near it there are marginal nobodies disrupting the trade. In no circumstances that is realistic, because in real situation they would-ve been wiped out down to the third generation. Not because they are criminals, but because money is so important that no government allow such occurances to happen.

Well for starters I am afraid that they will nuke me on entering the systems and as an ammarian I am not really thrilled to fly minmatar or gallente ships to comfortable mission run for them, because the locked damage type of amarr and rats resistances of these regions

As long as you remain -4.99 or higher, you wont be attacked. And thats -4.99 with diplomacy skill

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And me being able to press a button on my keyboard and have billions of isk appear in my wallet wouldve been great too. Sadly, thats not how the game works.

You do realize that Bank Robberies still exist today? These robbers arent being wiped out down to their third generation, and people steal all sorts of stuff, many of them being repeat offenders.

Furthermore, no, youre not blowing up money, youre blowing up stuff, in a universe where the laws and rules are different. I can go to Ukraine and blow up a russian tank with a rocket launcher and return to the Ukraine barracks. Will I get arrested? No. Can i do the same thing in the US? No, Id be arrested. Different laws, different situations.

Unless your standings are abysmal, which it only becomes after literal years of running against that specific empire, will they nuke you for entering their system. And when it does happen, its not instant, you can still travel through their territory. You just cant stay afk in the middle of their space.

Serpentis pirates, which operate in gallente space, has a secondary resistance to Thermal, which amarr ships use.

But there are no restrictions to what type of ship you can fly beyond simply skilling into them, and there is no problem fighting other rats in amarr ships. Its not like you deal 0 damage unless you match their weakness. This isnt Pokemon.

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On a sidenote… those serpentis have a really good salvage :slight_smile: