I remember quite some time ago that a dev had mentioned that they were looking at making it harder for a player to maintain good standing (+5.0) with all 4 main factions. No further announcement was ever made about the subject afaik and I kind of put the issue behind me. Until these last couple of weeks…
I have been getting storylines that would normally be very minimal increase with the faction I was providing the service (materials for war) for and even a smaller decrease with the opposing 2 factions. Now they give more decrease for the enemy factions than the increase to the 2 I’m doing the job for. In addition, I’ve been doing storyline missions against pirates for different factions. You would think that any of the 4 main factions would not mind a reduction in the Blood Raider population, but that is not so. I have been gaining less in faction standing for the agent’s faction than I’m losing for the opposing side. Where I was at one time able to balance by careful use of storyline missions a 5.0+ rating with the big 4, I am now forced to turn all storyline missions down and resort to running each factions epic arc (+SOE) if I want to keep my standings. I submitted a ticket for this issue, but received a canned response saying that everything was normal.
My questions: Is there a new formula for these recent changes? Are there more changes in the foreseeable future? Any chance we could use faction tags, ala clone tags, to fix faction standings? Is there or will there be a dev blog to discuss this already implemented changes? I can adopt, but I’m just looking for official formulas, game mechanics, and uncanned feedback.