Standings

Standings affect many features in the game. At the simplest level standings control which Agents you have access to. Beyond this standings impact a pilot’s access to Jump clones, their ability to anchor POSs in empire space, amounts of minerals lost in the refining process and a whole host of costs, including sales taxes, research and factory costs. Further, if you have -5.0 standing or below to a given Faction, you run the risk of being attacked by that Faction’s navy when in their space. You can view your Faction, Corporation and Agent standings via the ‘Standings’ tab on your character sheet.

Agent availability is dependant on your Corporation and Faction standing, with each Agent requiring you to have a certain standing to be able to work for them. The standings you need for a particular Agent can be found on their ‘Agent Info’ tab and can be calculated with the following formula:

Standings increases:

When you complete a mission you will get a base standing increase which will depend on the perceived difficulty of the mission. This standing increase is used to calculate the Agent and Corporation standing increase. The base standing increase is first modified by your Social skill level as follows:

The amount of standing increase for the Agent is then used to calculate the standing increase for the Agent’s Corporation:

Where Agent Efficiency is defined by:

and Corporation Size is a constant between 0 and 1 specific to an individual Corporation.

The Agent and Corporation standing increase is stated as a percentage value. This is not simply added to your current standing, rather it defines the percentage change between your current standing and the maximum or minimum available standing. To work out how the base standing change affects your actual standing you can use the following formula:

Where Standing Base is +10 for a standing gain and -10 for a standing loss.

You will receive Agent and Corporation standings losses if you fail to complete a mission or you let the mission offer time out. You will also receive a similar standing hit if you reject an offered mission within 4 hours of refusing an earlier mission from the same Agent.

When you complete storyline missions, you will receive standing gains to the storyline Agent’s Corporation and the Faction that the Corporation is aligned with. You will also receive standing gains to other Factions friendly to the Faction you completed the mission for (the primary Faction) as well as standing hits to Factions hostile to the primary Faction. While the standing gains to the primary Faction will continue as long as you complete their storyline missions, the impact on friendly and hostile Faction standings is limited by their standing towards the primary Faction. For example, Caldari State holds the Gallente Federation in a standing of -5.00. For every completed Gallente storyline mission you will lose Caldari State standing, however your standing towards the State will not fall below -5.00 as a result of these missions.

The derived standing change is calculated through the following formula:

The Faction standing information can be found in-game by looking at the ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ tabs in the Faction’s details window and the Faction Size is detailed in the RMR Data Extract. Charts showing the in-game Faction standings and the full list of the derived Inter-Faction Standing Modifiers can be found at http://www.newedenlibrary.net/eon/faction_standings.shtml

It should be noted that you will receive Faction standing hits when you destroy ships belonging to those Factions. Many pilots chose to avoid these kill missions to help preserve their Faction standings.

You can view the history of how your Agent, Corporation and Factions standing changes through the ‘Standings’ tab on your character sheet. Select an entity, right click and select Show Transactions. This will show a list of all your recent activity for that entity and list a standing change for each.

Negative Standings

While it is possible to have good standings with Agents, Corporations and Factions, it is also possible to have poor, negative standings with them. Apart from limiting your access to the best Agents, negative standings do not have any significant implications until they fall below -2.00. If an individual’s Agent’s standing is -2.00 or lower, that Agent will not talk to you. At a Corporation standing of -2.00 or lower, no Agents in that Corporation will offer you missions A Faction standing of -2.00 or lower means that you will not be able to get any missions from any of that Faction’s Agents. Further, a Faction standing of -5.0 or lower will result in that Faction’s navy vessels attacking you on sight when you enter their sovereign space.

There are a number of ways to fix bad standings. The simplest is to start running missions for the affected Faction, but if your standings are too low you may not be able do this. The next option is to train the Diplomacy skill. This may also not raise your standings to such a degree to allow you access to even the lowest quality Agents. The third option is to run missions for a Faction friendly to the affected Faction and receive derived standing gains from storyline missions.

If none of the previous steps work, the last option open to you is to purposely fail storyline missions for Factions hostile to the affected Faction. This will result in a Corporation and primary and friendly Faction standing losses, but at the same time will induce hostile Faction standing gains.

The true mission running professional will make sure that all their Faction standings are in balance. They will do missions for all Factions and carefully check their standings level to ensure they have access to as many Agents as possible.