Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I think it's annoying that if you want to setup a POS in high sec (or do anything that requires a high standing) you have to kick everyone that has a positive standing with the faction and just leave whoever has the highest.

IMO it's counter intuitive, you did the career mission chain and have a .3 standing with the Caldari state so you have to leave the corp for a few days while we setup this POS... oh no that Gallente industrialist who never spoke to the Caldari state is fine... in fact he's going to be the one anchoring the thing :)

So here's my proposed solution:

Create a new role in the corp called Diplomat. When you assign the role you must pick one to X NPC corp/factions. I'm not sure what the max number of corp/factions should be but there probably should be a limit per character. You can have any number of diplomats but each faction/corp can only be assigned to one character and each character should have a max number of faction/corps that can be assigned to him/her (perhaps a skill based number?)

Then you add up and average all of the remaining pilot's faction standings and divide by the total number of corp members (minus the diplomat) and ADD the result to the diplomat's standing.

IE. Billy is made the Caldari State diplomat for "Gallente Scum Slaughtering inc."

The corporation has 11 members. Billy has a 5.0 standing (without skills) with the Caldari State.
There are 3 treacherous Gallente pilots in this corporation that haven't quite convinced the Caldari State that they've put their dirty hippy ways behind them yet. They each have a -1 standing with the State for a total -3 contribution.

Besides Billy, there are 2 valiant Caldari defenders of righteous free market capitalism and puppies in the corp. They each have a +1 standing for a total contribution of +2.

The remaining 5 are some Amarr mercs that don't care either way and have a 0 standing with the State.

The final calculation would be ((2-3)/10)+5 = 4.9.
That's the +2 from the Caldari pilots minus the 3 from the Gallente pilots divided by the 10 (the number pilots in the corp not counting Billy) + the 5 from Billy's unmodified standing.

Without Billy being the diplomat it would just be the average standings of all members. (-3+7)/11 = .36(ish)

This way adding a pilot with a small positive standing won't hurt your standing as much (sometimes it will actually improve it,) and adding a neutral or somewhat negative member would have a small negative effect on your corp (would be a smaller hit for larger corps.) Though it could hurt to bring in a -10 pilot, but IMO it should hurt to do that.

Additionally we could create a social (or reuse a social skill like diplomacy) that boosts the effect of the non diplomat member's positive standings and mitigates the effect of the non diplomat member's negative standings.
The skill would be only be applied if the diplomat had it.

That sounds like a worse system then what we have now, because it punishes actual working corporations even more than the current system. The problem with both is, that actual good sized working corporations have practically zero chance to anchor a POS in highsec. Good corps have varied set of new and old players with various interests and professions, so such corps don't mostly comprise of people with extremely high faction standings with a single entity or with any entity at all. On the other hand alt corps with only one actual player can trivially meet the requirements. You don't ned to punish the alts, but normal corps shouldn't be at such a large disadvantage.

What ever system you come up as a replacement it should give normal corps with verying type of players a solid practical way to put up a highsec POSes without forcing every player in the corp to either do a painful standings grind or hop on and off the corp. If you do that, you also remove the need to kick people and re-invite them to the corp in order to bypass the current POS anchoring limits.

See my second post before reading this.

Destination SkillQueue: I just realized you may have been talking about Michael's statement and not my idea. If so then sorry :)

Michael:
I just figured out what you were talking about.

I agree there should be a mechanic that forces people not to jump ship from a corp when war decced, and using the POS as collateral is a good way to do that. The problem is that under an averaging system you only need one person in the corp to stick around (whoever is highest standing.) Everyone else could jump ship with no impact on the POS even if there was a recurring standing requirement.

My system would still have this problem, only the diplomat has to stay. It would be slightly better in that if your negatives stay in corp and your positives jump ship this would lower your standing (but not by much plus your negatives are just as likely to jump ship as your positives are.)

Making POS's collateral to force people to stay in a war decced corp would require a complete overhaul of the current system. That's not what I'm trying to do here.