Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Google "faction standing repair plan" and follow the guide. Doesn't take long to bring your factionnstandings back above -5, at which point factiin police ignores you.

better idea you have to pay in SP

It'd be nicer if running missions didn't mess with your standings and faction missions weren't mixed with regular missions.

I'd prefer if standings were affected by more definitive actions like fw, engaging faction roaming npc's and faction agents that were clearly separated from regular agents. That'd make standings clearer and more a deliberate choice than a bi-product of making isk. We'd also be skipping less missions.

Once its a clear and deliberate choice, you can better justify making it meaningful and difficult to reverse.

I would love to see this require those tokens you can only get in low sec to fix your standing. would make that market a whole lot more interesting.

Then stop mindlessly shooting stuff. That you cannot participate in something you like is a consequence for not thinking about what you do or were doing in another activity.

5-10M to repair your faction standing? Are you serious? That needs to be 500M-1B for every 0.1 standing repaired. At least.

Didn't sound like he meant to permanently repair standing. Sounded like he meant a fee to bribe the police into looking the other way for an hour or two. But yeah, should be a steeper cost, either way.

Incase you're not being deliberately obtuse, I'm aware that missions notify me of the npc's i will be shooting. Thats not the problem.

What they dont say is that completing any mission, regardless of the npc's being shot, negatively affects your standings. Nor does it enhance the game by doing so. Nor is the game enhanced by penalising you either way for accepting story line missions. If you accept you lose standing, if you decline you lose standing. Nor is it good gameplay to wait 4 hours for an agent because they gave you several faction missions in a row.

Little is gained by regular agents being tied to standings like this. The vast majority of mission runners run missions as a means to gain isk. The whole standings thing is a bi-product that can end up restricting game play. This is not good and the ways to remedy it are very tedious.

It would be better to remove the relationship most agents have with negative faction standing (or faction standing all together) and create a new type of agent whose purpose is to allow players to gain/lose faction standings (or role play with the empires). That way players are making a meaningful choice that has clear consequences and you can justify making it difficult to reverse. It also means people aren't skipping missions as much or plain logging off when they get faction missions.

Tldr, simply running missions should not be tantamount swearing allegiance.

And why should it not? The 2 faction groups are at war with each other. If you support one group (by lightening their exposure to pirate raids, transporting war material, directly destroying the opposing faction's gear and material or provide more resources), you cannot expect that the other group will sit by idle and applauds your actions to support their enemy. That logic is ridiculous and completely out of touch with war reality. Your idea of removing the standings penalties for the support of one group against the other in this war does not add meaningful choices, it removes them and replaces them with a system that no one is going to use because it would harm their ability to mindlessly blast away when they do things.

If this mechanic is restricting your gameplay, you play the game wrong. Simple as that. Instead of mindlessly blasting through missions for the Minmatar or Gallente and then be "surprised" that you are being hunted by Amarr and Caldari is not a sign of bad game design, it's a sign of mental incapacity of the players doing that. When I approached a really bad Minmatar standing in my early days, I was still in my then awesome NPC School corp Hedion University and I asked people what that low standing meant for me. People explained it to me and I rethought my then mindless blasting away and started to repair my standings bit by bit. I also started to run different agents of different factions in different places to balance out my standing losses/gains and have had an awesome time. I even learned by myself which factions are better to repair which standings, which greatly reduced the "tedious grind" because I could repair my standings quicker closer to my main mission systems. These are meaningful choices involving player interaction, learning from other players as well as learning by playing the mechanics and game, not what you suggest.
The only thing that should be changed/improved is that players get easier access to the information what running missions for a particular faction does to your reputation with other factions. The tutorials should explain that to you and also how the factions interact with each other when it comes to standings, relationships and allegiances. In the missions themselves, the agents could warn you every now and then that you are about to ruin your standing below a dangerous threshold and other empire navies would start hunting you from then on. They could even add a link to methods how to salvage your standings or refer certain agents (to seize on your idea of special agents for standing gains) for that end.

TLDR: Supporting mindlessly blasting away players who cannot count to 3 on their own and need mommy to change their diapers every day is not what this game needs. It is not what produces valuable and capable players for the game, instead it just creates more moronic, dependent and outright stupid F1 monkeys who cannot think on their own.

@ Rivr

Nothing you said explains why standings being a bi-product is good gameplay. You had a blast moving around a bit, but it ceases to be fun the more you do it. Upping home and moving to the opposite side of hi-sec for a few months is not good gameplay in the slightest. Running particular agents from certain stations when you'd rather be based elsewhere for repairs and indie or local content is not good gameplay. Thats why agent rank, or whatever it was, was removed. If you dont want to mine and you dont want to run hi-sec anoms (god) there is no agent that wont reduce your standings with an empire faction (except maybe interbus who live in the ******** of no where and have no lp store).

Some players want standing gains, some players just want isk so they can get on with more fun parts of the game. Call it mindless if you want, missions don't suddenly become engaging play because they have standings attached to them. And being forced to repair your standings to prevent being shot by npc's because you dont want to mine or anom for income is hardly a choice, let alone a meaningful one.

If you want to do that whole themepark thing with the empires then my proposal lets you, with extra meaning in fact. But for people who just want a means of income so we can build and knock over sand castles without tedious npc pursuits, it'd be nice to have optional agents that didn't force negative standings upon us.


Edit- and speaking of war reality, how logical is it to let a capsuleer play both sides several months at a time for decades?? Sitting idly by is exactly what the empires do because they are robotically waiting for their hatred to hit an arbitrary number before they try engaging the culprit in their space. Come on...

So what you are saying is, when you earn money, you are screwed. When you don't earn money you are not, please pay 2959571751957804562795 bazillion for gear.

Now here's a question, how do you get money to pay the fantasy pricetags from the Ferengi crowd?