Issues, Workarounds & Localization

I'm an old EVE player (don't let the character fool you) who hasn't played in about 4 years. Yeah, long time -- and lots of changes have happened since then. I hope I'm overlooking something.

Today I decided to go looking for an agent to do new missions for, and using the new Agent Finder, I was quickly able to find an agent that met my requirements and was labelled as "available" -- and was also an Epic Arc Agent (this may be the key to the answer). But once I got to their station, reality was quite different. Let me present the screenshot first, followed by an explanation:

http://jdc.koitsu.org/lj/agent_finder_confusion.png

1. In the Agent Finder, "Show Only Available" is checked.
2. The Agent (Keita Eslin) is what I was focused on.
3. Per the Agent's Info tab, the Agent is Level 1 and I am in "Good" Standing with them (0.79).
4. In the station the Agent is shown as "Not available to you".

To me, this classifies as a bug; in other words, Show Only Available is returning results which aren't really available at all.

After asking about this in Corp chat, a bloke insisted it was not a bug, quote: "some agents will only give you missions if you've done lots of missions of the same level" (to me, that means Standing). So I began trying to figure this out.

First and foremost, Epic Arc Agents are documented here:

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Epic_mission_arcs

Obviously this agent was not Sister Alitura, but still I ventured forward.

I figured the issue, per what someone said in Corp, was with my Standing. That led me here:

http://eve.grismar.net/wikka.php?wakka=standingsystem
http://eve.grismar.net/wikka.php?wakka=AgentLevelAndQuality

...which is quite old (dating back to Exodus), but says the calculation formula for whether or not you're eligible for missions is:



But what exactly was quality level? Documentation / old forum posts talked about it being visible in the Agent's Info tab, but there's no such thing. That lead me to this dev blog post (see bottom):

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=2316

Which says specifically that the Quality Level of all agents (for Standing-related calculations) is now -20. So back to the formula. When filled out, we get:

(1 - 1) * 2 + (-20 / 20) = -1.0

And this is where I'm stuck. :-) I'm not sure if a value of -1.0 vs. my "Good" standing means I'm still not good enough to talk to that agent (e.g. 0.79 + -1.0 = -0.11, or "0.11 more to go before I can talk to them") or what. I read "Standing with you" of 0.79 to mean that's the actual calculated result, hence I SHOULD be able to talk to this agent, no? Or maybe Epic Arc Agents are "special" in some regards (in which case they really shouldn't be returned in the Agent Finder results at all!).

Anyone have better insights to this or comments/thoughts? I imagine a Dev can explain this in detail (and that'd help me quite a bit).