EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi there,

My standing with Amarr Empire is now -5.39. I'm trying to fix this by doing missions for Amarr agents. However, this is nearly impossible. Because, every time I try to complete a mission in Amarr space the faction police show up and try to blow my ship away.

How do you fix a negative faction standing once it is below -5.0?

I'm not in faction warfare and this standing drop was due to doing missions for Gallente agents. I'd like to fix the standing if I could, but, trying to complete the missions is now impossible. Any ideas?

After training diplomacy, main sources of faction standings in order of speed/effectiveness/cost/difficulty: career agents, epic arc, data center agents, COSMOS agents, normal storylines. Some of these are once per lifetime, so make sure you really really want that standings first.

Surprised no one mentioned The Plan

^^^^^ OP, this is your solution

Also, don't do missions where you destroy ships of one of the empires (Amarr, Gallente, Caldari, Minmatar) if you would rather not get negative standings with two of them (Amarr / Caldari - Gallente / Minmatar are allies). Destroy only pirate ships. The mission description will tell you who they want you to fight before you accept the mission. Do the Sisters of EvE epic arc and choose to help the Amarr towards the end. You will gain some good Amarr standing without losing standing with any other factions. Regular Sisters of EvE missions are mostly neutral for standings toward the empire factions, but they do give a little Gallente standings.

also note that if you run missions for Caldari you will get derived faction increases to Amarr. Also worth noting that faction police do not spawn in low sec.

Thank you,

I have followed the plan and it is working great. Started by trying to repair my Caldari standing doing the tutorial missions, as I was teetering on the edge of criminal status with Caldari. This brought my standing with Amarr back to a manageable level. In addition to this I trained the diplomacy skill, and this has helped a lot with accessing level 2 Caldari agents for mission grinding.

I have been on a bit of a standings grind doing missions to get the Special faction missions for standings. I found that the best way to do this was get myself an industrial and haul massive numbers of level 1 and level 2 distribution missions. As they don't require me to shoot anything, and can quickly grind through the requisite number of missions to get the storyline mission referral...

The basic idea is to stop at every distribution agent in system as I'm flying and have something like 10 or more concurrent missions running. Every time I stop at a system I've usually got 2 or 3 deliveries there and it saves a lot of time. I can get 2 or 3 storyline referrals in a single session, and that has been great. All without shooting stuff or hurting my home faction standing.

The ISK per hour is pretty low doing this. But, I'm increasing standings with ALL Caldari corps. So soon I will be hauling concurrent level 3 and 4 distributions. So I expect the ISK per hour to increase a bit.... It would actually be interesting to see how much I could earn with the, "Postman Pat", strategy.

Yep, I haven't forgotten that. The reason why I stuck to a single agent for combat missions was to maximise the LP gained with a single corp, open up higher levels faster, and also have all my ships, ammo, and fittings based at a single mission running station.

But distribution missions don't work like that. As I'd be spending 50% of my time hauling back empty. So the idea is to find the next nearest distribution agent after reaching the destination and/or pickup extra jobs along the way. Though doing this requires access to multiple corporations at level 3 and 4. So that is why I'm trying to increase standing with all of the corps. It's working well so far.

Based on my calculations. Running level 2 distributions in this fashion earns about 500,000 ISK per hour. Level 3 increases that to about 3.5 Million ISK per hour, and with skills and level 4 this could be increased even further. Which is curious, considering the ships I'm using are available to alpha clones, with absolutely no cost overhead, and is more than Venture mining in highsec.

***

But ultimately for standings grinding, the ISK isnt' important. What is important is the turnover rate of mission count. As that is what triggers storyline referrals - and the mission turnover rate is much higher with distribution than security.

Yes, that approach is described in, "The Plan", which was linked above. The idea is to target the smallest negative standing faction, and increase that first. Then work your way to the criminal one. So by me bringing Caldari from -4.7 to -0.1 has all by itself brought my Amarr standing from below -5.0 to -2.0. So that I can now do missions with Amarr agents and has restored my freedom of navigation.

As for storyline missions, yes, they are triggered by completing 16 missions - and considering that distribution missions can be completed the quickest, (and often in parallel), I have done these to maximise the number of storyline missions I get. Yes, I haven't done some Epic Arcs, and still have some careers agents avalaible to me. But, I'm thinking that I will leave those for later. In case I need to do some massive standing repair later on.