EVE New Citizens Q&A

I've been doing some missions, which often includes fighting a lot of pirates. What exactly are the long-term consequences if I continue and end up with very low standing with the various pirate factions? Will there be null sec systems that I am essentially locked out of? Or just unable to do pirate missions?

Is there even a way to keep standing up against both empire and pirate factions, or do I basically have to pick one or abstain from missions entirely?

There are pirate agents in null sec that offer missions, much like regular agents. And their (pirate) corps have LP stores that offer ships and modules much like regular agent corps. It's where some of the rare "pirate" ships come from.

Having low standings block your access to these agents, preventing you from doing missions except for the level 1 starter agents. So you'll be relying on the healthy player trading market if you wanted a Machariel, rather than being able to grind and buy it with LP rewards.

Otherwise, pirates will shoot you no matter what your standings are. And NPC's don't revoke docking access even if you're at low standings with them. So, no other effect that I know of.

bad pirate npc standing is almost never an issue, the chance of you ending up in npc 0.0 is very very VERY low. Compared to other faction standing issues you might run into you're best off to take pirate faction missions over any other.