Every other game that has factions that can be gained and lost makes it much more difficult to gain faction than to lose it. You should not be able to gain 200 or more adjusted faction points from one procurement mission. Even the rate of faction gain from killing bots is far greater in VO than any other game, and trust me, I've worked on many factions in my time playing MMOs.

Rather than trying to find some gimmick to "save" the newbies, we should be trying to find a way to make people not want to lose faction. The only way to do that is make it such that having to spend time constantly regaining standing is not an attractive proposition

Now, that still leaves us with the problem of people griefing new players by causing a drastic drop in faction that can be difficult to recover from. Using temporary KOS to different degree for aggression in monitored space this can be mitigated to some extent.

In other games I've played it can take thousands of kills to go from one faction standing to the next. VO doesn't even require 1000 kills before you can enter a faction's space without being accosted. The current rate of increase from bot kills is thusly far to generous.

Missions are similarly far too generous with faction gains. Why should it be possible to go up an entire faction standing rank with only one mission? I'm not suggesting that procurement missions are necessarily broken. It's just that certain of their rewards are not well tuned.

It is already known that the real faction standing, as returned by API functions, is an unsigned 16-bit integer or uint16 (0-65535), but it is displayed as the adjusted range of -1000 to 1000. Knowing this, we can already tell that bot kills are giving more than 1 real point of faction per kill, since there's no way you'd have to kill 32768 bots to go from -1000 to 0. A little bit of math reveals that it's closer to +0.5/+16 (adjusted/real) points per kill. This gives us a lot of room to tweak standing gains of the most basic type. Just halving the gain from bot kills changes the game dramatically.

What then would be an suitable rate of standing increase for missions? Obviously it should be in some way linked to the amount of benefit the requesting faction receives from your doing this task for them, but not nearly on the dramatic scale it is now.

Lets use the trade guild missions as a central point of reference. Stations/factions need supplies on a regular basis for one thing or another. This is not typically a critical need (especially if they're already receiving massive amounts of phase arrays and consumer robotics on a regular basis) but a matter of business. Therefore their level of gratitude towards you and the accompanying standing increase should be minimal. For the sake of argument, I'm going to suggest that your average non-critical supply run should garner you no more than +1/+32 points. Keep in mind that standing rewards need not be tied to your monetary reward for the same task since the monetary reward is based on the value of the goods delivered and not the associated need of the faction.

With +1/+32 as an average starting point, we can now start to incorporate missions of other types with more danger/need and more standing reward because of a perceived threat to the faction.

But all of this means little without looking at the other side of the coin: faction standing loss.

The easiest place to start evaluating standing loss is that from killing NPCs of the faction. A simple starting point would be to have the most basic loss incurred be five times the amount received from a non-critical supply run mission (-5/-160).

This fails to take into account the standing of the NPC that is killed. Currently all station guards are Pillar of Society with their faction, and most non-security are Admired with their faction. I'll assign an arbitrary standing loss multiplier of x1 for neutral and x4 for Pillar of Society. Now, killing a guard for it's weapons is going to cost you -20/-640 standing with the easiest means of recovery still only giving an average of +1/+32 points.

Standing loss could be further expanded to take into account not only the faction of the NPC being killed, but the faction of the monitored space they are killed in and applying the appropriate faction loss multipliers for each; kill an Axia-faction ship (admired w/ Axia, neutral w/ UIT) in UIT space and lose -15/-96 Axia and -5/-32 UIT.

How then does all of this apply to players? Apply it the same. While the numbers presented above are all arbitrary and clearly not tuned, it should not be possible for your actual standing to drop to hated for a single kill of someone who is Pillar of Society, that is what temporary KOS is supposed to resolve. So now you have someone who possibly learns their lesson about killing someone in monitored space without an eggregious hit to their standing that seemingly can't be recovered from. But you also find a situation where people who want to engage in this behavior don't receive quite the same rewards for doing so.

EDIT (2013-03-06 02:28)

This could even be extended to giving players standing with the local faction for killing (N)PCs that are hated or KOS to them.

In any form of social engineering, it's usually more effective to provide incentive than disincentive. I'd further add that whenever a negative modifier is applied to a player for faction loss, that modifier is cumulative, so the next time you do it, the loss you experience is worse than before.

I'd personally love to see that any death is expensive. This will make people choose more about staying alive than saying "I don't care how often I die, money and ships are cheap." This is similar to the concept that faction gain is far too easy.

My recollection is that bot kills currently give +20 XP on the "real" 65535 scale.

I believe the biggest problem with this suggestion is that decreasing the mission rewards for proc missions to the point where it becomes a chore for vets (who have access to moths), would make the rewards depressingly insignificant for newbies running the missions with starter ships. Perhaps the best way to address this would be to have less of a disparity on the faction reward for bulk vs non-bulk missions (but keep the monetary reward higher), and instead have the critical station need be the determining factor for maximizing faction reward as per draugath's suggestion.

Raising faction is supposed to be a chore, otherwise it's meaningless. Right now the ability to gain faction is so easy in VO it's ridiculous, even for new players. Sure, players that have access to better equipment will have an advantage in missions, but that's par for the course in every game ever developed.

Also, I wasn't specifically targeting procurement missions, but rather just trying to define a baseline for non-critical missions. Procurement missions just happen to currently be that baseline.

Within the scope of Trade Guild missions, a timed mission could be considered to be more urgent and reward additional standing upon completion within the allotted time-frame.

That is the point of getting better ships, to make things easier/more efficient. There really isn't a point in catering to starter ships.

I want to take a minute or two to question the premise of your suggestion, because I think too many people are taking the position that the standing system is just another form of 'level' system where you get higher levels and then once you're at the top level you stop and that's that.

Standing is supposed to represent your current position with a faction, and I believe it's intended to be a dynamic metric. It's nonsensical to make decisions based on the faction implications of your actions.

Rather you should be making a decision based on your objective and the faction standings are adjusted to represent that.

In the future I know the mutual exclusivity of factions is intended to be something that changes as events in the universe unfold, so your faction standings will be adjusted dynamically as a conflict progresses between two factions. A faction might decide based on the recent conquest of sector x or the destruction of convoy y that they no longer like pilots who provide support to faction z for instance.

So considering this I think the faction system is actually something which has a primary function of dividing up the playerbase between the factions and providing a framework for conflict between players who chose to support one faction over the competition (not just between axia/valent).

The rules about standing loss for killing someone who is admire with a certain faction then function to ensure team cohesion.

When you say "raising faction is supposed to be a chore" I disagree. Raising faction happens incidentally to your actions in game if you are indeed playing your part in support of the faction. If you do happen to kill someone without the intention of changing sides, then yes of course there should be a penalty for that and I suppose it would set you back on the path that you've chosen.

So bearing that in mind, you've still highlighted a central issue in the current faction system where proc missions are disproportionally beneficial compared to the other options.

My counter-proposition to your suggestion is that the methods of gaining faction need to be more diverse so that constantly regaining standing is an attractive proposition because it forms part of your everyday activities.

If you kill someone who is admired with the enemy faction for instance, your faction should increase with the people who hated him, more missions based on combat should give balanced rewards with trading missions and of course standing reward diversity in trading missions.

Also I would love to see more regular occurrences of the same types of missions as "Axia must die" where one faction sends a pilot out to steal from an enemy faction and this gives faction gain for the home faction and loss for the other.

To summarize, faction loss and gain should be par for the course in any gameplay session, and reforms to the faction system need to be geared towards flowing seamlessly with player activity, rather than as a system for 'protecting newbies'.

+1 to TRS

+1 to TRS statement.

TheRedSpy, I don't disagree (at least not with most of your post). However, your comment deals more with the application of the standing system, while my post was dealing more with the rules of the standing system.

I definitely feel that faction standing should be impacted more by various actions, but that's not necessarily the problem I was trying to address.

The largest problem currently facing the faction standing system is that it's far too easy to gain/lose standing with a faction. This makes your standing with a faction essentially meaningless. This isn't "Hello Kitty Adventures in Space" where everyone should be friends with everyone else. Complicating the desire for more dynamic standings is the lack of mutual exclusivity. Not enough factions dislike each other for that to currently work, without more developed events that shape the world, but that's again getting outside the scope of this suggestion.

In light of the recent 1.8.278 patch release, and talking with Incarnate, I'm bringing this thread back to the top. Keep in mind that the wording and context is related to a theme that was prevalent at the time of this writing, but the mechanics are largely sound regardless.

One thing to consider in addition to a lot of the above, is the possibility of Clandestine missions giving faction with one side, but not reducing the other side of the equation.

EDIT:

Probably the biggest thing that I can't stress enough is that the standing rewards need to be decoupled from the monetary rewards for procurement missions. Currently the standing rewards are ludicrous and only serve to enable the faction flip-flopping that we've seen for years. Nobody has any investiture in their standing because they can always just re-level it in an hour or two, assuming they've previously stockpiled the usual goods.

OMG..... I enjoyed your post,TRS, and I *gags* .. agree with it . The idea of building faction standing as a chore is not one i have ever really enjoyed. It is quite boring when on has to do it.
+1 TRS

+1 TRS. Faction standing should reflect actions, not time-spent-doing-boring-stuff.

Simplest solution is to make faction exclusivity go both ways: every N points lost with faction X should gain 1 point with the enemy of X.

Second step should be to create more missions aimed at hurting 'the enemy' in the faction stations, which have an obvious element of danger (even though they can be stealth / trade / mining related as well) and should give considerable standing shift for both the faction giving the mission and for 'the enemy'.

Third step should be to give minor faction shift whenever you kill a player or NPC. Even though space is 'unmonitored', communication is assumed to be instantaneous and bounties etc are also not limited to monitored space.

In essence, (almost?) every time you gain skill points you should also shift faction.

TheRedSpy, to revisit your last post, how do you propose to make standings matter without there being some amount of necessary effort to gain it in the first place? I get that having more opportunities to gain standing would help, but in a non-abstract explanation, how can standings matter if you don't have to actually work for them (ie, "raising faction is supposed to be a chore")?

The problem is that everyone meta-games faction grinding. Endless procurements to get "Admire" or "POS", then stockpile the commonly requested items so that repair from faction loss is nearly instant. The changes I think could combat this are to only allow a certain number of procurements per faction per day, and to truly randomize the requested materials, so that stockpiling 1000's of cu's of silksteel here or robotics there is no longer effective. Also, remove the faction reward multiplier for beating the clock on timed missions. Make it a monetary bonus only. Bulk missions should only receive rewards proportional to the number of units delivered (or is it cu?). As it stands now, a bulk timed mission for a commodity you have already stockpiled at the requesting station = 100's of (adjusted) points in mere seconds.

Combat and even mining missions (not the trade guild ones, the stand-alones) should give better faction rewards. Those long-haul convoy escort missions that always pay crap should give good faction rewards with the destination faction and excellent faction per enemy killed from the originating faction. This might fall to the PCC, but each faction should have a set of missions visible only to disliked pilots, that lure them into doing some dirty work with the promise of stature and forgiveness with the employer. Of course, they might not mention the task might raise the ire of a competing faction…

Hey, I like my stockpiles! Even if I can't dock at the stations.

I'm not against missions that are predictable in their requests. But if a mission that grants standing is going to be predictable, then the reward needs to be really low.

So, to put down some concrete numbers, here's what I think the rewards and penalties should be (using Adjusted Standings)

Event .....................................:: AS Bonus
Killing bots ..............................:: +0.1
Missions ...................................:: +1-15 (penalty w/ opposing faction equal to bonus or up to x2)
--- +1-5 common, +6-10 uncommon, +11-15 rare
Killing (N)PC in monitored space :: -50 * YLS * TLS (see below)
--- This will result in -50 standing if you're both below Respected, and -1250 if you're both POS

Penalty Modifiers:
Your Local Standing [YLS]
Less than Respected :: 1
Respected ................:: 2
Admired ...................:: 3
POS ..........................:: 5

Their Local Standing [TLS]
Less than Respected :: 1
Respected ................:: 2
Admired ...................:: 3
POS ..........................:: 5

@CD - that's one reason why penalties should be cumulative. Each time you do something which applies negatively, the modifier increases. After a few actions, standing loss can't be easily rebuilt. There could be some type of action or mission which would allow a player to reset their penalty adjustments, but it should be very expensive. (there's not way that jail time could be enforced in VO - perhaps some form of community service?)

@All - there is to be expected a degree of grind for faction standing; killing other players is only 1 possible adjustment. I agree with TRS's suggestion that faction standing is adjusted based on the relationship of the victim with others, however what Draugat is saying is that some faction gain always should be possible through simple day to day actions like hauling freight, escorting convoys, killing bots (i.e. cleaning up the spaceways), etc.

In the end, it'll result in a better system if people are sweating their actions because faction loss may make that character unplayable.

Those proposed rewards values are too extreme and would result in too much grinding to gain faction standing in my opinion.

As an example, say the distribution is common 65%, uncommon 25% & rare 10%. And to simplify things, say the missions yield faction rewards of 5, 10 & 15 points, respectively.

The result would be that after taking 300 missions, a player starting at 0 standing would end up with 997.68 to 998.5 pts depending on the order of the missions (195 common, 75 uncommon & 30 rare missions). See plot below:



To achieve PoS, an additional 6 to 8 rare missions worth 15 pts each would be required. Keep in mind, too, that I used the upper limit of the rewards for this example. It would have been far worse had I used rewards at the lower end of 1, 6 & 11 pts.

That's simply too much grinding. To put things in perspective, over the last 5 years that I've played VO, I'm just a hair below having completed 1500 missions.

While mission faction rewards could perhaps stand to reduced a bit, I'd say the problem with the current system is how goods for procurement missions can be stockpiled, allowing for the mission to be completed in a matter of seconds over and over again. That's the real problem that should be addressed here.

First, I think you got the labels on your line colors swapped.

I'd written up a more detailed response but felt I should review a few things first.

The numbers I chose are still very generous in theory, compared to what I've experienced in other games. However, I neglected to account for the PvP nature of the game and lack of PvE, which in many cases heavily augments mission rewards.

Two things I'm not remembering is the point at which diminishing returns kicks in and it's modifier.