Rather then have factions standing as a single number which can be run up simply by doing proc missions break the total standing into several catagories and add them to together to determine the faction total.
Faction losses would be divided by three and applied equally to each catagory or could be applied in relation to the offense.

ie:

trade
combat
public service (escorts)

This would artificially force players to play in ways they might not want to. A better solution would be to make something besides proc missions give decent rep.

Not everyone likes combat. Same can be said for trading.

I've been advocating for something like this for years. I strongly object to trade being a straight shot to high standing. The current system has worked fine for years, but the game is becoming more complex and faction standing should be part of that complexity.

I might change combat to Military service for Itani and Serco players and to Mining for UIT players. Alternatively to mining for UIT I think the 'public service(escort)' option is OK as well. I don't include for UIT combat against the hive because there is no dynamic hive in UIT controlled space.

I therefore disagree with you Savet in just creating a secondary path.

Also, I'm not so sure that the sub factions should offer standing all the way up to POS. A corporation is not a (S)ociety. But I'm not going to argue that issue too strongly at this time.

Go read Snow Crash and Diamond Age, and then rethink that statement.

From the descriptions, they sound intriguing. I've bought both for my kindle, but since they both aren't text to speech enabled, I probably won't get to them until I'm mining. Ah well. I guess I now have a good reason to mine again soon ;-)

Oh and just a thought, perhaps limit the number of POS positions that can be achieved so that players have to compete for them. Just something to think about...

All types of missions give faction points as do certain non mission related activities, which makes the OP superfluous. It would be better to simply change the faction points rewarded for certain missions.

-1

Ryan, The only ones that give a non-trivial amount are procs. Try getting the last few points towards POS by doing hive skirmishes some time. I'd be interested to see if it's such a small increase that it's lost to rounding error.

I was under the impression that a player's standing is not actually stored using the displayed scale, but rather on a simple linear scale which is then mapped logarithmically to the -1000 to 1000 scale we can see. If that is the case, there wouldn't be a loss due to rounding errors. On the other hand, if the value is actually stored using the logarithmically mapped numbers, it might be. I'm not sure where I even heard this so it could certainly be the latter.

Yes most mission types give faction standing under the current system. Since the developers are in the middle of the faction redux I think this might be the most convenient opportunity for them to change the accumulation system from a single faction pool and spread it out over multiple categories.

I maintain that high standing or POS should not be attainable through a single process, but should require a combination of contributions to a nation or faction in order to achieve.

The two scales for standing (stored as data and visible) are direct mappings of each other. You can convert between the two by offsetting so they both start at zero and then multiply by a constant. While it is technically a linear scale, once your faction is above 600 any gains you receive get scaled down by an increasing amount as you progress toward 1000.

For example, killing bots gives you 20 pts per kill on the data scale (approx 0.61 on the visible scale), but beyond 600 the reward decreases. At 700 the rewards get scaled down to about 75% of their value, so you'd get 15 pts on the data scale (~0.46 visible scale). At 900 standing the rewards are scaled down to around 26% of their value, so 5 pts (~0.15 visible scale). If the reward on the data scale is less than 1 pt then your standing does not increase, meaning killing bots eventually has no impact on standing. You cannot reach POS by killing bots alone.

If that didn't make sense, going from -1000 to -600 requires killing just over 650 bots. If you kill the same number of bots but instead start with 800 standing, then you will end up with approximately 923.2

One way to mitigate a few of the objections is to establish 4 categories and then allow the player to select one to ignore. This would allow players to avoid any category that was un-fun for them personally while still requiring a variety of tasks to determine overall faction standing...

The individual categories could also be used to determine mission and equipment eligibility

IE a high trade standing might be required to obtain an xc but only a good standing overall.

@Meridian - Perhaps we should ask that a minimum of 1 point be established

I've been thinking about this some more, and having multiple categories required to build up for every faction seems rather contrived, especially for a sandbox game.

What would make things more interesting and give more personality to the various factions would be to have one category per faction that weights standing rewards higher. Then each faction could have different categories that they favor, such as military service for Itani/Serco, trade for UIT, mining for Tunguska, etc.

That would diversify things up a bit so that procs aren't the most efficient way to build standing for every faction. And then you could still build faction standing doing your character's preferred activities, it just might not be the most efficient way to build standing for a given faction.

"Perhaps we should ask that a minimum of 1 point be established"

I disagree with that. I think that it is a good thing to not be able to reach POS by exclusively doing things that only give a very small amount of standing reward (like killing bots). Even a 0 wh non-bulk proc in nation space will give at least 2 points on the data scale with maximum rounding down.

This almost sounds like perk point expenditures at times. ;)

Nice idea Meridian.

It also occured to me that instead of asking the player which faction category to ignore - just simply discard the lowest score and then add the rest together.

@ abortretryfail
"Ryan, The only ones that give a non-trivial amount are procs."

In my deity like brilliance, I realized that you would point this out. In my everlasting divine wisdom I addressed it seven hours and twenty one minutes prior to you committing your reply to the eternity that is the internet!

"It would be better to simply change the faction points rewarded for certain missions."

On a different note,

"Faction losses would be divided by three and applied equally to each catagory or could be applied in relation to the offense. ie:trade combat public service (escorts)"

What "offenses" are you talking about? The vast majority of faction loss is due to combat. The last time I lost faction points that wasn't wasn't due to popping some halfwit within the NFZ was either CtC or Deneb related.

In fact, I've NEVER lost faction for anything other than combat related activities. I know there is one mission which if you fail you lose a small bit of faction, though come to think on it... it's a combat mission. Then there are the two missions that where the outcome is faction points being lost BUT... those are both missions geared towards being a pirate, the faction loss is a reward... in a manner of speaking. Also, they too are combat missions.

In fact, the only way this suggestion has merit is if...

A: The faction point reward system is completely reworked so all missions give better faction points so that Bulk Procs are not the only feasible route to PoS.

And...

B: Failure of any mission... be it accidental, due to death or intentional... subtracts faction points equal to what would have been awarded.

"What "offenses" are you talking about? The vast majority of faction loss is due to combat. The last time I lost faction points that wasn't wasn't due to popping some halfwit within the NFZ was either CtC or Deneb related."

Not really relevant, but accepting and then aborting a procurement mission will cause a very minor standing loss. I used this to my advantage to keep my standing at exactly -600 so that I could both kill players of my nation and fly freely in nation space until the devs fixed the exploit.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane and all... but, I was kind of hoping for something more consequential than a trivial "slap on the wrist".

Basically for any of these ideas to work, if a mission gives ten faction points for success... it must take ten faction points for failure.

I have just been trying to get some standing in grey. What I like about the fact that the procurement missions are the way to get standing is that it forces you to fly around the obvious places in grey *in a trader*, making it a lot more tense then say botting or escorting in a fighter.

I would suggest increasing faction standing for mining as well, and maybe have specific high-danger fighter missions add significant standing as well, but I think it is good that getting standing requires flying around in a non-optimal fighting ship.

(... kind of ironic that the fighting missions are the least dangerous ones...)

The lack of offenses is a problem for any faction system they decided to implement....

Failing a mission should drop faction some but Im not sure an equal amount is always a good idea....