This is somewhat in response to the "way too much faction standing reward" thread in bugs ( http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/2/8782 ). Personally, I really like the new trade guild missions. They give enough standing that I actually feel like I'm making progress, which I didn't always feel with the old missions. But, I can see how everyone will soon be admired with every faction, which I think would detract quite a bit from the fun of the game. So, what I'd like to suggest is more ways to lose standing, as well as gain it, so that standing would be more fluid & would fluctuate quite a bit.

Here's a few things that I think would help:

1) Make faction standing penalties for kills in monitored space smaller. This may seem counter-intuitive, but here's what I'm thinking: currently, the standing penalties are so drastic, that almost no one purposely attacks in monitored space. If the penalty was smaller, people would be more willing to risk it, so we'd see more people receiving the standing drops. To discourage home station griefing, different station's would have different penalties. Capitals would have the same massive penalty we have now, and so would be 'safer', Barraks would have less of a penalty, Trade posts less still, Research lower yet, and Mining would have the least penalty (did I forget any type?). Also, Nation monitored space would have higher penalties than non-nation faction monitored space.

2) Inter-faction relationships. Every faction would have a relationship with every other faction, in the range of -50% to +50%. Whenever a player gained a point of standing with one faction, they would gain or lose the standing with other nations based off of the relationship. For example, Itani and Serco would be -50% with each other, so for every point of standing a player gained with one, they would lose half a point with the other.
Possible relationships:
Itani/Serco: -50%
Itani/Ineubis: +15%
Serco/Xang Xi: +15%
UIT/Corvus: -50%
UIT/TPG: +35%
UIT/Itani: +5%
UIT/Serco: +5%

3) Make player & faction NPC trader kills anywhere, including unmonitored space, dock some standing, but not very much.

4) Have missions between competing factions that would gain standing with one, but lose standing with the other. Like the corporate espionage we already have, piracy missions from Corvus, selling Special Delivery datapads & prototypes to competing factions, etc.

another thing is that time itself should move all standings towards zero. if you don't do _anything_ for a long time, you'll move towards the "neutral" end of the scale.

do you wish to keep getting that Tung Maud? feel free to do _regular_ missions for Tunguska.

i just wanna say :

Corvus = pirate

you do not lose standing if you kill at corvus station.

Full support to Beolach's suggestions.

I like terjekv's suggestion. Each faction basically has a "What have you done for me lately" attitude. A decay rate of like 1-10% per day of online time might be in order. Increases to hostile faction reps should be like half of the decay for positive reps. That way the factions hold a grudge longer. This also leads to a need to keep doing things to keep your rep up, so that you have something to do when you max out.

Beolach's second suggestion is basically the way Freelancer handles this.

@ point 3: "Make player & faction NPC trader kills anywhere"

No, please don't.

However, make it so that tradeships get an observer to "tag along" with them, and if the observer sees you kill a trader, you lose standing. If you kill the observer first, then you don't.

Simple stuff that makes things a bit more interesting. :)

Excellent thought there, Spider. I have been thinking for a while about how useless the Observers that escort CtC at the beginning of the round are (at least the Collectors shoot), and something like that would give them a purpose.

As far as my original suggestion #3 went, I guess I should have made the "but not very much" stronger. I was thinking each individual kill would usually be less than a point of standing, but repeated kills would add up.

[edit]
As far as standing drifting towards 0, I'd like it, except that it penalizes players who aren't on as often. If a player is only able to log on once a week during the weekend, and sometimes not even then, it would suck to work on standing, be gone for a bit, and then have to redo half the work. It might work, if it only drifted during time the player was logged in, or had a extremely slow drift-rate while the player was logged off.
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Standing only should drift while you're playing the game.

Each way to lose faction (killing an NPC trader while another watches) has to have a way to gain faction. For example, a1k0n has said that bots used to be able to fight each other. It would take some time and probably be a feature for later, but concurrent to NPC trader bots we should have NPC pirate bots. The pirates would be of one gray faction and attack another. So for example, a Xang Xi trader is at the Odia-Sedina wormhole, and an Orion pirate pair comes through. The Orion pirates (who hypothetically are at war with Xang Xi) attack the tradeship.

A player who comes by has choices. He can kill the attacking pirates and get a boost in Xang Xi standing (Thanks for saving my life!), he can watch and let things play out, gaining no standing either way, or he can help the pirates and get a minor boost in Orion standing (Dyar, ye be a scurvy pirate too, eh?).

One way to change things would be to make faction update on docking. So if I'm out flying, save a few traders, when they dock with their destination THEN my standing goes up. Same if I help out pirate bots - I don't get the faction boost until they report back with cargo.

Anyway, this is just one way to make faction more dynamic. It shouldn't be something that you only gain through trading like a grind, it should be something you can effect by your combat actions as well.

something I mentioned ingame today, and that I listed in the "Content" thread:

Missions -against- other factions.
Ie, Xang Xi has a mission against Ineubis, where you kill a certain amount of Ineubis NPC traders..

gives +Xang Xi standing, and -Ineubis ... fairly obvious, right?

Oh, and also.. It drops your Ineubis standing when you accept the mission, not when its completed.

I like all of this stuff, and yeah drop-over-time should definately be only when logged in, and should be pretty minor even then. Perhaps if you get standing to +1000 or -1000 it will not drop at all with time (try getting that last few points again and again!) until you do something that changes your standing - which will be more common anyway if these changes go through. IE you have +990 standing with corvus, and its drops by say 1 or 2 per hour of play online, but when you get to +1000, it doesn't drop any more. However, if you do anything, like take a UIT mission (them being enemies) that drops your standing even slightly, or if you kill one of their NPCs, then even though you lose only like 1/2 point for the kill your standing goes to +999 and from there it CAN fall with time.

Heh, I was just about to edit my post above to note that +/-1000 shouldn't drift. So yeah, I agree w/ Soulless1 on that.

especially as with the drift at +990 it will be REALLY hard to get +1000 :P

and as for -1000, well, there are some things that people will *never* forget :P

Actually what I would do is either raise the ceiling to +/- 1100 or make all the really good stuff available at like +950. That way you can go over the limit and have some time before you needed to increase your faction standing again... The decay should be based on online time, and should be large enough to be noticable.... the drift should be somewhere in the neighborhood of -0.1% per hour... that way someone with a +1000 would drop to +990 after 1 hour of play. Using my above idea of making things avaiable at +950 would give them a little more than 5 hours of online time before they had to do another mission.

um dropping ten an hour?! (which is also 1% of 1000 not 0.1% btw :P)

you have any idea how long it takes to get back that last +10?

it'd be one step forward 4 steps back :P

Oh, one other thing about standing drift: rather than drift towards 0, I'd think it should drift towards the beginning standing for players of your nation, so Itani players would drift towards -695 Serco, etc.

Duh.. I can do math.

So make it -1 per hour and adjust the boundaries as needed.
The specific amounts will need to be tested and balanced.

The point being that it should be really hard to get +1000 and stay there. You cant just be the best and then sit around doing nothing...

...which is why we proposed that there should be more things to lower standing

So, you could get to +1000 and stay there, as long as you were really careful to avoid all of the things that they don't like you doing - 'is it biocom missions im not meant to take or is it straight UIT?'

There would be standing loss for any number of different variables, but if you made sure you avoided all of this minefields then i reckon +1000 and -1000 should stick there when you bear in mind how hard it is to get to that standing - the last few points are horrible, doing them over and over would take up all your time, and BE NO FUN! I say this in capitals because this is a game, and therefore people want to play it for fun. If we give them a futile struggle against time so that they constantly have to fly to corvus to take trade missions, they won't bother doing it or worse, they won't bother playing. You have to give them something to work for, but make it so that when they have it, they can be reasonably sure of keeping it unless they screw up. A sense of achievement is critical.

If standing drift was the only suggestion here, then I might agree with you on that, Furious. But I'd like to see a lot of things that could potentially knock someone out of their Pillar of Society standing, without them having to worry about losing it from no action of their own.

Also, have you ever gotten +1000 with any faction? Trust me, it is VERY difficult to do. And currently, there's really not all that much reward for it. I'd see exemption from standing loss through drift to be a decent reward for the hard work involved.

How about awarding a one time medal for achieving +1000? Maybe that would do something like give you a 10% discount on ships or equipment.

This is a game and the problem with leaving the standing at +1000 is that once you have done that ... then what?
If you make all the really good stuff available at +990 or +995 then you don't need to spend so much time getting those last few points. They won't do you any good once you've achieved that +1000 the first time (if you go with the medal), but you will have to do some work to retain access to the good stuff or eventually you can't buy it.

I think the highest standing currently required for anything is +900, and very few things are that high (in fact, I can't remember what it is that requires that much). Raising that to +990 or +995 would make it even worse.

The thing is, Furious, the higher your standing is, the slower you gain it. It's easier to get from 0 to +600 than it is to get from +900 to +1000.

And I think you didn't catch or aren't addressing the other thing Soulless1 & I mentioned, that there should be other things that could knock a player down from +1000. Like look at my second suggestion. If you want to keep your +1000 Itani standing, you can't do anything to increase your Serco or Corvus or other enemy faction standing, because that would give you a drop in your Itani standing, and then you would be subject to drift. And not only can't you lose Itani standing, but you also can't lose any standing with any allied faction like UIT or Ineubis, because that would also knock you down from +1000 Itani.