This article will explain the system of standings in Eve Online. For a more in-depth treatment of faction standing, read the faction standing guide. For a more in-depth treatment of corporation standing, read the corporation standing guide.
In this guide, you will learn what standings are, how to increase them, and how standings affect gameplay. Higher standings open up more opportunities for you. Do good things for an organization and your standings go up with it. Higher standings can also lower your taxes and increase reprocessing yield. Poor standings might make a faction's navy attack you in its space.
Do corporation missions to increase corporation standing
The only way to increase your standing with a corporation is to complete missions for that corporation. If you turn down more than one mission offer from the same agent within four hours, you lose standing with that agent and (I think) with the corporation as well. You can turn down only one mission from the same agent every four hours without penalty. Also, if you kill ships of a corporation, you lose standing with that corporation. If you fail a mission, or do not complete an accepted mission before it expires, you also lose standing with the corporation that gave you the mission.
Do missions for a bunch of agents of the same corporation. This will do a lot to boost your overall standing with that corporation.
How to increase faction standing
Read my guide to increasing faction standing for details on increasing faction standing.
Do missions to increase standing with an agent
To increase standing with an agent, do missions for that agent. More difficult missions usually give you more of a standing increase with that agent. Having a good standing with the corporation that that agent belongs to will give you a boost in your effective standing with that agent.
Train skills that improve standing
The following skills give you standing increases with each level: connections, criminal connections (for those of you who want to be criminals or don’t want criminals to hate you), diplomacy, and social. Train all of these skills to improve your standings with NPC agents, corporations, and factions.
Steps to take to increase your standings
If you are just starting out in the game, there might not be a lot of agents available to you. If you go to the Map, and change the settings to color stars by agents available to you, you will be able to see how far you need to travel to find an available agent. If your options are really limited, just find the nearest agent who is part of a corporation and faction that you are willing to work for, and do missions for that agent. Even completing one mission will open up more opportunities for you.
Also, if you are just starting out, train up your social, connections, and diplomacy skills. Each level you train will open up more agents.
Another method for increasing standing is to fight the enemies of a group that you want good standing with. An example is fighting NPC pirates to get an increase in standing from Concord.
Similarly, you can get standing increases by helping out a faction or corporation’s allies. The Sisters of Eve faction is allied with Gallente and Minmatar, for example, so doing missions for Gallente or Minmatar will increase your standing with Sisters of Eve.
Read about how to find agents in EVE Online.
Faction information windows will show you all of the corporations affiliated with a faction. Working for those corporations can open up missions that increase your standing with that faction.
How do I increase my CONCORD standing? Are there CONCORD missions?
At present, CONCORD does not give missions. Your standing with CONCORD is the same as your security rating. The only way to increase your security rating is to kill an NPC pirate or anything else with a bounty on it (like a pirate-owned structure).
When fighting NPC pirates to increase standing, you can only get one security rating increase every fifteen minutes, and the only increase you get is from the most dangerous pirate you defeated within that timeframe. The increases you get from pirate hunting get smaller as your security rating gets higher.
Look for NPC pirates in agent missions, complexes, and also in asteroid belts (the lower the security of the current system, the more dangerous the NPC pirates you'll find in asteroid belts). If you are looking for pirates in asteroid belts, you need to just wait around until they show up.
There are also plenty of player characters with bounties on their heads. If you wish to bounty hunt, only attack characters with a security status of -5 or worse (because then CONCORD considers them to be criminals) and only do it in low security areas of space (0.4 or lower). Otherwise, you will be in trouble with CONCORD for trying to take the law into your own hands against someone whom they do not consider to be a criminal (if the character's security is higher than -5), in a secure area of space that is patrolled by CONCORD (if the system you are in is 0.5 or higher).
Can I lower my standing on purpose?
If, for some reason, you want to bring down your standing on purpose, fail NPC missions. If you fail the faction missions that come your way, your standing will get worse with many corporations fairly quickly because of the reduction in your faction standing. You can also bring down your standing if you kill NPC ships of the factions that you want a lower standing in.