Increasing Faction Standings with Tags

For some time I have been queuing up production jobs that would be well suited for highsec. In order to anchor a POS in highsec, your corporation needs to have 5.0+ standings with the appropriate faction [detailed guide].

Since my main character has run a lot of Gallente missions in the past for ISK and has Social IV, he started off this task with a standing of 3.12 to the Gallente Federation.

Rather than grinding out more missions, I found out that there are a series of one-time agents for each faction that will trade in tags for standings. There are four Data Centers, one for each empire, located in New Eden where you can turn in tags.

You can collect these tags by running missions or by buying them off the market. A bunch of tags for one empire’s Data Center agents came out to around 352 M ISK on the Jita market. I didn’t see any major swings in prices or obvious market manipulation attempts, so I bought enough for all the agents.

Turning in these tags raised my standing from 3.12 to 4.95 with Social IV. After Social V completes, I should have more than the required 5.0 base standing in order to anchor a POS in highsec. [edit] Apparently Social skills do not come into play with anchoring rights. It appears I will have to do some more grinding to get the base standing up to 5.0+.

Chatting with all the Data Center agents

Since corporation standings are calculated as ‘the average of all corporation member standings towards that faction after the period of a week’, I will have to move this character into a 1 member corporation and wait for the standings to update.

No rush on this project, but I wanted to get the standings in order now so when it comes time to light up the production lines, I can immediately drop a POS. If you don’t want to raise your corporation’s standings yourself, you can even hire a guy to do it for you.

Perhaps I will wait for the POS rework before starting this production project. From what I have gathered listening to current CSM Chairman Seleene, the POS redesign is in the works. I haven’t been able to determine if this is slated for Winter 2012 or for Summer 2013.