Originally Posted by chuckskull
Thanks mate, do you know if regional standing plays a part? I got one guy up to 5.6 with no level 2 agent, he wasn't in my corp though so i figured that was the problem, got a 0 quality agent up to 4.something in my corp now, so I should get a new agent soon hopefully.
There are 3 types of standings (can be viewed on your Character's Standing page).
Agent Standing (bottom list of the page): - Quickest to rise and only affects the "Effective Quality" of the agent (can be seen under agent info). The more missions you do with that agent, the slightly more rewards you get in money, LP and corp standing increase. Does not affect what what level agents are available to you.
Corp Standing (middle): - Increases when you do a mission for them and slower than agent standing. If you right click the corp in your Character's Standing page, you can select show transactions to see how much standings increase you are getting per mission. This value affects what level agents are available to you.
Decreases when you destroy their ships (usually only pirate faction will decrease this way).
Faction Standing (top list): - This only increases when you do a Storyline mission. That faction's standings towards other factions will affect your standings as well. For example, when you complete a storyline mission for a Gallente corp, your Gallente faction will increase. As the Gallente has positive standings towards Minmatar and Servants of Eve, those standings will also increase (in fact, SOE increases quicker than Gallente for some reason!
). They also don't like the Caldari and Amarr, so those standings will drop. It also drops when you destory their ships (normally in missions for the other faction). As nimbu said above, this value also affects what level agents are available to you, but for all corps that are associated with that faction.
Not sure, but be careful that they don't drop too low otherwise you might not be allowed in their space (-5.0 maybe). Personally, I would get a mission or two for all sides so that you can work for them at some point later in your career as the corp standings hold their value regardless if the faction value drops.
Just to check that you are searching for agents yourself rather than waiting for an EVEmail to tell you that there's one available?