Those of us who have successfully ranked up to Baron or higher (or the Federal equivalent) in a major faction's navy, or who have achieved Friendly or higher reputation with a major faction, have already wrapped our heads around the very obtuse and nonintuitive way that rank progression and reputation progress works. But I see _many_ posts and threads demonstrating great confusion with these two systems and no clear guides yet. Like many other players strugging through the progression, I often wondered if I was being hampered by an outright bug or simply didn't understand the mechanics. Searching for keywords to help answer these questions found only threads where most people surmised that rank progression was just outright broken, and the few voices here and there who tried to explain how it worked and how it wasn't broken were hard to find and not very detailed. So, hopefully this guide will be remembered and pointed to when the next OMG IT'S BROKEN thread arises.
Note: this guide will not discuss "influence". The community as a whole seems to be demonstrating to FD that influence is indeed broken right now, or else we just haven't reverse-engineered how it works yet. EDIT: Everything the community knows about "influence" so far is summarized quite handily in this one post in the long "Mercs of Mikuun" thread. Give some rep to the commander who painstakingly compiled and summarized this _great_ list of dev quotes.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=97577&page=13&p=1527442&viewfull=1#post1527442
-----Does this sound like you?-----
So: You're trying to reach Baron rank in the Empire so you can finally buy that sweet Imperial Clipper, but those "naval ascension" mission never seem to appear, or flowed nicely for a while and then suddenly stopped for many days or even weeks. (The bug allowing the Clipper to be purchased earlier than Baron rank has been squashed in v1.05, BTW.) Or you're getting shot at in various systems--perhaps suddenly and unexpectedly--and you've become aware of this thing called "reputation" and are now trying to improve it, but it never seems to go up. Or you've gotten a new system permit invitation, and after visiting the system you don't get any "message" or "communique" as clearly stated in the special summons, and then the SAME permit invitation keeps appearing in the "unobtainable" section of your bulletin boards. Or, you get scanned for hauling some "illegal" cargo and your reputation with a major faction suddenly goes from ALLIED to UNFRIENDLY. Say whaaa?
Do scenarios like this mean you are bugged? Is this bug the reason you haven't seen a new rank mission in ages, or the reason you haven't seen your reputation with a major faction change in weeks? No, probably not. There actually IS a rhyme and reason to both rank progression and reputation progression. (Well, TBH the system permit system IS buggy as heck, but not in a way that hampers either your rank/reputation progession OR that hampers your system permit unlock progression. And yes, SOL permits are currently bugged for beta players, but again not in a way that hampers anything except perhaps subsequent permit unlocks for Federation-aligned players.)
----- Rank vs Reputation vs System Permit Unlocks -----
Naval ranks and reputation "ranks" are not the same thing, and they have a _mostly_ independent progression. System permit unlocks are also a _mostly_ independent progression. More about the specific dependencies in a moment.
Indicators of naval rank progression are very clear: you get a clearly different "naval ascension" mission (or similar title) in your bulletin board list, you complete the mission, and you can clearly see the rank label change in the REPUTATION sub-tab of your System window's STATUS tab from "Squire" to "Knight" (and so on). One mission: one rank. If you want details on each specific rank and what type of missions you must run to advance each rank, you can look at some excellent guides by Commander Fenris Wolf that I'll link in another section further below (SPOILER ALERT).
However, indicators of reputation progression are more obtuse. All you ever see are some blue or red arrows in the REPUTATION sub-tab (or in the mission completion screen). Sometimes those arrows disappear entirely. What's going on?
-----How rank, reputation, and system permits relate to each other-----
Your reputation with each MAJOR faction is the primary driver to rank progression and system permits. However, there is ALSO some RNG randomness involved! Think of it like this: You have a hidden "reputation score" with each major faction. You can see only broad labels like Hostile, Neutral, Friendly, Allied, and so on. But each of these broad "bands" of reputation comprise a range of numeric values. For example, when the number hits a certain point, you get bumped up to "Friendly". If the number drops below that point again, you drop back to "Neutral".
Where it gets tricky is that the numeric value of your "reputation score" ALSO drives certain thresholds after which some RNG kicks in to determine when you'll see your next rank ascension mission or your next system permit unlock. Even more tricky: these threshold values are DIFFERENT from the points at which the broad labels like Hostile, Neutral, Friendly, etc. are applied.
So: you just finished one rank mission for "Serf", and the _very_ next time you open a bulletin board you see another "ascension opportunity" mission! You complete that one, and now you've gone from Outsider > Serf > Master in just two back-to-back trips! But then.... 5 days (or more) go by and you don't see another "ascension opportunity". This is all explained by thresholds and RNG. What happened in this scenario is that you actually hit the Empire reputation score to unlock the "Serf" mission several days ago, but RNG prevented it from appearing in a bulletin board. In the meantime, you kept advancing your reputation with the Empire and finally kicked it over the threshold for the "Master" mission. Then, finally, the RNG gods rolled in your favor and finally made the "Serf" mission pop, and on your next visit to the bulletin board, the RNG gods again rolled in your favor and you got the "Master" mission pop. But after that point? Who knows? Maybe the RNG gods just hate you for the next 5 days, OR, you might have actually lowered your underlying reputation score with the Empire and not even have realized it.
The bottom line here is this: to advance your naval ranks, you simply must keep working diligently to push up your reputation with the associated MAJOR faction, AND you must also be patient and pray to the RNG gods to smile down upon you. However, there are lots of ways you might be letting that reputation score drop down, without realizing it, which might take the RNG gods completely out of the equation for a while. We'll cover how this works in the next section.
This pattern I've described for the naval rank unlocks is exactly the same for the system permit unlocks. You hit a certain threshold score, and now RNG might finally roll your invitation to the locked system.
Let's step aside for a moment to talk about the one thing about system permits that is truly buggy ATM. Well, two things that are buggy. There _seems_ to be a genuine bug where beta people who already unlocked SOL are not actually able to visit SOL post-release, and the post-release version of the system invite is persistenly in the "unobtainable" section of the mission board. That said, what those beta folks might be experiencing is the next bug, which applies to EVERYONE. The bug has two separate issues:
1. Your summons to visit a system like "Summerland" (Empire) clearly states to look for a "communique" when you arrive at Summerland. However, this is just flavor text, and is totally misleading. Because there is no communique.
2. The same summons to Summerland (or whatever) keeps appearing in the unobtainable section of the bulletin board after that. And keeps appearing. Sometimes appearing twice in the same bulletin board!
The important point is that: A) you have successfully unlocked Summerland (or whatever), and B), at some point in the future you will eventually pass the reputation threshold needed for the _next_ system permit mission, and it's all up the RNG gods after that. In the meantime, it's nothing more than an annoying bug that you keep seeing those summons in the BB. Most importantly, NOTHING about this particular bug affects or "breaks" your naval rank progression or your reputation growth/loss with the Major faction.
-----How exactly do you control your MAJOR faction reputation growth?-----
Because the obtuse blue/red indicators are not well understood, it's hard to tell exactly why your reputation gain with a Major faction might seem to have stalled out. For a long time. OMG IS IT BUGGED? No. All is well. And actualy the mechanics are pretty easy to understand and explain. Just not that easy to reverse engineer.
A) Your rep with each MAJOR faction relies on the cumulative growth of your reputation with multiple MINOR factions.
B) It's not enough to become "Allied" with just two or three MINOR factions. At some point, your MAJOR faction growth will stall out unless you increase reputation with _more_ different MINOR factions.
C) It's _far_ easier to lose reputation than to gain it. If you botch one mission or inadvertently do anything to cause a red "down" arrow for a faction, it takes multiple blue "up" arrows to eventually compensate for the loss. You can dig yourself a hole that will take a _very_ long time to crawl up out of. Of special note: smuggling illegal goods or shooting at a "clean" target can cause a HUGE reputation drop if you don't pay the associated fines on time! (For example: Why is it so easy to ruin your reputation?). PAY YOUR FINES PROMPTLY, and don't freak out when you see a huge reputation swing: it might simply be temporary until you pay off the fines. Even after paying the fines, you might need to relog before you see your reputation restored correctly.
D) Every blue "up" arrow for a minor faction at mission completion also contributes to a positive improvement for the minor faction's associated MAJOR faction. BUT ONLY TO A POINT! Basically, once your minor faction's visible "band" hits ALLIED, either it completely stops contributing to the major faction's reputation gain or at the very least tapers off to a much flatter slope of improvement. The bottom line is simple: STOP ranking up a minor faction after you hit ALLIED, and go find _other_ minor factions that you haven't ranked up yet. For example, I was stalled out at "Lord" rank in the Empire navy for a long time. As soon as I experimented with consciously raising my reputation for three entirely new minor factions in the Empire that I hadn't yet done missions for, within just a couple hours my "Baron" mission finally popped. Before that, I had been trade grinding for my Clipper out of stations that made me allied with only three different Empire sub-factions, so I wasn't hitting the threshold needed to tell the RNG gods to make with the "Baron" opportunity. This entire time, I was sitting at "Friendly" with the Empire as a whole.
E) It has been surmised by some players that if you do missions for a minor faction that is not aligned with the controlling faction for a station, then you make greater reputation gains both for the minor faction and the associated major faction. Me? I'm not so sure, but I'll throw that out here for consideration. Not really sure how to test the verity of this assertion or not.
F) If you do missions for a MINOR faction that does not also belong to the MAJOR faction you're trying to improve your reputation for, then you will not grow your MAJOR reputation. You should always look closely at the REPUTATION sub-tab of your System window's STATUS tab for every new station before you start pulling missions from the bulletin board. Make sure that you choose missions ONLY from those minor factions that are allied with the major faction you're trying to improve! Any one system typically has a mixture of minor factions from _different_ major factions operating inside of it. Know your factions!
-----Fenris Wolf's excellent guides to specific naval ranks (SPOILERS)-----
http://www.fenris.co.uk/elite/pilot-military-ranks/
http://www.fenris.co.uk/elite/empire-ranks/
http://www.fenris.co.uk/elite/federal-ranks/
Note: this guide will not discuss "influence". The community as a whole seems to be demonstrating to FD that influence is indeed broken right now, or else we just haven't reverse-engineered how it works yet. EDIT: Everything the community knows about "influence" so far is summarized quite handily in this one post in the long "Mercs of Mikuun" thread. Give some rep to the commander who painstakingly compiled and summarized this _great_ list of dev quotes.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=97577&page=13&p=1527442&viewfull=1#post1527442
-----Does this sound like you?-----
So: You're trying to reach Baron rank in the Empire so you can finally buy that sweet Imperial Clipper, but those "naval ascension" mission never seem to appear, or flowed nicely for a while and then suddenly stopped for many days or even weeks. (The bug allowing the Clipper to be purchased earlier than Baron rank has been squashed in v1.05, BTW.) Or you're getting shot at in various systems--perhaps suddenly and unexpectedly--and you've become aware of this thing called "reputation" and are now trying to improve it, but it never seems to go up. Or you've gotten a new system permit invitation, and after visiting the system you don't get any "message" or "communique" as clearly stated in the special summons, and then the SAME permit invitation keeps appearing in the "unobtainable" section of your bulletin boards. Or, you get scanned for hauling some "illegal" cargo and your reputation with a major faction suddenly goes from ALLIED to UNFRIENDLY. Say whaaa?
Do scenarios like this mean you are bugged? Is this bug the reason you haven't seen a new rank mission in ages, or the reason you haven't seen your reputation with a major faction change in weeks? No, probably not. There actually IS a rhyme and reason to both rank progression and reputation progression. (Well, TBH the system permit system IS buggy as heck, but not in a way that hampers either your rank/reputation progession OR that hampers your system permit unlock progression. And yes, SOL permits are currently bugged for beta players, but again not in a way that hampers anything except perhaps subsequent permit unlocks for Federation-aligned players.)
----- Rank vs Reputation vs System Permit Unlocks -----
Naval ranks and reputation "ranks" are not the same thing, and they have a _mostly_ independent progression. System permit unlocks are also a _mostly_ independent progression. More about the specific dependencies in a moment.
Indicators of naval rank progression are very clear: you get a clearly different "naval ascension" mission (or similar title) in your bulletin board list, you complete the mission, and you can clearly see the rank label change in the REPUTATION sub-tab of your System window's STATUS tab from "Squire" to "Knight" (and so on). One mission: one rank. If you want details on each specific rank and what type of missions you must run to advance each rank, you can look at some excellent guides by Commander Fenris Wolf that I'll link in another section further below (SPOILER ALERT).
However, indicators of reputation progression are more obtuse. All you ever see are some blue or red arrows in the REPUTATION sub-tab (or in the mission completion screen). Sometimes those arrows disappear entirely. What's going on?
-----How rank, reputation, and system permits relate to each other-----
Your reputation with each MAJOR faction is the primary driver to rank progression and system permits. However, there is ALSO some RNG randomness involved! Think of it like this: You have a hidden "reputation score" with each major faction. You can see only broad labels like Hostile, Neutral, Friendly, Allied, and so on. But each of these broad "bands" of reputation comprise a range of numeric values. For example, when the number hits a certain point, you get bumped up to "Friendly". If the number drops below that point again, you drop back to "Neutral".
Where it gets tricky is that the numeric value of your "reputation score" ALSO drives certain thresholds after which some RNG kicks in to determine when you'll see your next rank ascension mission or your next system permit unlock. Even more tricky: these threshold values are DIFFERENT from the points at which the broad labels like Hostile, Neutral, Friendly, etc. are applied.
So: you just finished one rank mission for "Serf", and the _very_ next time you open a bulletin board you see another "ascension opportunity" mission! You complete that one, and now you've gone from Outsider > Serf > Master in just two back-to-back trips! But then.... 5 days (or more) go by and you don't see another "ascension opportunity". This is all explained by thresholds and RNG. What happened in this scenario is that you actually hit the Empire reputation score to unlock the "Serf" mission several days ago, but RNG prevented it from appearing in a bulletin board. In the meantime, you kept advancing your reputation with the Empire and finally kicked it over the threshold for the "Master" mission. Then, finally, the RNG gods rolled in your favor and finally made the "Serf" mission pop, and on your next visit to the bulletin board, the RNG gods again rolled in your favor and you got the "Master" mission pop. But after that point? Who knows? Maybe the RNG gods just hate you for the next 5 days, OR, you might have actually lowered your underlying reputation score with the Empire and not even have realized it.
The bottom line here is this: to advance your naval ranks, you simply must keep working diligently to push up your reputation with the associated MAJOR faction, AND you must also be patient and pray to the RNG gods to smile down upon you. However, there are lots of ways you might be letting that reputation score drop down, without realizing it, which might take the RNG gods completely out of the equation for a while. We'll cover how this works in the next section.
This pattern I've described for the naval rank unlocks is exactly the same for the system permit unlocks. You hit a certain threshold score, and now RNG might finally roll your invitation to the locked system.
Let's step aside for a moment to talk about the one thing about system permits that is truly buggy ATM. Well, two things that are buggy. There _seems_ to be a genuine bug where beta people who already unlocked SOL are not actually able to visit SOL post-release, and the post-release version of the system invite is persistenly in the "unobtainable" section of the mission board. That said, what those beta folks might be experiencing is the next bug, which applies to EVERYONE. The bug has two separate issues:
1. Your summons to visit a system like "Summerland" (Empire) clearly states to look for a "communique" when you arrive at Summerland. However, this is just flavor text, and is totally misleading. Because there is no communique.
2. The same summons to Summerland (or whatever) keeps appearing in the unobtainable section of the bulletin board after that. And keeps appearing. Sometimes appearing twice in the same bulletin board!
The important point is that: A) you have successfully unlocked Summerland (or whatever), and B), at some point in the future you will eventually pass the reputation threshold needed for the _next_ system permit mission, and it's all up the RNG gods after that. In the meantime, it's nothing more than an annoying bug that you keep seeing those summons in the BB. Most importantly, NOTHING about this particular bug affects or "breaks" your naval rank progression or your reputation growth/loss with the Major faction.
-----How exactly do you control your MAJOR faction reputation growth?-----
Because the obtuse blue/red indicators are not well understood, it's hard to tell exactly why your reputation gain with a Major faction might seem to have stalled out. For a long time. OMG IS IT BUGGED? No. All is well. And actualy the mechanics are pretty easy to understand and explain. Just not that easy to reverse engineer.
A) Your rep with each MAJOR faction relies on the cumulative growth of your reputation with multiple MINOR factions.
B) It's not enough to become "Allied" with just two or three MINOR factions. At some point, your MAJOR faction growth will stall out unless you increase reputation with _more_ different MINOR factions.
C) It's _far_ easier to lose reputation than to gain it. If you botch one mission or inadvertently do anything to cause a red "down" arrow for a faction, it takes multiple blue "up" arrows to eventually compensate for the loss. You can dig yourself a hole that will take a _very_ long time to crawl up out of. Of special note: smuggling illegal goods or shooting at a "clean" target can cause a HUGE reputation drop if you don't pay the associated fines on time! (For example: Why is it so easy to ruin your reputation?). PAY YOUR FINES PROMPTLY, and don't freak out when you see a huge reputation swing: it might simply be temporary until you pay off the fines. Even after paying the fines, you might need to relog before you see your reputation restored correctly.
D) Every blue "up" arrow for a minor faction at mission completion also contributes to a positive improvement for the minor faction's associated MAJOR faction. BUT ONLY TO A POINT! Basically, once your minor faction's visible "band" hits ALLIED, either it completely stops contributing to the major faction's reputation gain or at the very least tapers off to a much flatter slope of improvement. The bottom line is simple: STOP ranking up a minor faction after you hit ALLIED, and go find _other_ minor factions that you haven't ranked up yet. For example, I was stalled out at "Lord" rank in the Empire navy for a long time. As soon as I experimented with consciously raising my reputation for three entirely new minor factions in the Empire that I hadn't yet done missions for, within just a couple hours my "Baron" mission finally popped. Before that, I had been trade grinding for my Clipper out of stations that made me allied with only three different Empire sub-factions, so I wasn't hitting the threshold needed to tell the RNG gods to make with the "Baron" opportunity. This entire time, I was sitting at "Friendly" with the Empire as a whole.
E) It has been surmised by some players that if you do missions for a minor faction that is not aligned with the controlling faction for a station, then you make greater reputation gains both for the minor faction and the associated major faction. Me? I'm not so sure, but I'll throw that out here for consideration. Not really sure how to test the verity of this assertion or not.
F) If you do missions for a MINOR faction that does not also belong to the MAJOR faction you're trying to improve your reputation for, then you will not grow your MAJOR reputation. You should always look closely at the REPUTATION sub-tab of your System window's STATUS tab for every new station before you start pulling missions from the bulletin board. Make sure that you choose missions ONLY from those minor factions that are allied with the major faction you're trying to improve! Any one system typically has a mixture of minor factions from _different_ major factions operating inside of it. Know your factions!
-----Fenris Wolf's excellent guides to specific naval ranks (SPOILERS)-----
http://www.fenris.co.uk/elite/pilot-military-ranks/
http://www.fenris.co.uk/elite/empire-ranks/
http://www.fenris.co.uk/elite/federal-ranks/
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