The Initiative to Reset All Standings on January 1st

It was announced at the weekly fireside this past Saturday that The Initiative would be resetting standings with all of its “blues” as of January 1, 2025.

For those not familiar with the arcane ways of New Eden, there is built into the game a way to set standings between individuals, corporations, and alliances.   There are five settings.

Those are all my personal standings, the blues being mostly people I know outside of the game.  The blocked list are chat spammers I’ve blocked, a few of whom are in GSF.  Block can also be done to corporations or alliances, though somebody would have to have a pretty bad reputation for spamming in the game to get that sort of treatment.

Anyway, standings can be used as a filter for the overview, so you can setup an overview that only shows hostiles rather than having to pick out the right ships to shoot when there might be hundreds in range or on grid with you.

Standings are also inherited down through the hierarchy, so I can set my own standings while I also get the standings my corporation sets and everybody in my corporation gets the standings the alliance sets, all unless overridden.

The alliance level standings are what enables the meta organizations, the coalitions and what not, that otherwise have no supporting structure within the game.  There is no coalition management panel.  That is all done as part of the game meta on voice coms outside of New Eden.

When The Initiative left the Imperium back at the start of 2023, there was no in-game real in-game change.  They opted to leave us with blue standings and the relationship between the Imperium and them was more a matter of changing rules and probably some access lists.  We were no longer allowed to rat or mine in their space, as an example, and they were likewise barred from doing so in our space.  They also no longer had access to our voice coms and web resources.

But the standings were still blue.

You can see how neither I nor my corporation has to set standings, they are blue based off of the alliance setting.

All of which meant that while The Initiative was no longer part of our coalition structure, they were still friends and we could cooperate with them on specific operations, sort of like the relationship between NATO and France in the 70s.  France was always going to help defend against the Soviet Union, even if they didn’t want to be fully invested in everything NATO did.

Resetting standings with the Imperium takes that relationship in a new direction.  Their ships will now be hostile… the neutral gray, but still targets… and shot on site… we’re an NBSI, or “Not Blue, Shoot It,” coalition… and they will be able to roam, gank our ratters, and do all the things that people not on our friends list.

Does this mean that there will be war?  Probably not.  My first thought, and apparently the thought of many others, was that with GSF moving east to Tenerifis, what The Initiative really wanted to do was farm Brave, their new neighbors in Delve.  Farming Brave for content has a long and storied history and part of the reason that Brave is in the Imperium now is that they were kind of sick of that shit.

Which brings us to the grim reality of the null sect situation is that there are two major blocs, some pets/partners (your own allies are partners, your enemy’s allies are pets), and a few neutrals who are either out of the path of invasion routes (Provi) or who keep their heads low enough to be ignored.  But unless you’re allied with a bloc in some way, you are subject to whims and pressures of the larger powers.

On the null sec influence map you can compare the number of alliances on the left side version with the coalitions on the right.

The Imperium is in the south, with The Initiative in the central west, marked as neutral but only in that they are not directly linked to the Imperium.  The reset will make them “more” neutral, though we’ll have to see how that works out in reality.

There are also some non-neutral neutrals in between.  Phoenix Coalition, squeezed between PandaFam and The Initiative exists only through PandaFam’s sufferance and had to sign a treaty that forbade them from aligning with or helping the Imperium in any while putting up with whatever PandaFam wanted.  Likewise, there are some buffer states in the southeast that lean one way or the other.

In reaction to this news there were announcements that WinterCo, centered on Fraternity, and PanFam, centered on Pandemic Horde, were considering a reset between the groups.  WinterCo stated:

And from Gobbins:

WinterCo and PanFam have worked so closely together since World War Bee it was easier just to call them PandaFam.  Now they say that they too will reset each other, though they both represent coalitions of multiple alliances, so this is not exactly the atomization of null sec.

There will still be three large coalitions and The Initiative, the fourth largest alliance by membership now, sitting between two of them.  Coalitions form out of necessity or common purpose.  It isn’t clear that The Initiative resetting all of its blue or PanFam and WinterCo cutting formal ties will result in any sort of shakeup.

But we shall see in the new year.  I’m still not betting against The Initiative simply farming Brave for content.