Standings design revisions

So, a couple of weeks ago I wrote this blog, where we talked about (among other things) changes to the standings system that we were planning for Tyrannis. We got some good, solid feedback in the comments thread, which prompted us to think some more about the design, and then have a meeting to discuss our plan going forward. As a result of said meeting, we are (for now) going ahead with the previous plan, but with the following changes:

• You will now be able to set standings to NPC corporations. This doesn't do a whole lot, but apparently some players like that it's there, and it's technically trivial to allow, so we're leaving it in.
• We are not changing the way that standings are calculated for the purposes of the overview. The proposed alliance>corporation>player dynamic is not being implemented, and the system as it is on TQ currently will be retained. We feel that this change is not giving sufficient benefit given both the implementational cost and the disruption it will likely cause when deployed. We reserve the right to revisit this in future.
• Starbases and outposts will gain an additional checkbox option to use alliance standings instead of corporate standings. This will be off by default, and will be configurable on a case-by-case basis. Note that this will affect all options in a station equally - it either uses the owning alliance's standings, or it uses the owning corporation's standings.
• Corporations and alliances (not individual players) will have access to an "advanced mode" when setting standings which will bring back the slider and thus allow more granularity

We'd like to say "thanks" to everyone who gave structured feedback to the last blog, as it proved very useful to us, and (we hope) will result in a better user experience for everyone.

-- CCP Greyscale