you know, to beeing able to compete on the market, you simply go to a beta outpost with refining III and then haul the stuff to the rank III factory

you can out-bid any high-standing-alpha dweller without any standing grind at all. One issue i see is, that the standing bonus has the very same effecto on a RANK III facility as it has on a Rank II  - or even more (recycling eg.)

Standing should be an option to increase your efficiency in pve space (you want to be in safety of syndicate protection -> then you have to do something to compensate for it)

PvP island deweller should get no standing bonus on their already high level facilites of outposts they own. Next step would be PoS facilities which will have better production without any standing influence...

After the outpost changes to prevent neutral docking, then unaffliated alpha players will never have access to level III to get that advantage, regardless of the risk they are willing to take.

Again, that's not an issue if the beta corps would have some reason to sell refined goods back to alpha, and we're back to NIC sinks for beta owners.

But in the Alpha/beta thread, there's the issue that owning an outpost doesn't mean anything, I doubt adding more cost that requires them to use part of their already risky mining just to generate NIC would make the outposts more desirable.

Then again, the owner that opens the refinery up to neutrals will get a huge boost from the players using it right? Not sure how that works, since there's no NIC cost associated with refining.

not to give away secrets, but if I was going to take 1 outpost on each of the beta-1 islands, the refinery's would be the targets. totally gimp the whole islands production. Or if I was in an alliance, that's the one I would want incase the deal went south.