Intel sales reputation caps question

[banq]

While selling intel to contacts I noticed that there are thresholds that prevent you from gaining more rep. I actually tried to up my e-rep for some service and wondered why it did not increase. Once the cap is hit you gain only money and influence by selling intel records.
Does anyone know if they are fixed or influenced by something? Faction rep seems to be capped around 30 and personal rep varied between 30-60 for me (I only checked 3 contacts, though).

Furthermore if you bulk sale a large amount of intel in one sales session the p-rep cap gets obliterated and you basically don't have to bother with rep for this contact anymore for the rest of the game. I hope the capped rep is the intended behaviour as it would make intel less OP. (screenshot shows same amount of intel records sold each; all at once and one after another at multiple visits)

[drspendlove]

Bulk sale as in selling many sets of intel? Or as in selling a larger set of intel?

I've noticed the limit as well but didn't know this trick to bypass it.

[daveal]

I'm interested in the "real answer" but to me, it seems that there are two equations: (1) how much selling intel to one contact affects the whole faction's rep, and (2) how much selling affects that contact's personal rep and influence. Your finding that (1) has a diminishing effect makes sense to me; you can bring the faction rep up from a negative or small positive value, but you have to do something more "global" to raise faction rep higher. On the other hand, (2) is much more personal and I can see that selling more will keep having a similar effect.

Personally, I find that the quickest way to develop any contact is to carry around a bunch of intel. I only look for contacts who buy intel, the other ones are almost useless to me. I visit the contact with negative influence, dump 6-8 intel loads, get this huge raise in influence and p-rep, and then buy whatever I went there for. It may be possible to do 10-15 missions to raise influence from negative, to a useful value; but the intel dump is instant. I hope they do not make any change to remove this effect.

I don't think this is a "trick" to bypass something, but it is a useful observation that the intel dump approach is not effective for faction rep. Only for personal rep and influence.

In related news, does anybody have a solution for easily raising faction rep from a negative value?  Once or twice, I can find a contact (a) of the right faction, (b) who grants pardons, (c) who buys intel.  Then it is easy.  Otherwise it seems pretty impossible.  In one merchant game, I have over 60 contacts, but there are two factions who are not represented at all.  I have negative rep with them and no apparent way to improve it.  I am reluctant to go wandering around the 20+ contacts who grant introductions hoping that one of them may offer a contact from these two factions.  Even if they did, chances are (b) would fail.

[Cory Trese]

Thanks for the posts. We will keep working on improving the balancing for Contact Intel sales while monitoring the average player experience.

May 20, 2018 5:59:55 GMT -5 banq said:

Furthermore if you bulk sale a large amount of intel in one sales session the p-rep cap gets obliterated and you basically don't have to bother with rep for this contact anymore for the rest of the game. I hope the capped rep is the intended behaviour as it would make intel less OP.

I was able to fix the bug with repeated sales.

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