Since a lot of the most PvP-oriented RP corps and RPers have gone through FW at some point, they are now saddled with standings which prevent them from even entering another factions' highsec (or at least, not without hordes of NPC Navy spawning). This presents a huge discouragement into making noise in other peoples' space - you're not only fighting them, you're fighting endlessly respawning waves of NPCs as well. Neutral space exists, but represents a fraction of the available regions (and may be difficult for some parties to reach).
I have been in FW for more than 3 years and have plexed quite a lot. Not as much as the crazy plexers like 1PG or some PIE pilots in the first days or some others, but enough to be in the top VP tier on 1PG killboards for a while.
I have also run since I started eve a shitload of standard L4s before that and even during FW, most of them for Amarr. Even when I was in Providence (2007) my only income came from L4s and the new LP system that was very profitable. Most of the time I also ran the missions against gallente, minmatar, or even caldari NPCs, which was not very good for my standings. I have stopped now, ofc, but I still used to do it until I left FW and started to change my mind regarding my standings.
So, in the end, I still have never been barred from any other faction territory, except through FW mechanisms. The worst I got was with the Republic (around -8.2 raw) mostly due to FW consequences, which obliged me to skill up diplomacy V. But after 3 years of plexing I have always been surprised not to be lower. In any case, when I left FW I was still able to go in Republic space with my -8 standings and diplomacy V, putting me slightly above -5 (-4.7 effective).
However I know some people that have terrible standings for any reason and can't really fix that easily, even through missions, because running L1 missions until you get a positive standing with the faction is a nightmare. Same for me, I did not choose to do that, it is just silly or masochist.
But you have several good options left :
- Running missions for a secondary faction to gain indirect faction standings with the factions whose standings you want to fix. SOE, for example. Works not bad since fixing very bad standings goes A LOT quicker than upping positive standings.
- Running COSMOS ? Not tried yet, and requires standings for some.
- Running epic arcs. This is the win solution imo. I recently ran again the SOE noob arc and choose the republic agent at the end. It gives you +8% standings. It is something like 0.25 or 0.50 when you are at 0 iirc. Here, it gave me above +1.0 standings. Now, keep in mind that's just the noob epic arc that gives 8%. The L4 epic arcs give +12%. I ran the gallente one and got incredible standing boosts, to the point with doing it twice + running SOE + running the SOE noob arc in the first place made me go from -6 (raw) to +1.0.
All of this, without any opposite factions standing losses.So yeah, I would say that once out of FW, it is not very hard to fix standing issues really.