Missions in EVE are similar to daily quests in WoW. They are boring, sometimes outright annoying and pay pocket change. Yet they are hard to avoid for any businessman because they provide not only starter ISK but standing (reputation) with the various corporations and your state and you'll need these to decrease broker fees, refinery and manufacturing costs. The formula for broker fees is BrokerFee% = (1 – 0.05*BrokerRelationsLevel)/ exp(0.1 *FactionStanding + 0.04*CorporationStanding). Running missions is something that you can do as a low-skill new player, so doing them now is much better than later when you have the skills for doing something more profitable.
There are several kind of missions, provided by agents. Security department agents send you to kill NPCs, bleh. Mining divison agents want you to travel to some spot and mine quest ore for them. If you want to be a miner, go for them (though mining is grindy with low ISK/hour and miners are favorite targets of griefers). However our favorite agents will be the distibution agents.
Their jobs are similar, though the quest texts are worth reading, some of them are really charming (my favorite is when you must transport homeless people to other station since they couldn't find an excuse to just throw them out of the airlock). They give you an item and tell you were to bring it. Or they give you a location where you must go, pick up the item and bring it back to them. For level 1 agents the range is 0-2 jumps (0 meaning another station in the same system), level 2 agents send you 0-3, level 3 ones send you to 0-5 and level 4 agents has the nasty habit to send you to the end of the world or worse: low sec systems. To make it worse, you can't just decline what you don't like. You have 1 decline chance every 4 hours, if you decline again, you lose standings with the agent and the organization which that would give standing upon completion.
So are we condemned to do 4-6 jumps for a single low-paying mission that will give you some lousy 0.01-0.03 standing (and you need 5+)? Absolutely not. Here is what you shall do: open the agent finder and check out where the highest available level of distribution agents of your target corporation sit. One by one set your destination to them, but don't fly. Open the starmap and you see a bright line from your current location to the home of the agent, showing exactly where he is. If he is in a system which connect to several ones, check the next agent. What you seek is a linear chain of systems like this:
Now go to the end of the line and open the agent finder and configure it to find all available distribution agents in the region. They are sorted by distance so the first page always have the agents in the current system. Watch out for the rank slider on the top. The higher you set it, the higher the rewards will be, but the less agents you can access. Their accessiblity depends on existing faction and corporation standing. It's sometimes better to do lot of lvl 2 missions than a few 3 or 4. Always stick to one level, don't mix them.
Pick the first agent, dock on his stations and pick up his missions and cargo. If he would send you out of your interest zone, decline and ask again. If he sends you out again (both are unlikely), press "delay" and leave him be. Repeat it with all agents in the system unless your cargohold is full.
Some of the missions send you to the same system, complete them, grab new. After these, jump to the next system, complete all the missions that sent you to this system and pick up the ones from the agents living here. If you have empty cargo space, dock at the agents first, maybe they send you somewhere in-system, with some luck to a station where you already have something to drop. Continue this to the end of the line and start moving backwards. Never turn back for a mission, always run the pre-set route. This way you can run several missions in the same time:
Keeping the agents locations organized, planning which mission to dock first to be within the time bonus window, who are on the 4 hour cooldown, and who don't can can be declined to get a new mission (or new cooldown), who to skip when the cargohold is full (will be full, even if you have your Badger II or equivalent, fitted with cargohold expander IIs as it should) needs attention, organization skills and attention divided to several directions, making the activity challenging = fun.
And what about profit?
But the real reward is not money. There are "storyline agents", who contact you via notification when you did 16 missions for the same faction. They are balanced for normal gameplay, to appear once a day maybe. Since the above screenshot shows about 25 completed missions / hour, they appear very frequently for you. Keep your mission count well recorded (you can use the wallet too to count agent mission reward fields). Complete 15 missions, not 16. Actually you should complete just 14 to be sure not to trigger early. Then open the agent finder and select the corporation you want standing with, for example Caldari Navy, the owners of Jita 4-4. Set the agent type to "storyline" and the level to 1 (don't worry, the mission level won't be 1). Now go to the system where this agent is and change the agent finder settings back. Find an agent in the system or one of the neighboring systems who is on the same level as your previous 15 missions. Pick up and complete his mission (two missions if you did 14). Soon after completion your storyline agent will contact you via notification and offer his mission. This mission will give lot of corporation and faction standing. Sometimes they are mean and give you a combat quest, then hire someone to do it for you, they worth their price.
Standings explained: By default a corporation doesn't know you and you have 0 standing. By completing missions to them, you gain standings, up to 10. To use their station services you have to pay them, for example to refine veldspar into tritanium, you'd have to give them 5% of the yielded tritanium if your standing is zero. With 6.6 standing they take nothing.
The standing increase depend on the current standing. You can never reach 10.00, as the mission reward is multiplied by (1-current_standing/10). So a mission that gives 1 standing at 0 will give you 0.5 when you are 5 and 0.11 when 9.
There are two skills affecting standing: one is "social" that simply increases mission reward by 5% per rank. With Social rank 4 you get 20% bonus to missions. The other is "connections" that give a boost in a weird way: 0.04/rank/missing standing. So if your standing is 0.001 (doesn't work with 0.0), you get 0.4 standing/rank, as you have 10 points missing from the maximum. If your standing is 5, you'll get 0.2/rank. It is a huge boost at the start, allowing better deals with corporations you barely know and faster reaching the higher level agents, but the benefit diminishes as you gain standing.
You can access level 2 agents if your standing is 1 or more, level 3 at 3+, level 4 at 5+. The level 1 agents are always available. However there is a trick here: the agents don't only belong to a corporation but also to a state. So if you have high standing with your state (which is easy if you did your starter missions in all 3 hubs and did storyline missions via the mass missioning technique listed above), you can access rank 3 agents to companies where your standing is just 0.01.
By running missions you also get loyalty points that you can spend in the loyalty store (uniform guy icon in the station). The really good items (like unique ships) cost lot of points, much more than anyone shall spend doing missions. The mass missioning technique provide lot of LP, but to different corporations and they can't be combined.
There are some more skills to be considered:
One more thing you should know: states and organizations have standing to each other. If it's positive, whenever you get standing with one, you get some with another. If it's negative, you lose standing with the other. For example the Gallente Federation has -5 standing with the Caldari state. If I gain 1 standing with Caldari, I lose 0.5 with Gallente. At -5 their ships start attacking me. You can prevent it using the Diplomacy skill or by doing missions for them (which will decrease your Caldari standing).
There are several kind of missions, provided by agents. Security department agents send you to kill NPCs, bleh. Mining divison agents want you to travel to some spot and mine quest ore for them. If you want to be a miner, go for them (though mining is grindy with low ISK/hour and miners are favorite targets of griefers). However our favorite agents will be the distibution agents.
Their jobs are similar, though the quest texts are worth reading, some of them are really charming (my favorite is when you must transport homeless people to other station since they couldn't find an excuse to just throw them out of the airlock). They give you an item and tell you were to bring it. Or they give you a location where you must go, pick up the item and bring it back to them. For level 1 agents the range is 0-2 jumps (0 meaning another station in the same system), level 2 agents send you 0-3, level 3 ones send you to 0-5 and level 4 agents has the nasty habit to send you to the end of the world or worse: low sec systems. To make it worse, you can't just decline what you don't like. You have 1 decline chance every 4 hours, if you decline again, you lose standings with the agent and the organization which that would give standing upon completion.
So are we condemned to do 4-6 jumps for a single low-paying mission that will give you some lousy 0.01-0.03 standing (and you need 5+)? Absolutely not. Here is what you shall do: open the agent finder and check out where the highest available level of distribution agents of your target corporation sit. One by one set your destination to them, but don't fly. Open the starmap and you see a bright line from your current location to the home of the agent, showing exactly where he is. If he is in a system which connect to several ones, check the next agent. What you seek is a linear chain of systems like this:
Now go to the end of the line and open the agent finder and configure it to find all available distribution agents in the region. They are sorted by distance so the first page always have the agents in the current system. Watch out for the rank slider on the top. The higher you set it, the higher the rewards will be, but the less agents you can access. Their accessiblity depends on existing faction and corporation standing. It's sometimes better to do lot of lvl 2 missions than a few 3 or 4. Always stick to one level, don't mix them.
Pick the first agent, dock on his stations and pick up his missions and cargo. If he would send you out of your interest zone, decline and ask again. If he sends you out again (both are unlikely), press "delay" and leave him be. Repeat it with all agents in the system unless your cargohold is full.
Some of the missions send you to the same system, complete them, grab new. After these, jump to the next system, complete all the missions that sent you to this system and pick up the ones from the agents living here. If you have empty cargo space, dock at the agents first, maybe they send you somewhere in-system, with some luck to a station where you already have something to drop. Continue this to the end of the line and start moving backwards. Never turn back for a mission, always run the pre-set route. This way you can run several missions in the same time:
Keeping the agents locations organized, planning which mission to dock first to be within the time bonus window, who are on the 4 hour cooldown, and who don't can can be declined to get a new mission (or new cooldown), who to skip when the cargohold is full (will be full, even if you have your Badger II or equivalent, fitted with cargohold expander IIs as it should) needs attention, organization skills and attention divided to several directions, making the activity challenging = fun.
And what about profit?
But the real reward is not money. There are "storyline agents", who contact you via notification when you did 16 missions for the same faction. They are balanced for normal gameplay, to appear once a day maybe. Since the above screenshot shows about 25 completed missions / hour, they appear very frequently for you. Keep your mission count well recorded (you can use the wallet too to count agent mission reward fields). Complete 15 missions, not 16. Actually you should complete just 14 to be sure not to trigger early. Then open the agent finder and select the corporation you want standing with, for example Caldari Navy, the owners of Jita 4-4. Set the agent type to "storyline" and the level to 1 (don't worry, the mission level won't be 1). Now go to the system where this agent is and change the agent finder settings back. Find an agent in the system or one of the neighboring systems who is on the same level as your previous 15 missions. Pick up and complete his mission (two missions if you did 14). Soon after completion your storyline agent will contact you via notification and offer his mission. This mission will give lot of corporation and faction standing. Sometimes they are mean and give you a combat quest, then hire someone to do it for you, they worth their price.
Standings explained: By default a corporation doesn't know you and you have 0 standing. By completing missions to them, you gain standings, up to 10. To use their station services you have to pay them, for example to refine veldspar into tritanium, you'd have to give them 5% of the yielded tritanium if your standing is zero. With 6.6 standing they take nothing.
The standing increase depend on the current standing. You can never reach 10.00, as the mission reward is multiplied by (1-current_standing/10). So a mission that gives 1 standing at 0 will give you 0.5 when you are 5 and 0.11 when 9.
There are two skills affecting standing: one is "social" that simply increases mission reward by 5% per rank. With Social rank 4 you get 20% bonus to missions. The other is "connections" that give a boost in a weird way: 0.04/rank/missing standing. So if your standing is 0.001 (doesn't work with 0.0), you get 0.4 standing/rank, as you have 10 points missing from the maximum. If your standing is 5, you'll get 0.2/rank. It is a huge boost at the start, allowing better deals with corporations you barely know and faster reaching the higher level agents, but the benefit diminishes as you gain standing.
You can access level 2 agents if your standing is 1 or more, level 3 at 3+, level 4 at 5+. The level 1 agents are always available. However there is a trick here: the agents don't only belong to a corporation but also to a state. So if you have high standing with your state (which is easy if you did your starter missions in all 3 hubs and did storyline missions via the mass missioning technique listed above), you can access rank 3 agents to companies where your standing is just 0.01.
By running missions you also get loyalty points that you can spend in the loyalty store (uniform guy icon in the station). The really good items (like unique ships) cost lot of points, much more than anyone shall spend doing missions. The mass missioning technique provide lot of LP, but to different corporations and they can't be combined.
There are some more skills to be considered:
- Negotiation: increases the ISK reward of missions by 5% per rank
- Diplomacy: increases the relation with hostile agents. You can get hostile if you do missions to a state that they hate.
- Distribution connections: increases LP gain by 10% per rank for distribution agents
One more thing you should know: states and organizations have standing to each other. If it's positive, whenever you get standing with one, you get some with another. If it's negative, you lose standing with the other. For example the Gallente Federation has -5 standing with the Caldari state. If I gain 1 standing with Caldari, I lose 0.5 with Gallente. At -5 their ships start attacking me. You can prevent it using the Diplomacy skill or by doing missions for them (which will decrease your Caldari standing).
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