Griefer-safe EVE life

Griefers are the plague of EVE and make its bad name. They aren't pirates who go for loot but kiddies going for "tears". It's common belief that griefers can't be avoided, they are a menace that can hit you anytime and there is nothing you can do about it. You can of course stand up and start again but you are never safe. You must always look over your shoulder and still they will hit you. EVE is not safe. It's not for "carebears".

I'm completely sure that this belief is the most important reason why many prospective players stay away from this great game. Who wants to play in an environment where a 12 years old kid who stole the credit card of his daddy can destroy your ingame life at will?

What I'm telling here is not a trick to avoid most griefers. No self-restricting rules come like "make a 0-m dock bookmark to every possible station" or "check ships destroyed in last 24 hours statistic every 5 minutes and if it increases in your system instantly dock and log".

The point is neither that griefers are vastly overestimated. This scientific research says that people who fear something see them bigger than they are. Since people fear griefers, they way overestimate their number. If we'd listen to the amount of whine about them, we'd guess that an average person is griefed several times a week. I've never been killed in EVE in high sec. How many exact encounters can you recall that happened to you or someone you personally know (not "some guy my buddys roommate once talked about")?

No. I'm offering you advice that can make you 100% safe from this plague. The griefer is a simple creature, he wants to cause ... [intensive drumming] ... grief. He wants to see some evidence of his target is being sad or angry. His second account is reading the local chat and if you are in the newbie starter corporation, the corporation chat. He may even initiate direct conversation to taunt you. I have no idea what he wants or why he does it, it's completely alien to me, but instead of moralizing or analyzing, just accept his motivation to get "tears".

The griefer will be killed by CONCORD. He surely don't care about it, otherwise he wouldn't do it. That's why he looks unbeatable: he cannot lose anything he cares about, you can. However he very much care about your feelings about his ship blowing up. Remember that he thinks that loss of the ship is the way of suffering and seeing others losing ship is fun. You saw him losing his ship, so you're having fun. All you have to do is make sure that his loss is greater than yours, and somehow communicate this to him. Unless you are doing something stupid like carrying several hundred millions in lowbie ships, the first is given. The game is designed the way that in high security space pirating is not profitable against average targets. You can increase this difference by having a premium insurance. It's not cheap, but a worthy investment, not just ISK but safety-feeling wise.

Now you have to communicate it. The easiest to do so in your bio that you can edit on your character screen. Add something like "I'm paranoid, have my ship max insured and never fly or carry anything I can't replace easily". And do so! If you bluff, you'll still be afraid, even if the bluff works! This way you can never be griefed. Your ship can still be destroyed but all it gives you a good laugh over the idiot who was spectacularly blown up by the CONCORD.

This is the reason why the tag is "philosophy". I doubt if the fear of loss of pixels keep people away from EVE. It's the social idea of being in the mercy of 12 years old kiddies. The solution is recognizing that you are not. They can only harm themselves and give you a good laugh. This way you present them the unsolvable dilemma: "If you rickroll someone who actually likes Never gonna give you up, you are giving him a gift!". Because that is needed: while we don't understand what is fun of destroying some total strangers ship, but a true goblin always have fun when sees M&S suffer because of their own idiocy.

If you get blown up by some of them, please try to start conversation with him and send me the log where he desperately tries to prove that he won and you should be sad now and that he "knows" that you are crying and he is "having fun"! Let's share the laugh on this blog!

Of course the above doesn't mean you should ignore the basic EVE safety rule: never fly or carry anything you can't replace easily. Oh wait, the platinum insurance just replaced your ship, the only cost will be the new insurance.


PS: short business update: Cash + buy orders + sell orders = 912M (500M gift)

Read More

Hauling shinies

The PuG update: the first openraid ran very well, 3 BWD HM bosses died:
This was a true pug, from various realms. While stupid mistakes happened, not more than in guild raids (the druid who was told to switch cat form when targeted by Atramedes switched bear form for huge laughter for example). I definitely see cross-realm pugs as a future of casual raiding. Of course such pugs can't compete with HM guilds, but they are perfect way of completing content without being forced to boost M&S.

---

In EVE you can transport various things between stations, mostly for profit. However there is a risk of being killed by pirates or griefers even in high security space. To lower that risk, you must understand that there are two kind of things to transport: shinies and large stuff.

Shiny things are small but valuable. A skillbook takes up 0.01 m³ space and can cost 10-100 million. A single +5 implant is 1m³ and costs 100M. You obviously won't fill your cargohold with these. You can make good money transporting these, much better than by doing missions:
On the other hand their great value makes them good target for pirates. He scans you down, kills you, CONCORD (the police) kills him, his buddy grabs the loot and flies away. Griefers mostly don't bother to scan but you can bump into one while your cargohold has half your fortune in books.

What to do then? Common sense says to only transport these in strong ships that can't be destroyed. That's the worst idea you could get, there is nothing in EVE that can't be shot down.

The way to relatively safely transport shinies is the opposite, doing it in a frigate or a faction shuttle. To understand why, you must understand how traveling happens in EVE. It starts by undocking the station. Your ship instantly appears outside, but invulnerable until you perform an action or 30 seconds pass. You warp to the stargate and just when you arrive the stargate pulls you in. The stargate transports you to the other star system, where you are cloaked until moving or 30 seconds. So you can't be harmed when you just arrived to the space via stargate or leaving station. You can't be harmed while warping.

However you don't warp instantly. When you give the warp command, the ship must turn to the target and speed up to 3/4 thrust before warping happens. The faster you do it, the less time the enemy has to notice you, click on you, complete the targeting and activate his warp scramblers. You might noticed that cargo ships turn slow and accelerate slow. The acceleration speed depends on your mass, your inertia modifiers and your agility.

So to warp fast you must decrease your mass, inertia modifiers and increase agility. Frigates has the lowest mass among ships and good inertia modifier. It can be further decreased by inertia stabilizer module. The skills Spaceship Command and Evasive Maneuvering increases agility (actually decreases since EVE calculate this backwards).

There is one more vulnerable spot: when you give the "dock" command away from the station, you warp to it, but not surely close enough. The docking request can be done from 2500m, but the "docking request accepted" message arrives only after 500M, you are vulnerable in the meantime. Solution: go away from the station with an empty ship, give the "warp to 10km" command and then just fly into the station. Stop inside it and bookmark that location. Give the "dock" command there, if it's instant, the bookmark is good. Make this bookmark the destination of your flight back and when you arrived there give the dock command to the station.

There is one more thing to keep in mind. You can't start a warp next to an object as you must speed up before you could initiate warp, where you can pass trough even planets. So if you leave the station and issue warp command, you see your ship slowly going around the station, while being vulnerable. There are no such blocking objects at stargates and you leave your home station empty, so you are vulnerable to this problem only once: when you leave the station where you picked up the cargo. To prevent being vulnerable, do the following:

1. Leave the station empty and initiate warp to the first stargate with the "warp to 0 m" command. If the warp is instant, return to the station and proceed with the cargo.
2. If your ship starts to go around the station, redock.
3. Leave the station empty again and look the ship from behind. Close to the middle of the screen is where your ship is heading. Seek some object there. Another station, asteroid field, planet, moon. Just not the "pith depot" or a player placed container please. These objects are "front of the door" of the station, unblocked. Save their location.
4. If there is no object visible simply try different stargates and celestial objects. Undock and see where you can jump without being blocked.
5. Redock and leave with cargo. Warp to this object using the "warp to 50km" or some other non-0 distance. You will warp instantly. While in warp set your destination to your real one and when you arrived, instanly give the jump order to the first stargate.

More safety tip: if you are extra paranoid, run the course with an empty ship. If your ship starts targeting something automatically, it's a sign of someone is targeting you, probably for a scan. This case you can delay your transport.

One more skill to be mentioned: warp drive operation. This skill decreases warp core energy consumption. It is important when you have to warp between stargates that are far from each other. If you don't have enough energy, you will stop in the middle of nowhere losing time (= money).
 

The map can be configured to show recent kills, so you can avoid systems with serious pirate activity:

The obvious EVE rules apply: don't carry anything you can't afford to lose and don't go AFK while in space while carrying anything worthy of attacking. Using autopilot while transporting shinies indicates terminal state mental degeneration.

And keep in mind that all my experience is coming from high security space and I don't recommend any newbie to try them on low or null sec.


PS: short business update: Cash + buy orders + sell orders = 888M (500M gift)

PS2: if you are a pirate getting ideas, I'm transporting these by a newbie alt, so good luck scan down all the hundreds of frigates, shuttles, rookie ships that travel there every hour.

Read More

Fly Badgers!

The first ship that I flied after the beginner missions was the Badger, the smallest Caldari transport ship. The first photo on my first EVE post illustrated this ship:
The Badgers are still close to my heart. For this reason I started to buy them up. For the sake of nostalgia maybe. Or rather:
I wish I knew why do they buy Badgers in mass in Jita. I mean anyone but a total newbie can fly the much better Badger II which doesn't cost significantly more. And if they buy little Badgers since they can't afford the big, why can't they do a 4-jump trip to the starter solar systems, where the newbies who got this ship as a mission reward are selling it for peanuts? Anyway, in business their motivation doesn't matter, profit does. As long as they buy, I sell.

To increase the profitability, I do the same with Cormorants (Caldari destroyers). The reason why newbies are selling their strongest combat ship is again beyond me, along with the near-infinite demand for them in Jita, but again: my place is transporting instead of asking questions:
My business plan is simple: I fly to the newbie system with a shuttle carrying a cargohold expander I module. I assemble the Badger, fit the expander on it, put the shuttle and the Cormorant into the hold and fly it back to Jita. 450-500K profit over 900K capital for a 2x4-jump high-sec transport which can be done by autopilot? Yes please! As a bonus, I can carry a few odd books that the newbies sold too on the Badger (of course not an expensive one that would get pirate attention).

Buying them is easy, I set up buy orders for the ships in the newbie systems, so I never have to worry of running out of Badgers. Actually, the situation is quite the opposite:
Seems I got myself into the same situation as before: I have way more Badgers than I could handle and new ones are arriving while you are reading this. However this time I was prepared, which leads us to the industrial system to learn today:
Reprocessing is the act of turning a product, a mineral or ice into raw materials. You can see on the picture that I don't get all the materials. Some lost to "unrecoverable" and other bunch to "we take". The first is affected by skills using the following formula: SC+0.375*(1+R*0.02)*(1+RE*0.04)*(1+SP*0.05)

• SC is the station constant, it's 0.5 for NPC stations
• R is the Refining skill
• RE is Refinery Efficiency skill, it needs Refining 5 to be learnable and takes 3x more time to level up than basic skills
• SP is special processing skill. It's not one skill but many, like Veldspar processing, Scordite processing. The basic ones are easy to learn, but the rare ores, ice and scrapmetal processing (ships and modules count as scrapmetal) are all learnable after Refinery Efficiency is rank 5. This skill takes 5x time than basic skills to learn

On the picture you can see 97.8% yield which is reachable by Refining 5 and Refinery Efficiency 4 which can be learned in reasonable time.

The "we take" field is affected by your standing with the station that can be increased by doing missions to them. It's 5% at 0 standing and linearly decreases, reaching 0 at 6.7 standing.

Please note that raw materials are very small in size, only 0.01m³ and some are pretty expensive. 500000 Noxcium fits into a Badger and costs half PLEX. So rather don't transport 500K Noxcium in a Badger. Take several turns instead to avoid pirates. If you want to implement it, remember that Badger is Caldari, there is similar ship for every faction.

Read More

Lemonade or loan

Boxington commented to the RMAH buying: "To me, a real life analog of this situation is person A who starts a lemonade stand to get capital to start a lawn mowing service to get capital to fund ever bigger and more capital intensive enterprises (the key being they ground their way up from nothing). Person B, conversely, takes out a big loan and skips the first 5 steps of grinding to move into a small/medium sized business. Who is more rational, A or B? It's unclear unless you define carefully your definitions, but in no way is it obvious that person B is somehow skill-less, lazy or cheating. In this comparison, person B is the plex to isk converter. One might argue that they skipped the grinding part of the game (going from frigs to destroyers to cruisers, on up) and that is somehow skill-less or cheating, but that would, again, require much more specification on how we ought to play the game (and that will probably be fruitless)."

At first I couldn't answer it, but life answered it. I set up a business plan in EVE. I don't discuss it in detail until it actually works. The product of the plan sell well. I calculated the material prices and saw that they sell cheaper than the product. I figured out that I buy up those which are 10% cheaper than the break-even point, create the product and sell. So I went and start buying it. Then bang, "you can't afford it" or something. I managed to blow all my 150M ISK that is not invested into something already to raw materials. Nevermind, I create the products, sell them and I made 15M. Except, the materials are littering a whole region (I ran out of money before I finished buying in The Citadel), and they are big in size, needing lot of runs with my poor Badger II.

The money is not lost, it's in raw materials and I may even make money by holding them if their price continue to rise. Or I lose if they don't. However I did not plan to invest into them, did not research their future price and to prevent being out of cash I had to sell some books I bought for myself for future learning.

What a moron! What made me do so stupid act? I did not do anything stupid like on the first week when I went from zero to 50M by hauling, mostly rich plagioclase and pyerite. What happened?


The money these good souls gave me conspicuously match to the money "I did not have invested elsewhere". I grown naturally before. I got a small amount in one business and invested into the next. I probably made stupid things but always with little since I did not have more, as the rest were invested into something that proven itself to work, even if with lower profitability than new plan (if works). I had to try my plans out in small and fix the errors. Just because the plan is good, it doesn't mean that it's without "little" technical mistakes. My plan with the production still doesn't look bad, I was just unprepared with the logistics of it. As you naturally grow, you fix these mistakes, polish your plan. You always know where to spend the next batch of profit.

However if you get money from nothing, you put it into something that is not ready yet. You are over your head and will make the necessary mistakes on much larger scale than you should. You must start out at a lemonade stand because when (and not if) you lose a bottle of lemon juice, it will be much easier to stand up than after losing $1M investor money. This is exactly what happened with the .com business around 2000. The internet-based business, the web2 ideas weren't bad. These companies weren't scams or daydreaming idiocies. Yet they went down with lot of investors money, because the people inside did not know how to handle a company of that size. They should have started out small.

If you buy a PLEX in the item shop to have a "fast start", you probably going to waste it some stupid way and chances are that you won't be significantly ahead of those who did not do it. For the same reason I'm sure that financial investment (buying papers without being proficient on the field of the company, just because I my crystal ball told that they'll rise) will cause more bankruptcies and recessions. It gives money to people who can't handle it yet. If they could, they would have it at the first place!


PS: after two weeks of playing my balance:
Liquid: 391M
Buy order escrow: 111M
Sell order worth: 25M (They will sell for that amount, I did not price them high)
Materials waiting for processing: 43M (on current, unprocessed price)
Books, implants that I use myself and won't sell: 87M
Gifts from other players: 400M

So the wealth collected by me is 257M. Considering that a PLEX costs 500M and covers 4 weeks, I'm already making enough to play free. Of course I can't yet as I will invest this money to ships and skills to increase my revenue, but the point is that a totally fresh newbie can trade himself into free-play mode.

Read More

Skipping combat

Side note: what is the clear sign that you like blogging and going to continue? If you have an idea you want to write about and then you look at the schedule of pre-written posts and say, "Oh, which one to delay for this". Thanks to EVE, I'm in this position now, having more than a week of posts in various states of preparation. But I must write this now. I'm already overdue.

From the title you might figured that this post is about the hate campaign against Jennifer Hepler. I did not considered it an interesting topic first, as "sexist idiots being sexists idiots" doesn't sound interesting.

Thanks to the noise they made, the idea of Ms Hepler reached me, for good as it's probably one of the best I've ever heard. It tells that you shall be able to skip combat in MMOs. Of course it should be implemented the very same way as skipping dialogs or skipping reading the license agreement: just because you skipped, it applies to you. So if I encounter a bunch of boars and choose to skip combat, I can see my combat log running with extreme speed and soon I see bunch of dead boars or a dead character on the screen.

Why would anyone be bothered by such change? What is the source of hate against the creator of the idea? I mean I don't care if someone skips reading the hilarious text of the EVE mission to transport homeless to somewhere else, out of sight. The hate and despise that the mission agent (questgiver) expresses towards the bums is perfectly written and clearly touching me. I am not running some curier mission for standing, I'm saving a a space station from the worst plight: the M&S. But if you skip it and care nothing but that few 10K ISK and 0.02 standing, I'm fine with you. I don't think you are a cheater or unorthy of rewards.

Why combat is not already skippable and be ran by auto-calculation? Why is the huge rejection against it? I mean sexist idiots are usually being sexist idiots but something has clearly kicked the beehive this time. Considering that Ms Hepler was a female game developer for years without such outrage, it must be the idea itself.

The reason lies in the hate against Strand of Ancients, it lies on the bridge of Arathi Basin and the middle of Eye of the Storm. Literally, in the form of skeletons. The optimal strategy on these maps is using vehicles, defending or capturing objectives. Yet serious part of the players clearly ignore it and initiate rather pointless PvP combat in some uninteresting area, or in EoS, to capture the flag that has near-zero outcome of the battle. These people are ready to lose in order to get into combat. For some reason this combat thing is extremely important to them. Why?

Combat is an obvious way of showing off superiority. When I win (and I dare to write "I" and not "we") Alterac Valley by directing people to the proper places and delaying the capture of Dun Baldar bunkers and flag by several minutes, my superiority is rather impersonal and theoretical. If you clearly understand what is going on in AV and you saw me calling the objectives and defending the bridge head, then you could come to the conclusion: "yes, that guy won it for us, in a sense that if we'd replace him with a random, it would have much-much bigger effect on the outcome than replacing anyone else". I'm a thinking person and I'm very happy with this definition. I am happy even if no one bothers to or capable of recognizing my performance.

If you bash someones face, you clearly and simply shown superiority over that person to him and the spectators. If some peer would be watching your monitor, he would come to the conclusion without doubt that you are superior player than your opponent, while - unless he is proficient with AV strategy - he will most likely say "he chatted a lot and AFK-ed mostly next to the bridge" watching my play.

The idea of skipping combat threatens these simple people of losing their simple and straightforward measure of worth. They would have to accept something more subtle and complicated measuring system that may or may not be possible for them, but what matters most: make gaming unable to display elite status to peers. I mean xXnubpwnzorXx is able to learn the signaling value of toplists, titles and reward mounts but his buddies clearly don't without explanation. Explaining them that "I got this dragon for killing the hardest of enemies" is more complicated and less convincing than simply killing an opponent right front of them.

The non-existence of peers makes it just worse. The social person always show off to peers, even if they are not present. The "I must wear make-up, to feel good about myself" is a simple example of showing off to non-present peers. The thinking behind it is "what would they say if they'd see me". Peers who are there are giving feedback, even with a smile or gesture. If a guy is standing next to me, I can explain him how AV works and can see the moment on his face when he understands why was I right there were I was. But if he is not there, you must go for overkill. You need a display that cannot be questioned.

These creatures wanted to devastate the "skipping combat" idea (and not the author of it), because they are social so want to impress peers and because they can't explain anything to peers since they don't have any: they are sitting behind a computer screen. Alone.

---

The PuG update: remember that you can join our cross server BWD HM run!

Read More

Openraid.eu

I wasn't happy with the raiding in The PuG. We killed DW on Jan 23, according to MMO-Champion, we are ones of the 300K out of 5.6M who did that (way in the top 10%), what is enough to prove that it works, however clearly not as elegantly as I expected. At first we had to cancel raids due to low attendance, and also I lead most of the raids.

However something great happened that can finally make the proof complete. Mirth, one of the members of the guild (and not me), came up with the idea of using the site openraid.eu to find other people to raid with. It has the drawback that the RL has to use realID, however it makes it sure that not I will lead it.

Why is it great? The guild is called "The PuG" for a reason. I want to prove that a random selection of non-M&S is capable of performing and social bonds and structure are not necessary or even useful. They become inevitable when we have to fish jewels from the sea of idiocy. If you finally found someone with more brain than a baboon, you stick to him, try to bind him to your circles so you can keep cooperating.

/trade pugs and the Looking for Retards feature got their infamy from the amount of drooling tools that pollute it. When you are happy that there are only 3 Amalgamations on Spine, it's a good sign that LFR did not become the great feature I expected. Why? Because you have no simple (and lately not at all) way to get rid of the leeching M&S and simply because their wast numbers make finding people for a one-time raid very time-ineffective. That's why I wanted to collect these people into a guild, however that's still a social structure, no matter how hard I try to de-socialize it by rules.

However if the raid organizer openraid.eu (or any similar) works, that would remove that last problem and let people enjoy successful and M&S-free raiding without any social bonds.

Why would it work better? At first the pure thing that you have to find a site is a serious barrier from the M&S. I mean if they could find elitistjerks or a class blog, they wouldn't be terrible at the first place. Secondly such service allows you access to countless players, you don't have to go with whatever warm body to find and hope they perform better than an empty slot.

Thirdly, since such service is not in Blizzard control, they can no longer stop us from excluding M&S. Your ignore list has 49 places for a reason: it's likely that you have less than 49 personal enemies so it serves the purpose to exclude the guy who got you kicked from your social guild for not helping, but you can't use it to /ignore every below-healer DPS (noticed that the term "below tank" lost its usage?). There is 2-hours cooldown on kicking from LFD and LFR, you can't kick from Tol Barad raid, you can't /ignore guilds and so on. Blizzard actively fights excuding even the most obnoxious creatures from our own playing since those things are paying customers too and without being boosted they couldn't kill even a Stormwind Rat. On the other hand a third-party site, especially on a web platform allows the creation of auto-excusion tools that makes this not only possible but simple and intuitive. For example if I mark someone "good player I want to play again", I could automatically exclude all the M&S that he marked useless.

We will do the test run at Saturday 19:00 server time (I guess that's Paris time) with BWD HM (can't run DS yet via realID raids). Feel free to join. Message from the raid organizer:I haven't yet figured it out, but chances are that you _must_ specify a RealID email before you can see cross-realm raids on this website. If that's true and the raid isn't showing up for you. If that states true, just add any e-mail for that field, an unexisting one will also work. In case some of you would like to join directly, without registering on Openraid, my realID: inbox@helvene.ru. The link to the raid is http://www.openraid.eu/index.php/users/raid/577/

Read More

Running missions for profit and fun

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: There are many dead-end systems like this. Rings and maximum 1-star "hairs" are OK too. The point is that an agent on this line can't really send you anywhere else but to the other stars on the line. Draw the map to a piece of paper, making sure that it doesn't contain more than 6-7 stars.

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?
That's 1.2M in about half an hour, and I made it as a 5 days old newbie.

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

Please note that skillbooks are not free and learning skills takes time, so calculate if learning these skills worth the price.

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).

Read More