Love them or loath them, missions form a large part of the EVE-playing experience. Whether you are grinding missions for a Navy ship offer, simply to earn piles of ISK or just passing time waiting for corporation members before embarking on a mining expedition, chances are you will run a fair few missions during your career.

Missions can be an important source of ISK and minerals, but, as well as these benefits, the associated corporation and faction standing changes have a significant role to play in the current game mechanics. You may get special treatment if you are favoured by a certain faction, or get shot on sight if you let your reputation drop too low.

Even if mission running can be a very lucrative occupation, a pilot has to constantly keep in mind there are still risks, and underestimating the dangers may lead one to quickly lose a ship. The purpose of this guide is to prevent this from happening, by not only describing the base mission mechanics but by also providing some advice in the same vein.

Types of Missions

Missions do not consist of only one type of activity and offer various purposes depending on a pilot skills and preferences:

• Encounter/kill: Encounters, or kill missions, require a ship captain to fly to a location and destroy ships found there. There are currently two types of encounter missions: those located in deadspace pockets (a.k.a. 'dungeons') where you warp to an acceleration gate prior to engaging with the NPCs, and those where you warp directly to a particular engagement.

• Courier missions: Entail moving goods from one station to another. These goods may be specific sealed cargoes or common market commodities. You may need to make multiple deliveries across many systems using an industrial transport ship, or the delivery may be able to fit into the hold of a frigate and only involve a quick visit to the next system.

• Trade missions: Trade missions differ with the courier ones as they need a pilot to provide the agent with the goods requested in the mission briefing. These goods need to be purchased (or produced) by the pilot and delivered to the destination station.

• Mining missions: Consist to deliver volumes of minerals or ore to a certain location. These items can either be mined and reprocessed directly by the pilot or purchased on the open market.

Special Missions

• Storyline missions: After every 16 regular missions completed you will be offered a storyline mission. These will be one of the regular mission types but will differ by having a great impact on your faction as well as corporation standings. The initial 16 missions can be completed for any agent, as long as those agents are aligned with the same faction and are at the same level as each other. The number of missions is not altered or reset by rejecting or failing an accepted mission.

• Cosmos missions: Most of the Cosmos missions may only be done once, but they provide unique rewards and give a significant boost in standings. However, pilots have to find Cosmos agents inside complexes to receive such an offer.

• Epic Arc missions: Epic mission arcs are composed of a series of branching missions that present the player with choices. These choices will determine how the Epic Arc concludes. These missions also increase your faction standing considerably.

Agent System

Agent Attributes

Agents have a level, quality, location and corporate division. Most agents are located in stations, however there are some 'celestial' agents that are in space.

• Level: The higher the agent level, the harder the missions. For combat missions, this means for level 1 agents you will face Frigates, with level 2 agents you will mostly fight Frigates but with some Cruisers added, at level 3 you will see mostly Cruisers and a few Battlecruisers, and with level 4 agents you will be up against all sizes of ships. For courier missions, this means larger deliveries and more jumps.

Agent Attributes Screenshot

• Quality: Agents also have a base quality, measured on a scale of -20 to +20, and an effective quality, rated between -30 and +55. An agent's base quality, coupled with their level, is used to determine whether you have access to the agent's missions, while their effective quality is involved in calculating mission rewards. Effective quality is derived from an agent's base quality plus a combination of your skills and standing with that agent. The higher the effective quality is, the better the mission rewards.

• Corporate division: Additionally, each agent belongs to a corporate division. The agent's division determines the type of mission they generally offer. The offers are chance based.

Finding an Agent

All NPC corporations have agents. Agents working for corporations loyal to CONCORD, InterBus, or the Jovian Directorate are unavailable for now; however, all other agents are available to anyone who meets their standings requirements. Agents can be found using the Star Map. This is perhaps the easiest way for new players as it shows you all agents currently available to you throughout the EVE universe. On the Star Map control panel, there is a tab labeled "Star Map". Under this tab is another tab labeled "Color Stars By". In this tab, you may select "My Information" and then "My Available Agents". Doing this will change your map so that any systems that have agents you can use are colored green. Hovering your cursor over these star systems will list the available agents along with their respective corporation, level, quality, and division.

Agents can also be found in a corporation's info window. There, you can navigate to the “Agents” tab to view all of the corporations' agents and whether or not they are available to you. More information about this can be found in the Finding a Better Agent section below.

Interacting With Your Agent

After finding an agent, you must travel to the station that they are based in. When you dock at their station, click the "Agents" tab in station services and double click on the agent to start a conversation with them. The agent will greet you somewhat morosely and offer you a mission.

When an agent offers you a mission, it will appear under "Agents > Missions" in your NeoCom Journal, which you might want to keep open during missions. Double-click on the journal entry and you will get a more detailed explanation of the mission such as your task, the promised reward, the bonus (if any), and the time frame for completion to claim the bonus.

All mission offers expire 7 days after they have been offered. Missions expire 7 days after the offer has been accepted. Refer to your NeoCom journal to double check missions' expiration deadlines. Expired mission offers don't count against you in any way; however, an accepted mission must be completed. If you accept a mission and let it expire, or report back to your agent that you failed to complete it, then you will suffer a standing loss.

You can reject a mission offer once every 4 hours on a per-agent basis. This is a good way to get rid of a mission offer that drives you into lo-sec systems that you may not want to risk. If you reject an offer earlier than 4 hours after your last rejection with the same agent, you will incur a standing loss.

When you accept the mission, the agent will confirm your reply and expect you to report back when the mission objective has been met. To report completion of a courier mission, you can contact the agent from the destination station. To report completion of a combat mission that doesn't require you to bring any items back to the agent, you can contact the agent from any other station. To report completion of a combat mission that requires you to bring certain items back to the agent, you need to be in the same station as the agent and have the requested items either in your cargo hold or in your hangar. If you happen to have the requested non-specific items in your hangar at the agent's station, the combat mission can be reported without you being physically present at that station.

Some missions require the deposit of collateral as insurance for the items that your agent entrusts to your care until you have achieved the mission objective. Make sure that you have enough money in your wallet to cover the collateral. When you achieve the mission objective and report back to your agent, they will refund the collateral without interest.

Finding a Better or Higher Level Agent

There's always a time where you will want something bigger, more challenging, or just better rewards for your missions. As the mission level depends on the agent level, you will need higher level agents when you want to get harder and more rewarding missions.

Better (by quality) or higher level agents won't EVEmail you or contact you in any way when they become available. You will have to search for them by opening the info window of the corporation you have been working for, either by the blue button on the top right in one of its stations or by searching for it in the standings tab in your character sheet, and look inside the “Agents” tabs. There you can find, ordered by division, the agents that are already available and not yet available to you. The availability depends on your standings.

If the agent interesting you is not yet available, you can view his information by using "Show Info" and at the bottom of his agent info tab you will find the required standing to take missions from him. Raising the corporation standing to the required level is done by running missions from available agents, but remember that several skills can help a lot to achieve that goal; please see the Helpful Skills section below for further information.

Remember that missions of higher levels can be much harder and that you should prepare properly or bring wingmates to be sure to succeed.

Standings

Standings affect many features in the game. At the simplest level standing controls which agents you have access to. Beyond this, standing impacts upon a pilot's access to jump clones, their ability to anchor Player-Owned Structures in Empire space, amounts of minerals lost in the refining process, and a whole host of costs including sales taxes, research, and factory costs.

Furthermore, if you have -5.0 standing or below with a given faction, you run the risk of being attacked by their navy when entering their space. You can view your faction, corporation, and agent standings via the "Liked By" and "Disliked By" tabs under your "Standings" section on your character sheet. Agent availability is dependent on your corporation and faction standing, each agent requiring you to have a certain standing to be able to work for them. The standings you need for a particular agent can be found on their "Agent Info" tab under "Mission Services".

There are three different levels of standings. The more widespread a standing is, the harder it is to increase it:

• Agent: such standings only work for a single agent. Every time a mission is completed you receive personal standings with the agent who offered it to you as well.

• Corporation: these are your personal standings toward an NPC corporation, and not your own corporation standing toward another NPC. Corporations contain numerous agents and by increasing standings with them you will be able to access more agents inside them. Such standings may be augmented by missions.

• Faction: faction standings remain the most general but most difficult type of relationship to increase. Each faction possesses numbers of corporations inside it, so if you raise your faction standings you will be able to access all corporations linked to it. Faction standings may only be augmented by storyline, COSMOS, or Epic Arc missions.

As you can see, it is a lot more beneficial to have high faction standings, as you can directly access all corporations and all agents under that faction by doing so, instead of increasing the corporation standings one by one.

An interesting note about agents: most people relate an agents "Required Standing" to the standing one must have for that agent's corporation in order to access that agent. This is not entirely true. Because of the "corporate-wide" structure of standings many people assume this and forget about the agents personal standings toward you. You can raise standings with a particular agent fairly quickly by fleeting up with someone who can access that agent and whose willing share mission rewards with you (including standing increases). This way you don't have to grind level 2 and level 3 missions for a corporation in order to get access to that agent. This, of course, will only work for that particular agent, and not for all agents in the corporation.

Modifying Standings

When you complete a mission you will get a base standing increase, which will depend on the perceived difficulty of the mission. This base number is used to calculate the agent and corporation standing increase and is modified by how high you've trained your "Social" skill level.

To view the exact increase, go in your character sheet, then browse through the "Liked By" tab under your "Standings" section. There, right-click on the corporation or faction you want to check and select "Show Transactions". The agent and corporation standing increase is stated as a percentage value. This is not simply added to your current standing, rather it defines the percentage change between your current standing and the maximum or minimum available standing.

You will receive agent and corporation standing losses if you fail to complete a mission or you let the mission timer run out. You will also receive a similar standing hit if you reject more than one mission per four hours. So always be sure when canceling an assignment or you'll suffer more than just ISK/loss.

When you complete storyline missions, you will receive standing gains to the storyline agent's corporation and the faction that the corporation is aligned with (the primary faction). You will also receive standing gains to other factions friendly to the primary faction, as well as standing hits to factions hostile to the primary faction.

While the standing gains to the primary faction will continue to rise as long as you complete their storyline missions, the impact on friendly and hostile faction standings is limited by their standing towards the primary faction.

Formulas

Here are approximate formulas to manually guess the raw modifications of standings:

Standing increase: 10-(10-[Current_Standings])*(1-([%modification]/100)

Standing decrease: [Current_Standings]*(1-[%modification]/100)

Where Current_Standings is the faction, corporation or agent standings before the modification and %modification the raw number listed in your "Show Transactions" window. However, please note theses formulas are only an approximation as there are other parameters included for standing modification calculations, like skills.

Bad Standings Impacts

While it is possible to have good standings with agents, corporations, and factions, it is also possible to have negative standings with them. You should take note that you will receive faction standing hits when you destroy certain ships belonging to those factions no matter if you engage them in missions or not. Many pilots choose to avoid these 'faction kill' missions to help preserve their faction standings.

Before the Dominion expansion, negative standings had a huge impact when they fell below -2.00. If an agent's standing with you was -2.00 or lower, the agent would not talk to you. If a corporation's standing with you was -2.00 or lower, no agents in that corporation would offer you missions. A faction standing of -2.00 or lower would mean that you would not be able to get any missions from any of that faction's agents. This cause many people to fall into a sort of standings 'black hole', where a players standings with a faction was so horrible there was no hope in raising them since they could not get agents from that faction. The only way to have raised standings with that faction was to either run storyline missions for other factions friendly to the target faction, or fleet up with somebody and share standings until yours were high enough to

This 'black hole' was fixed with the Dominion expansion. Now you are able to run missions for any agent regardless or your agent, corporation, or faction standing as long as that agent is a level 1 quality 0 or lower agent. This gives players a chance to fix bad standings, while also restricting access to the more rewarding agents.

A faction standing of -5.00 or lower will result in that faction's navy vessels attacking you on sight when you enter their sovereign space. Note that faction navies aren't Concord. Concord, the official police force, only intervenes if a criminal act is achieved in high-security space (ie: engaging another pilot without kill rights), and it's possible to get away from the navy forces (whereas it's considered an exploit to get away from CONCORD).

Recovering Bad Standings

There are a number of ways to fix bad standings. The simplest and recommended way is to start running missions for the affected faction, even if you need to run missions for sub-0 quality level 1 agents. Or you could train the "Diplomacy" skill. The third option is to run missions for a faction friendly to the affected faction and receive derived standing gains from storyline missions. This option is very time consuming, since derived standings are just that -- derived. You won't get the full standing increase to the affected faction from storyline missions of the friendly faction, and storyline missions themselves take 16 regular missions to obtain.

So, it is up to you if you want to push some standings to +10.00 (maximum limit) by running missions for the same faction, or prefer to stay versatile by switching to enemy factions to keep a balance in your standings.

Mission Rewards

Generalities

One of the main reasons people run missions is for financial gain. Through mission rewards, bounties, loot, and Loyalty Points, you can make mission-running a highly profitable experience. The level of rewards are derived from a number of factors, including the level of agent you are working for, the quality and effective quality of that agent, your security status, and the system's security level. Basically, mission rewards stay far more profitable in low and 0.0 security space than in high-security zones.

That said, mission rewards are not fixed. There is a dynamic algorithm in place that averages out the time it takes to complete each mission, so that the longer a mission takes the greater the rewards offered. The agent system automatically determines a mission's difficulty based on the average mission time, thus any two missions that generally take about the same amount of time to complete will give roughly the same level of rewards from the same agent.

The most obvious return on a mission is the base mission pay. This is the first ISK figure you see on the agent's offer and will vary greatly depending on the aforementioned factors. The second main reward is the bonus that you will be awarded if you complete the mission in a specified time. The bonus reward can be either cash or trade goods that the agent's corporation sells on the market.

For kill and encounter missions, you will also receive income in the form of pirate bounties and loot. In many circumstances, the bounties from kill missions greatly outweigh the agent's rewards for the mission itself. Not all ships have bounties, however. Rogue drones drop valuable alloys which can be sold or reprocessed and the main faction navies drop tags which can be traded for ISK or used for offers in the LP Store.

Encounter missions usually have you zipping around several structures. Sometimes these structures will drop loot when destroyed, including implants, rare skillbooks and other items. It is best to review mission notes for each mission to see which structures have a chance to drop items and pop only those, leaving the rest untouched.

Finally, all non-storyline agents also offer Loyalty Points (LP) for completing missions. The amount of points you get is mission specific, modified by the agent's base quality, the agent's solar system security rating and your present skill levels in the relevant divisional connections skills. Theses points may be used on the LP Store, offering unique items related to the faction you are working for.