LP Store

Loyalty Points (LP) can be one of the most valuable rewards from running agent missions. As soon as you begin to run missions for a particular NPC corporation, you will start to accrue Loyalty Points and gain access to the corporation's store.

LPs are associated with particular NPC corporations, so running missions for any agent from a particular corporation will increase your stockpile of LPs. The Store may be accessed by clicking the appropriate service button while docked at a station belonging to the corporation in question.

As soon as you gain access to the store you can see the full range of offers available from that corporation, along with the requirements for each. Each offer may require some combination of ISK, LPs, built items and dogtags.

Built items requested are generally the Tech I version of whatever you're attempting to buy, while dogtags are a general requirement for many offers from the four Empires, and can generally be collected from the wreckage of ships from hostile Empires during missions. Be warned, carrying such tags in the space owned by the faction you obtained them from is illegal and may get your ship destroyed.

The wide range of offers and possibilities in combination with EVE's dynamic market make picking and choosing offers for maximum profit something of a black art, but in general you should aim to earn around 1000 ISK for each LP you spend. Of course, if you're simply buying items for your own collection, your own measures may apply.

Low vs. High Security Systems

The security level of the system in which you are running missions greatly affects the rewards you receive. You will receive higher mission payouts and greater LP amounts the lower the system security level. The highest quality level four agents are all located outside of secure Empire space.

While the rewards of running missions in lower security systems are much greater, so are the risks. It is not unheard of for mission runners to be ambushed by groups of player pirates in low security space. Probes are used to reach mission runners with great efficiency, so always stay vigilant in such areas.

Faction Loot

There are a small number of missions that may spawn a pirate faction ship as part of the target ships. These rare spawns will give significantly higher bounties and may also drop valuable faction equipment. Faction spawns have been confirmed on the level four missions Worlds Collide and The Blockade. The best place to find information on these is to visit the Mission chat channels in-game, or on the "Missions & Explorations" forums on the official EVE website.

Helpful Skills

The unpopular social skills are the mission-runner's friend. Alongside the offensive and defensive skills required to be able to deal with pirate threats, and the ship skills to be able to transport goods, the social skills improve your access to agents and the rewards you receive from them.

They fall into two main categories, namely those relating to improving standings (which indirectly improves mission pay) and those that directly increase mission rewards. There are five skills relating to standings: Social, Connections, Criminal Connections, Diplomacy, and Negotiation.

The "Social" skill is the base skill for all the other social skills and must be trained to level three before you can train the others. As well as being the base skill, the Social skill improves the standing gains you receive for each mission you complete. Each trained level gives a five per cent bonus to the base mission standing increase.

The next three skills all relate to agent, corporation and faction standings. Each level trained in these skills gives a four percent bonus to effective standing towards all relevant entities. The "Connections" skill relates to friendly entities (i.e. those with whom you have a positive standing); the "Diplomacy" skill relates to hostile entities (i.e. those to whom you have a negative standing); and the "Criminal Connections" skill relates to criminal NPCs (i.e. those with low CONCORD standing).

The description for the "Negotiation" skill states that it improves pay for agent missions by five percent - but it achieves this indirectly by altering the agent's effective quality.

As well as the skills that improve your standings, there are also nine further skills that improve the rewards you receive from missions. The seven Divisional Connections skills improve your LP gain by five percent per level when working for agents in the related corporation divisions (see Divisional Connections - Related Skills table below). Two of these seven skills stack for any Division, thus increasing the amount of LP gained by 50% if both trained to level five.

"Fast Talk" is supposed to improve the pilot's effective security status increases, with each level trained giving a five per cent bonus to effective security rating. However, this skill isn't currently working and there is no use to train it yet.

The final skill is "DED Connections". Apparently this skill grants an additional 1,500 ISK bounty reward for each NPC pirate destroyed, but as it's not actually seeded in-game at the time of writing, its effect can't be confirmed as yet.

Divisional Connection Skills

Each agent belongs to a division and each division has two related Divisional Connection skills as shown in the table below. These Divisional Connections skillbooks are only available through LP Stores at high prices on the market. The increase to the mission LP offer can be calculated with the following formula:

Actual LP Reward = Base LP Reward x (1 + (0.05 x (Level of Connection Skill 1 + Level of Connection Skill 2)))

Hints

Having effective skills and equipment matter little if you have no experience on mission running. This section will provide a ship pilot with some basic and logical advices to survive when attempting to do missions.

General Hints

• Agent criteria: Training the relevant social skills as soon as you can is a must for serious mission runners. Following this, probably the next most important thing to do is find a good area to work in, preferably one where there are several agents available to you. This way, even if you have to turn down missions for one agent, there will still be alternatives available to you. However, another important factor seriously limits the agent area option, which remains how crowded a system is. It is a well-known fact that some systems are more populated than others and trying to run missions there stays very risky as you might have lag and lose your ship. Trying to work for an agent in a quiet system stays a very good option to avoid troubles.

• Mission location: It should be noted that encounter missions are always located within the same constellation as the agent offering the mission (3 jumps away at most), and that courier missions can take you anywhere up to eight jumps away, including pickups and deliveries in different regions.

• Maximizing courier runs: When running courier missions, try and find an area spread over a number of systems with several courier-type agents. You will find that you will get asked to make deliveries to systems where another of your agents resides, so that on completion of your mission you are already in a location to request another. This means you can usually travel without an empty hold, maximizing your per-trip profits. In courier missions, you actually have to be present at the station where you need to deliver the goods to, as it is no longer possible to ask someone else to do it for you.

• Buying mission objectives: In a similar vein, for those courier missions that require you to move general market items around, if those items are being sold at the destination station you can buy them off the market and complete the mission without actually moving any goods anywhere. This can't be done with specific named items such as sealed cargo containers, however.

• Safespot creation: It is worth having a look at the system scanner window when you're in deadspace missions to see where you are on the map. Most missions are randomly located in a solar system and some of the locations can prove to be ideal safe spots located way off the normal travel routes.

Know Your Enemy

On all but the easiest missions, the key to survival is information. You need to know what to expect on the other side of that gate to ensure you don't need to claim on your insurance and spend hard-earned ISK (and valuable mission time) refitting a new ship.

When your agent offers you a mission, check the mission description for an idea of who you will be fighting. If it's not clear what faction you will encounter from the text, there is usually a logo somewhere on the page that lets you know who will be waiting for you. If there are none, expect several or unknown factions at the same time in the mission.

Once you know who you will be facing, the next job is to know what you are going to be up against.

A common tactic is to warp to the mission area in a shuttle to see exactly what's there. This will give you invaluable intelligence and allow you to choose an appropriate ship and configuration. Some rats may attack the shuttle, but NPCs do not attack pods, so even if you lose the ship you won't need to activate a new clone.

General Combat Mission Hints

If you lose your own ship during a mission and you feel you will be unable to complete the rest of it, bookmark the location of your ship wreck before canceling the mission. NPCs do not attack pods, so resist the urge to warp away as soon as your ship is destroye and take a second or two to bookmark the location before returning to the nearest station. Due to can persistence, your surviving equipment will remain in your can at the location, even after the mission has been canceled and the NPCs are gone. Just don't wait too long, as wrecks/containers will be destroyed after 1-2 hours.

Finally, always be wary when running missions after patches and extended daily downtimes as they can change significantly.

It is usually safer and faster to change ship sizes and types depending on the level of the combat mission you are attempting. Depending on skill, experience and preferences, several ship classes may be used on the same mission type.

Ship Setups

Knowing what you will encounter will dictate the set-up of your ship. The various online mission guides and resources are a fantastic source of information about ship configurations and tactics for missions. We strongly suggest reviewing these sites before starting, as well as keeping your own notes about what works for you (and what doesn't).

There are no right ships or fittings to use for missions, but there are certainly wrong ones. Players have their own preferences and skills, and different missions require different tactics and fittings. It is beyond the scope of this guide to discuss all possible combination's, but we will make a few suggestions.

With the current mix of missions, you can expect to encounter almost any enemy, from Angel to Serpentis, or even Concord and empire navies if you are working for pirate factions. You are not limited to the type of ships you would expect to encounter in the region's belts, so you need to be prepared to fight all opponents.

Your first step in fitting out your ship should be to identify the enemy's resistances and fit the defenses you will need to survive against the attack, then to load the appropriate offensive modules. Your choice of tactics will determine the rest of the ship's fitting.

The nature of the mission will also affect the tactics you employ. If you have a regular-space "Kill" mission then you can easily control your warp-in distance and arrive at a suitable location for your setup. For "deadspace" encounters you may be deposited in the middle of a swarm of NPCs without the ability to speed out of trouble, so you will need to be able to tank the damage.

Don't be afraid of changing your ship set-up between missions, or even during one. Sometimes you need different damage resistances or different tactics to be able to complete a single mission. Also, the same can be said of the different stages of some missions. Taking this a step further, some dedicated mission runners have multiple ships, each one already set up for specific mission types. Rather than having to refit your ships for each mission, you can select a ready-configured vessel. This greatly decreases the turnaround time but is far from the cheapest option. Knowing what to fit and when to fit it is the key to successful and efficient mission running. Here is a chart with the four races advantages at mission running, as well as the most used mission running ships. That doesn't mean you can't use others if you so desire of course, that is only a matter of taste.

Race attributes:

Sample of mission running ships:

Aggro Management

When you arrive at an encounter in your perfectly set-up ship, it can be difficult to know what to attack and what to leave alone. Sometimes as soon as you arrive you will be instantly attacked by a number of NPCs.

In this case it is best to destroy these first before starting on any others. Once you have dispatched them, or if you are not instantly attacked, use the Tactical Overlay to identify separate groups of ships that are clumped together in the same general area. Select a single ship from a group and attack only this one, then wait to see which other ships attack back. Generally, only the rats from that group will aggro you back. Using this tactic can help to reduce unwanted cases of mass aggro.

It is also a good idea not to shoot structures or missile/gun turrets unless you are prepared to take on the whole deadspace area. Attacking such structures causes all ships in the pocket to target and attack you. You can also get the full attention of the enemy by "bumping" or running into certain structures.

In many of the higher-level missions, you will encounter "tackler" ships that will warp scramble and/or web you, preventing you from leaving the area or speeding out of enemy range, respectively. There are three tactics to deal with tacklers depending on your skills and confidence:

• Shoot the tacklers first: If you are not sure that you can tank all the damage that could be dealt, you will want to take out the tacklers first, allowing you to warp out should there be any major safety issues.

• Shoot the damage dealing ship first: Alternatively, if you are comfortable with your ability to tank out the damage, you can work on the large damage dealers first, thus reducing the overall damage you take and then move on to the smaller Frigate tacklers.

• Securing the escape: The final tactic is to fit Warp Core Stabilizers on your ship. Since the Revelations patch, theses will lower your targeting range and lock speed, as well as using a valuable low slot on your ship. Since this can severely impact the performance of your ship, this is the least recommended option.

Managing The Loot

Your approach to collecting loot will depend greatly upon your reasons for running missions. If you are purely after the bounty and LP payouts then, on many missions, you can chose to ignore the wrecks dropped by enemy ships and simply cash in the mission and move on to the next one.

On the other hand, if you are something of a pack rat, you will probably want to open every wreck in the hope of finding something special to sell or refine back at the station.

Since the Revelations patch, NPCs leave a wreck behind when they're destroyed. These wrecks behave in the same way as normal player-jettisoned cans and will survive in space for one up to two hours before imploding. However, you can directly salvage a wreck without first removing the loot, as it will be moved to a cargo container nearby.

The wreck 'lifetime' is not affected by closing the mission, which means that they will remain in space once you have told an agent that you have completed the work. When you close a mission, the structures and any remaining NPCs will vanish, but the wrecks will remain out there.

If the mission was in a Deadspace pocket, as most are, then the Deadspace also vanishes when the mission is turned in. Therefore, in order to return to the mission location, you must first bookmark each deadspace 'pocket' before turning the mission in; otherwise, the acceleration gate will disappear and you will have no way of getting to your wrecks. Once turned in, you can fit a Microwarp Drive for extra speed.

Some missions require you to deliver certain items that are dropped from the mission NPCs to the agent. Even if you are not collecting all loot drops, you will still need to locate the relevant wreck containing the mission objective. In missions where there are many drops, it can be a little tricky picking out the right one.

Be warned that in some missions, the required item doesn't drop from the convoy but from the last ship you destroy, so be sure to check all wrecks and containers before leaving the area.

• Pick-up truck: A common tactic for collecting loot is to use a tractor beam during missions to pull a jettisoned cargo container behind you as a trailer. When you open a wreck, you can move the contents to the trailer without filling up your own hold. When you have collected everything, you bookmark the location of the trailer can, close the mission and return to the can in a ship with sufficient cargo space to transport all the items. This can work very well in missions located near stations or gates, where you may want to ensure you get to keep all the best loot.

• Hauling ship: Another common alternative is to not bother collecting loot until all the NPCs are killed. Instead, you bookmark each area of space where wrecks are located and return in a specific loot-collection ship, fitted for speed and cargo space and with tractor beams to ease the collection. One of the most popular ships for this is the Gallente Exequror Cruiser or even Destroyer ship class, as they have plenty of high slots. Battlecruisers are also useful here, with 8 high slots, plenty of cap, and large cargoholds when fully expanded. The Hurricane can haul 2040m3 before rigs and containers.

• Loot focusing: A happy medium that some mission runners prefer is to ignore Frigate and Cruiser drops and concentrate on Battlecruiser, elite ships and Battleship drops. Again, when you pop one of these ships, tag the wreck to identify it as a wreck of interest to allow you to differentiate it from all other drops.

• Structures: Some of the structures in deadspace encounter missions also drop loot. These drops range from standard trade goods through to rare implants and skillbooks. Not every structure in a complex will drop loot, so it's best to do some research beforehand to know which, if any, structures to destroy.

• Saving ammunition: It's also worth noting that when destroying structures, using drones rather than missiles or turrets is generally preferred as they expend no ammo - in many circumstances the value of loot dropped from structures is worth less than the ammo spent destroying them.

Unfortunately, ship and cargo scanners do not work on structures, so you only get to figure out which of them drop items through trial and error or checking on common mission note sites.

So now you have collected all that loot, what to do with it? Many players keep the items they use on a regular basis (guns, launchers, ammo, drones, etc.) and sell the high-end named items. The rest are reprocessed, with the resulting minerals either sold or used to build more ships and ammo.

Groups

It is possible to share mission standings and reward if several pilots are forming a gang. When the mission is completed, the player who has started the mission will have to select the proper "me and my gang finished the mission" option in the agent window.

Common setups for groups include a dedicated tanker, a logistics/remote repair support ship and a dedicated damage dealer. By sending in the tank first and having them attack the spawns, you can protect the other ships and complete missions quicker. However, be warned as NPCs tend to change their primary target depending on the threat they perceive.

Sometimes, the presence of a second player entity (either a ship or drone) in certain missions can cause the whole deadspace pocket to attack the players. You may be able to last out the damage, but in many circumstances this could be too much for an average tank.

Worlds Collide is well known for aggro problems. Also, if there are mission respawns, these tend to target the weakest ship present first. It is best, therefore, to try and ensure the tank receives all aggression to protect the supporting players.

Mission Mining

Most encounter missions will have asteroids present as part of the scenery. These are regular asteroids and can be mined as if you were in a belt. For the most part you will only have Veldspar or other low-end ore, but some missions spawn large Omber, Gneiss or similar-quality rocks, even in high security Empire space.

It should be noted that while many combat missions have asteroids the mining missions only have the asteroids that are required for the mission and only the amount needed for the mission, also these asteroids are special mission ores that can not be used outside of mining missions. There used to be regular mineable asteroids in these missions but they where removed at one point.

It can be profitable to mine these, especially as you are likely to be the only miner present and the possibility of ore theft is very low. Further, it will be difficult for pirates or war targets to find if you if you're in a mission rather than a belt, giving a certain level of security.

If you remain mining for long enough, there's a strong chance that NPC pirates will come and have a sniff around. You will get spawns of the same type as you would in that system's asteroid belts. Therefore, if you are mining you should always be prepared to deal with NPCs, even in missions.

Last point, some asteroids are trapped, and mining them is at your own peril.

Low Security Space

Generally, when you set up your ship for mission running you fit for facing local NPCs with the appropriate resists and damage types. While these fittings will work well on missions, they tend to be very poor PvP setups. Conversely, good PvP configurations tend to perform poorly as mission running ships. If you are mission running in low security space, you may want to review your setup to strike a balance between your NPC tank/gank configuration and the demands of PvP.

Being always aligned to a celestial object, like a planet of moon, always checking local, leaving a container near the entrance of acceleration gates are good actions to take to prevent unfortunate encounters with pirating players.