Missions & Complexes

To gain standings with a corp you can do a couple different types of missions:

Distribution: Courier jobs. Move XXX from A to B.
Mining: Warp to site, fight off some weak rats with your drones and mine whatever they ask for.
Security: Combat. Warp here, shoot this.

Rep gain follows EVE's supposed theme: More risk = more gain.
So as far as rep gain:
Security>Mining>Distribution

EDIT: There are a couple people that will grind missions for you for a price, look in the Sell orders forum or do a search. If you're looking for faction standings, consult "The Plan" created by DMC. I don't have a link but if you give it a while, he'll probably educate you. In the meantime you can do some research on COSMOS missions.

2nd EDIT: Found link to "The Plan" All credit for it goes to DMC :)

To get FACTION standing up to 6 or 7, you'll likely need to do some combat. B/c in order to do COSMOS missions, you need to be able to use the agents, which require standings themselves. You do on occasion get combat storyline missions when running distributions.

For COSMOS missions, the main agents require:
agent level = standings required
1 = not horribly negative
2 = 2.0
3 = 4.0
4 = 6.0

So. The mechanisms for faction and corp standing are actually quite different. Corp standing is pretty easy to grind; it's the one you want for jump clones, reduced taxes, and perfect refine. That can be shared across characters by handing in missions while fleeted. People sell corp standing pretty regularly (basically, you fleet with them and afk while they accept and grind missions, splitting the mission rewards). They tend to charge but how high you want to go.

Faction standings on the other hand can't be shared. The only thing you really need them for on a trade/industry character is to launch a POS in high sec. To be perfectly honest, it's easier to buy a corp with the standings you want (or pay someone to raise your corp's standings) than it is to actually get your own faction standings up. The only ways to actually get your own up are a) grind storyline missions, which requires that you run 16 normal missions for the same faction of the same level -- and yes, whether you get a combat you might have to decline or a simple courier mission is entirely random and b) the rest of the options listed in DMC's plan, most of which involve combat to one degree or another.

Where does that leave you? Ask yourself what you want the standings for. If you don't need to plant a POS, don't even worry about faction standings. If you do need to plant a POS, consider buying a pre-made corporation with the standings you want.

One thing to consider is the Sisters of Eve arc. It's a lot of combat, but doable with low skilled characters. At the end you get a decent bump for one faction. I think you can do it every 6 months (or 3). I've been doing to fix my faction standings with the frogs. If you have 2 accounts I reccommend you just fleet up and shared the reward for corp standings.

A character skilled for a Trade career can also raise Faction standings easily without doing any combat.

Basically just train up the various Social skills (Social, Connections, etc.) and then work the Data Center Agents for the specific Faction you want.

Of course doing the Data Center 'Tag' missions is going to tank the opposing Faction standing but if you're just gonna sit in Jita, then it doesn't really matter.

Now if you want that character to also travel to various Market Hubs then working 'The Plan' is definitely advised. A Trade character can accept the mission offers while a friend or alt does the actual combat when needed.

Good luck to you.



DMC

That's correct. Unless the charcters in said corporation have no relevant standings then the standings will adjust after a week. You can of course plant your pos or posses in that time or pay someone to corp sit later.