Missions & Complexes

I think I must have missed something when it comes to missions, so please feel free to berate me for a bit of a noobish question

I am trying to get my standing with the Minmatar Mining Corp up to 6.7 as I wish to start refining my mined ore myself and (I believe) this will negate the 50% tax levied on me when I try to at the moment.

My standing with them was 1.67, I did a level 2 mining mission (simply because I am a miner and am suitably equipped to do them) and my standing went up 0.03 to 1.7.

Now by my calculations that means I've got to do this another 167 times to meet my goal. I guess I'm either missing something very basic or I'm going about this completely the wrong way.

Wow, I see. I had assumed that as the mission levels increased the standing rewards would also increase, so I knew it wasn't going to be as a massive slog as I had calculated. It's very interesting to see the maths behind the process.

I guess I should go and have a bit of a read up on mission types and see If it would be worth my time training myself up to handle different missions.

Thank you for your advise and time.

Once again thank you for reading and replying.

That is very kind of you to offer, one of the reasons I chose the mining route is that my Eve time is fairly sporadic otherwise I would have gotten myself deeper into playing a more interactive role and even trying to be more active in my corp. It does mean that it's difficult to pin down times and dates when I will be on-line so I would hate to mess you about.

It is good to know that this kind of advise and offers of help are about in the Eve community.

Here's the math you can do to figure out where your standing will be after X missions, or how many missions (at some fixed % gain each) it will take to reach Y standing. I'm assuming you're familiar with the basics, e.g. how each mission you do nudges your standings some % of the way from where it is currently to 10.0 (or -10.0 for negative standings changes). I'll ignore the effect of Social skills here for now.

Let's use your example. You were at 1.67 MMC, did a single mission, and afterward were at 1.7. This means that after this one mission, the gap between your current standings was:

[10.00 - 1.70] / [10.00 - 1.67] = 99.6399%

of what it was before. The "standings gain" for that mission was therefore 100% - 99.6399% = 0.3601%. (Wow, that is teeny.)

You could also check this directly by opening the Standings tab of your character pane, finding the MMC corporation, and right-clicking and selecting "Show Transactions."

Let's say you want to reach 6.7 standing. That means that after some number X missions, each trimming 0.3601% off the gap between your current standings and 10.00, you want to be at 6.7.

The formula for that is: (final gap between desired standings and 10.00) = (current gap) * (percentage drop in gap size per mission) ^ X

So: (10.00 - 6.7) = (10.00 - 1.67) * (1.00 - 0.003601) ^ X

Doing some logarithms magic that I won't get into:

log(10.00 - 6.7) = log(10.00 - 1.67) + X * log(1.00 - 0.003601)

X = (log(10.00 - 6.7) - log(10.00 - 1.67)) / log(1.00 - 0.003601)

= about 257.

Sounds disheartening, right? The good news is that most people don't do many/any L1 or L2 missions. They're used strictly to unlock access to L3 and L4 missions (by raising corp or faction standing). A big beefy L4 combat mission might have an 8% standings gain with a corp. How many of those would it take to reach 6.7 MMC standing?

(log(10.00 - 6.7) - log(10.00 - 1.67)) / log(1.00 - 0.08)

= just over 11.

As a quick aside, when you mention this to some people, they'll tell you that you shouldn't hop in a battleship to do L4s until you've trained lots of relevant support skills to 4 or ideally 5. Laugh at these people. Support skills are indeed helpful, but the standings and cash rewards jump a huge amount from L2s upward, and many battleships can be fit with really forgiving tanks. (I'm a Gallente pilot, and an armor-tanked Dominix is a classic forgiving newbie battleship when you use enough slots for tank + cap recharge, but I'm biased.) My advice would be to get into L4s asap, but use EFT to make sure you have a really solid, cap-stable tank when you first start out - I'd suggest 500-600+ dps tank, cap-stable, while using mission-specific hardeners.

For the record, I was getting a toon that I wanted standing raised on to do double/triple L4 courier missions in one run, and getting to the Storyline missions. Because I was getting Security ones (I had to get them done by another toon) rather then Distribution one, and they were rather intense, the standing boost when the distro toon was handing them in was 42% and I got that 6 times in a row, out of the Security missions.

What type of mission you get for the storyline is meant to depend on what agents are nearby. Maybe someone here knows how that is supposed to work.

I am surprised no one told you to train up social skills. That will increase your standing as well as running missions.

Wow! I go to bed and wake up to find a huge heap of help. Thank you

Thank you very much for the in-depth maths explanation and also for the spreadsheet, I've saved that and will be using it (I like spreadsheets). It's good to see that I just need to power through the level twos to start getting better rewards from the level three and four missions.

I'm not so disheartened now. Once again thank you for all you advise and time.

Well, a little hint maybe.

I had the problem some time ago also. Until i noticed that i get an additional mission about every 13-16 missions. So chose a system in which or to which a storyline agent is close, if possible of the same corp you are flying missions for. That additional mission will give you a bigger faction hit.

Maybe that helps.