Missions & Complexes

Yup, basically you grind missions, unlocking higher levels of them. To reduce the grind you can train better social skills.

You will always get standings gains even without skills. Keep in mind there are agent, corp and faction standings.

Agent and Corp standings are gained with every mission. Faction standings are gained every 16 missions through "stoyline missions"

Training the social skill will increase this amount by 5% per level.

There is no repeating, missions are given at random so missions will repeat as they are randomly given.

I believe it was determined that standings are most efficiently gained through level 3 missions.

http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Missioning_101

To further complicate things, running missions for one faction will have a derived standings effect on all of the other factions. This is important to know as if you grind missions for only one faction and then you decide to go run for another faction you may be locked out from running missions due to your derived standings. This can be somewhat mitigated by not accepting missions that are against a particular faction (for example Roden Shipyards is Gallente so they will occasionaly give mission against the Caldari and Amarr factions, continually running these missions will tank your standings with them and eventually you won't be able to use them, the exception is level 1 missions you are never locked out of these)

Hi Paranoid Loyd, thanks for commenting on one of my questions again! Your advice is always great.

I had heard about the standings issue and feel like I'm running into that now with the Roden Shipyards mission chain. I'm currently loosing standing with Caldari and given that Jita is in Caldari space, I'd like to keep decent standing with them so I may back off the Gallente missions for a bit.

Great thoughts too on the Social skills - I'll add a few of those into my queue. As a side question to this point, though, does it make sense to train in something like Accounting to save on the tax cost for selling items in station?

Epic is one which gives faction standing without derives at the end of epic arc. No LP during epic arc, only big ISK. Epic is repeatable every 90 days.
Standard mission gives no faction standing, but gives LP as reward.
Storyline mission gives faction standing with derives. To get storyline, have to do 16 regular missions same level and same faction.

Faction standings wise any mission that is against one of the 4 major factions will be a standings killer.
While these "faction" missions as we call them are most commonly given from story line agents there are many that you may get at any popint and from any agent. This site has excellent information and you need to read your mission briefs completely and carefully before you accept a mission.
http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=missionreports

Rotating between factions is another way to help keep standings neutral to all 4.
You have to define X as a specific number of story line missions, most mission runners I know use 4 but that is up to you.
After getting to X you rotate to another faction, and after X times 4 story line missions you would be back to Roden Ship Yards agents. If you combine this practice with declining all faction missions and you can easily keep your standings neutral to all 4 factions.

You get one story line for every 16 regular missions you run.

Declining more than 1 mission every 4 hours from the same agent is another standings killer. To help with this try to choose an area that has more than 1 agent for the NPC you are running for.

Easiest way is to use the agent finder, look for multiple L3 agents from the same corp in 1 system (sometimes 1 station).



edit
some useful info

mission guidance

standings management --> "the plan"