Missions & Complexes

If you never did missions do start it's fun for a while and the isk is good if you have a skilled Pirate BS grinding through them. With that said it is a grind after a few weeks and you can earn much more by doing combat exploration (low sec best sec :p).

I second that posted by DeMichael Crimson since it is what I was thinking about posting.

If you are making 30-40 million ISK in a gaming session with exploration you can easily count on doubling or tripling that with lvl 4 mission run over the same period of time no matter how you run them. Instead of a Raven, if you can afford it I suggest the Navy variant it is better suited to missions and in a relative way it is not that much more expensive.

The really sad part of this comes in your observations of how little you can make during an average gaming session when exploring. And even sadder is that CCP made it this way on purpose because they wanted to make exploration viable for more players especially those with low skills. However when they did that to counter the increased amount of materials that might enter the markets CCP had to nerf the drop tables and rates. So while they accomplished the goal of lowering the skills bar for becoming an effective explorer they made it an order of magnitude harder to make a real significant amount of ISK while doing it.

If you are not doing so then move your explorations into low and nul sec, you can still make a decent amount of ISK that way but beware those who live in or visit those areas since most of them will be looking for players like you to kill.

be a pirate and gatecamp

I'm a returning player who in the past did nothing but HS missions with a duel box account for SOE, made hundreds of billions .... it got very boring and I quit.... started back up a year later, did the same thing, but less billions.... then quit, gave away characters and ISK.

This time around, I'm doing it different.

Single character, and immediately went to NULL NPC space to have fun with the game.

I'm going to play far less, but quality time I hope.

My character is less than a week old and has been blown up far more times in a few days then my entire 3 years of off and on again playing in HS.... but it's far more interesting and at the end of the day, it's all about having fun and a personal score and not the the amount of billions you can make grinding. Absolutely don't grind for ISK.

Mission running is a grind in HS, but it's much, much more interesting in Null or Low if you think everyone is going to jump you.

Go to NPC Null, Rat, mission, explore, explode..... ignore the local chat.

I think it's a good option for mixing things up. Ideally I'll split mission running and exploration 50/50. It also works well for steady income. Exploration relies on luck (and speed as it's indirect PvP) whereas mission running is much more steady.

Actually with the recent buff the Barghest makes a pretty decent end goal and compares favorably with the Machariel in many ways. If you like missiles go for the Barghest, if you like Guns go for the Machariel. If you like lazors then probably either a Nighmare or Paladin but I don't have a ton of experience in that area so I don't know how and if they compare to the Mach/Barghest.

While I agree normal Lv4s can become a little bit tedious, burners really are amazing content and people who haven't tried them are really doing themselves a disservice. It's one of the better things CCP has done lately.

Only after getting final answer from CCP about possible recent level 4 missions stealth nerfs!

Mission hasn't changed much since I started playing this game in 2005. So imagine what older players think about them.

What nerfs are those? I only recently came back.