EVE New Citizens Q&A

There are basically two reasons for running missions. Standing increase and profit. For standing you want to run for the corps owning your preferred trade hub (Caldari Navy in case of Jita), in order to decrease trading fees. If it's for profit and fun only, SoE is a good pick. But as you expierienced nullsec exploration, you should know that highsec mission running nets you only about half what you can earn from null relic sites, if you only look at ISK. Though there are some highly optimized setups with a high upfront investment including burner missions which may come close.

use this tool to work out what is profitable:

https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/lpstore/

click the "i've read and understood" and start looking at corps and their LP stores

You want to take a look at items that not only have good LP/ISK ratio but also ones that move regularly. No point buying stuff that only sells once a week. I believe the stat for this is 5% volume

SoE is a steady earner, nowhere near as good as it once was because it's being overfarmed (astero dropping from 90mil to 50 in a year)

Thukker is great lp/isk ratio but annoying to mission for and the cap batteries move quite slowly.

Some corps sell blueprint copies that can be quite lucrative, I used to mission for 5 run copies of federation navy stasis webifiers and build+sell them.

High sec missioning isn't all that great but once you get everything down to a science and stuff is as efficient as possible, you can make some respectable money doing it.

LP is the lion's share of the income now. Salvage is pitiful and loot is mostly bad unless you run against empire and pick up tags. Bounties and mission rewards are largely insignificant.

You want to pick the corp you run for based on how much the LP will net you and that's the main reason why SoE is so popular since their LP has stable prices and is always in demand.

A very significant fraction of your mission reward will usually come from LPs, especially as you progress to Level 4s. There are exceptions, but generally the biggest part of the mission reward is the LP value. Some LP stores are most definitely better than others.

Be careful when looking at the Fuzzworks LP calculator; it can mislead you into thinking that certain items have an extraordinarily high LP value. These are almost invariably worthless items that are used for margin trading scams because they have a ~0 turnover: no one wants to buy these items for the item itself. Be sceptical of anything from a hi-sec LP store that has a value of more than ~1500 ISK per LP.

Finally, many of the best selling LP store items require tags from opposing empire factions. Like yourself, most mission runners are cautious about losing empire standing. This means that those who do take that plunge are operating in a sellers market; "tag missions" (eg: Enemies Abound) are very lucrative for that reason. I mentioned pirate missions; I run Angel missions for my money, and even though Angel LP are currently almost worthless, I made very good ISK indeed farming tags to sell in empire.

There is no way to totally avoid this. You can only pick and choose your level of standing loss. There is such a thing as derived standings which means that most factions in Eve have a relationship with most other factions that is expressed in a number that is either positive or negative. If you look at the show info on any corp you can click on the faction and then see the show info on the faction. Go to the standings tab and you will see their relationship with other factions.

If you look at Caldari State they are -2.0 with Minmatar Republic and -5.0 with Gallente Federation. That means for every 1.0 increase in Caldari Standing that you Achieve you will go down with Minmatar by 0.2 and down with Gallente by 0.5. However Caldari has a 7.0 standing towards Amarr empire but Amarr only has a 5.0 with Caldari which means the same 1.0 increase in Caldari will get you 0.5 increase with Amarr but a 1.0 increase with Amarr will get you a 0.7 increase with Caldari. That is assuming that I am reading all the "<" and ">" correctly.

Something also worth noting is that all standings increases are expressed as a percentage of the difference from where you are to perfect which is 10. So at zero the percentage is equal to the increase if you move the decimal one place. Lower than zero and you move faster and higher than zero and you move slower.

So if you study one of the standings charts that are out there you can do things like run missions for SoE which give you decent increase with Gal and Mini while barely scratching your Amarr / Caldari standings and then run some Amarr or Caldari missions to balance it out for example.

Also note that only storyline missions affect your faction standings when you turn them in and only faction standings have this relationship. However non-storyline missions can be faction kill missions meaning running missions for a faction's Navy they will occasionally ask you to kill an opposing faction's ships. In many cases you will receive a faction hit for each ship killed.

Also each empire faction has an epic arc mission line which are almost a free pass on the negative standings hit to opposing factions but can only be run once every 90 days or so.

In most cases looting / Salvaging isn't worth the time. If you want max isk / hour you speed run missions. Completing as many as possible in as short a time as possible to get the most LP. For me I enjoy looting and salvaging so I always loot and salvage but I am more concerned with fun than max isk.

Skills will help with hacking but also flying the right ship and having the right mods helps. Further learning what you are doing helps a bit also as those little numbers that pop up mean something and if you learn how to read them you can get better at it.

IDK anything about Theology council. SoE has good isk to LP because they don't have that many high sec combat agents and they have really good stuff in the LP store. They are technically a pirate faction that exists in high sec. The four main empire factions give out lots of LP through faction warfare so their prices get a little diluted by that.

I can't really add much to the good points above but Theology Council are one of the better Amarr corporations due to their LP store and that they have a system with two L4 agents in the same station (Sasoutikh is 0.5 sec status iirc).

For the highest LP/isk conversion Pirate corps (all based in null sec) are very good and they have their own epic arcs but require some ingame knowledge of how to survive in hostile space, so maybe look at that as a longer term goal.

In high sec, Thukker and Sisters of Eve are the two corps with most valuable LP. Those are followed by the science oriented corporations (often R&D corporations) like Hyasyoda (Caldari), Roden Shipyards (Gallente), etc.

You don't have to do storyline missions, but many do. But you can just decline all those if you want to (with no penalty) and as long as you don't do anti-faction missions you'll just get corporation standings and no loss to faction (but no increase either).

Once you're over the hump of level 1s, you'll accelerate through the standings grind very quickly. It can take several days to get to L2s, but then only a couple of hours to get to L3s, and then only 6-9 L3 missions to get to L4s.

Always do the storyline missions if you can; not only do they increase your faction standings, they generally give you a very large standing boost to the corp that the storyline agent works for.

Going to go a different direction than most people here but first if you are going to run missions especially as a new to the game player you need this it contains lots of useful information about missions and many other aspects of EvE.
EvE Survival

If you think the most enjoyable way to spend your time in EvE is making as much ISK / LP as possible from everything you do then ignore the rest of what I have to say.

EvE should be about making ISK while doing something you enjoy and are having fun while doing it. Any and all PvE activities can get boring and running them in the same optimized ships / fits / tactics that makes the max ISK / LP work just emphasizes the boring nature of the PvE activities in this game. Things that can help take some of the boredom out of missions.
Move around, different agents will give you a different sub-set of the missions in the pool.
Try new and different ships.
Change your fits.
Try different tactics.
Full clear and loot salvage some missions while blitzing others.
Distribution missions can be fun because they can lead you on a roam through the EvE universe. Many distribution missions are a one way thing, you fly from A to B and drop something off. Instead of returning to your regular agent take a mission from any agent you can in the system you dropped stuff off in. Doing this I started just outside of Dodixie in Gallente space and ended the game session in Rens in Minmatar space. Got to see a lot of places I had never been to before and talked to a lot of other players in local along the way.

If something flashy and yellow shows up in your mission, don't shoot it unless:
1: You don't care about losing your ship, and
2: You're really, really bored.

What kind of weapons are you planning to use in missions ?

The NPCs you'll need to shoot have varying resistances. Hit their weak spots and you'll kill them much faster.

If you're running projectiles, missiles or drones as your primary weapon, you can change your ammo type for the mission. If you're using hybrids or lasers you can't. For hybrids this isn't too bad, as kin/thermal damage is good for shooting most NPCs.

Lasers are a problem. They do EM/thermal damage. If the NPCs you're shooting have strong resistances against EM and thermal (eg, Angel Cartel), running missions against them will be very slow. Last I checked, the faction you're running missions for affects what NPCs you'll face.

Though you only have to worry about this when you hit level 3 or 4 missions.