Missions & Complexes

I have been offered the Valuable Records (2/2) mission. The mission description warns that I will lose standing with Caldari State because the mission involves destroying a ship at a hidden station (no Concord, just standing loss). The main reason I'm running missions is to increase my standing with Caldari State. I've only been playing a few weeks and my Caldari standing is 2.70 now. The mission has been offered... should I accept it or decline? Raising faction standing seems to take so long that I'd rather not move in the wrong direction. There's really no indication of how much standing I'll gain or lose here.

Actually gaining Faction standing is easier than what most players think.

Check out Event Agents, granted there's only a limited amount of agents available and after running through all of those agents, the only option left besides doing 16 regular missions to get a storyline offer is to complete Epic Arcs every 3 months.

As for completing Anti-Empire encounter missions, yeah, that's up to you.

My memory is very hazy on this but I believe this mission is related to the datacenter agents; not the ones that simply ask you for tags but the one or two that actually make you go someplace. I'd decline that mission tbh.

Edit: seems it's related to the circle agents: http://community.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=490450

Yeah, seems it's the 2-part mission series gained from an agent while working the 5-part mission series offered from the agent listed on the Cert gained from the Data Center Agents.

It's been a long time since I've completed those missions but I believe it's mandatory to complete the 2-part series in order to complete the 5-part series. Back when I did those missions, Part 4 of 'The Celestial Imperative' gave the 2-part mission series 'The Hapless Thief'. I guess CCP has changed it. Or maybe I'm just not remembering correctly.

Completing those will give you 2 different Faction standing gains which will vastly outweigh the negative hit for the single ship kill. I'm not even sure if you do incur a negative ship kill standing hit for completing that mission. Like I said, it's been a long time.

Personally I would just complete the mission series. The amount of gain is way more than the amount of loss. If you're really worried about it, have an alt or another character destroy the NPC ship in question.

Just remember that completing Event Agent missions will usually incur positive and negative standings towards all Factions.

EDIT:
Back when I did them, these were the mission chains and side chains gained from the Agent listed on the Data Center 'Certs'.

Gallente = 'Beizan Picholen' leads to 'The Plot Thickens'.
Amarr = 'Quelling the Insurgency' leads to 'Choonka's Request'.
Caldari = 'The Celestial Imperative' leads to 'The Hapless Thief'.
Minmatar = 'Shaman Secrets' leads to 'Snatching the Shaman' (Decline that mission and talk to agent again to be offered 'The Shaman's Will', complete that and talk to agent again to receive 'Snatching the Shaman' offer again.)