EVE New Citizens Q&A

There are three agent types - security, distribution and mining. Security agents give you combat missions, distribution agents have you haul something to another station and mining agents give you missions to go mine something in a mission location. Some missions come in as a multiple part missions that might have more than just the one your agent type would have you expect.

Agent level tells you the expected toughness of the missions you will get. As a rule of the thumb L1 missions can be done in a frigate or a destroyer, L2 in cruisers, L3 in battlecruisers and L4 in battleships. L1 agents are alvays available to you, L2 needs 1.0 standing with the corporation or faction, L3 3.0 and L4 5.0.

Picking a good corporation to run missions for can be a bit more tricky. You can go with a popular navy and that is a good choice. They have lots of stations and with good standings you get less taxes and eventually jumpclone ability over a good area. The downside is that the LP stores are not that lucrative as more people are running for them. You could take tho LP approach too and look at the LP store for something good to sell and start running missions for that corporation. Whatever you do if it is your first corporation to build up standings you want it to have all the level agents available in high sec. You can check it in the corporation info window under agents tab or use the agent finder tool.

For avoiding standings hit with other factions you need to avoid missions against them. Every mission comes with a badge in their description that shows you who you are going against. If it's one of the empire factions you are going to kill ships from that faction and lose some standing as a result. This can and will eventually take you to kill on sight levels, ie. -5.0 and lower. If there isn't for some reason you can use the mission reports for it.

Then you have derived loss from gaining standing with a faction. Every 16 missions you do for the same faction and level you get a storyline mission that improves your standing with the faction you are running the missions for. Unfortunately their enemies won't like that and your standings will drop. However it will take you to -5.0 at most and you can remain not kill on sight with just one level in diplomacy. Note that you will lose access to any agents other than level 1 if you have -2.0 or less with the faction.

It is possible to keep all factions happy by rotating the agents you work for but it will take a lot longer to go up a mission level that way. You might want to get at least some L4 missions before trying to balance the faction standings. Luckily there is a standing repair plan for this.