Missions & Complexes

1. Doing missions for pirate factions as such wont lower your standings to empire factions AFAIK (not 100% sure here though). What I do know is, that pirate faction agents do tend to give a lot of missions against empire factions and CONCORD. Sansha will most likely give you a lot of missions against Amarr and shooting the ships in these missions will lower your standing to Amarr even though turning in the mission itself might not.

2. You will not lose security standing. Hits to your security standing only occur when you aggress another player in low or highsec without CONCORD permission.

3. When doing things like this you should always expect not to come back with your ship. Missions are more often than not in a different system than the one the agent is based in and everytime you jump through a gate means you potentially jump into someone waiting for you on the other side. Since running missions is a repeating pattern and you always return to your agent also means that all people have to do to catch you is wait. One possibility to make this safer is using an second account with a scout, preferably something cloaky and small like a CovOps or even just a T1 frigate with a T1 cloak on it. But still, this wont make you safe, just safer. In general it is not recommended doing level 4s in a battleship in hostile low/null that isn't controlled by your corp/alliance.

4. Should you start doing this on a bigger scale, the LP rewards are definitely worth it. Pirate LP shops give good items like implants (High Grade and Low Grade Slaves for Sansha) as well es the respective pirate faction ships (Succubus, Phantasm and the Nightmare for Sansha). Due to the troubles of getting your hands on the LP these items tend to have decent LP conversion rates. On this website you can check all the LP shops.

5. As said above, be careful when you jump. If possible use a scout. Always expect to lose your ship and dont pimp it with all those shiny things. use the least expensive ship for the job. Once you get more experienced you could look into ships that pack a punch while being small like HACs or maybe T3s if you feel like it. Also, depending on how experienced you are with ship fittings, you might want to get some feedback on that before you take the ship out to low/null.

I hope that answers your questions :-)

Running regular pirate missions doesn't tank your empire faction standings, but running storyline missions does.

If you accept anti-empire missions (of which there are a lot) then expect to get hit by empire standings losses from killing ships in the mission (so if you can blitz a mission without killing any, or very few, npcs then you may be able to get away with no/reduced standings loss). These standings losses used to be quite significant (e.g. a 2% standings hit from killing one ship, although not all missions and certainly not all ships actually give you the standings hit.)

There are anti-mercenary missions that you can do that don't impact your standings at all but you will rapidly run up against the mission decline limit if you try to avoid anti empire ones. This is another reason that it's good to have a scouting alt - you can decline twice as many missions.

Assault frigates can chew through level 1 and 2 missions pretty well, but so can t1 frigates/destroyers although they will struggle with some level 2 missions especially if you have poor skills/cheap fits.

Sansha are pretty deep into Null. You can get info on Sansha, select one of the corporations like True Power, then select the agents tab and go through the agents. Set destination to an agent and bring up your in game map. Configure your map to something like ships destroyed in the last hour and you'll get some indication of how dangerous the route in is. Often the first system or two on the way into Null is the most likely to be camped and dangerous.

Note that you can right click on a system in the map with a lot of kills and tell your auto-pilot to avoid it and you'll be re-directed to a different route. If you do this a couple of times you will frequently get a much less traveled (and thus much less likely to be camped) route - but it will probably be a little longer, occasionally a lot longer.

The advice about getting a cloaked scout is invaluable. Learn things like the MWD-cloak trick and read up on bubbles. Learn about insta undocks and making gate/station spying perches. Learn to use dscan to figure out if a gate that you are heading towards has other people sitting at it or bubbles anchored, etc.

Mission rats in null will tend to drop more loot than high sec rats and people will often pay a considerable markup over Jita prices for useful items like warp disruptors. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's worth looting (although anti-empire missions the rats all drop tags rather than bounties so there's an incentive to at least look at the wrecks.)

When I wanted to go back to empire I tended to try to find a wormhole route rather than going a dozen jumps through hostile null including the gateway camp but that depends on how busy things are. And, honestly, I haven't done it in quite a while so I guess wormholes might be more dangerous now. Essentially you look for a named wormhole (not a K162) as you know that when you go into the wormhole it will have another exit wormhole going somewhere else then follow the chain. If you're lucky you can get one straight from null to empire but those are rare so mostly you want to jump from wormhole to wormhole trying to stay in the lowest class of wormhole that you can as those are most likely to have an empire exit hole.

Don't do it OP. Or if you do, don't do it in the way you imagined. When I was a rookie I also imagined how cool it would be to run missions for the Guristas and stuff like that. I realized soon it was not plausible in my current situation. Unless you're an expert ninja, the best way to do nullsec missions is to join a corp that lives and PVPs in the area where you plan to mission. I did this for a time and it was some of the most fun I've ever had in Eve. You get people to train you in PVP, you get PVP action funtimes, and when you want to make isk, you have a semi-safe place to do it, or at the very least some support. And when you need stuff from empire, chances are your corp will have weekly JF runs or something.


They will give you missions that are against empire factions. Killing empire faction ships will tank your faction standings (the ones that are hard to improve/repair) very quickly. Unlike empire factions, you can expect to get these missions most of the time. You do have an alternative though, and thats to mission for factions in nullsec that are not pirate factions. The other other option is to live in NPC space and just do belt ratting or anomalies, which also makes very good isk for a newish player.


It really depends on how fast you're noticed. An experienced and competent player can see the ganks coming and avoid them, accepting it as a loss of time. It really depends on how bad the people want to kill you, which is somewhat out of your control. If they want to kill you a lot, they can pretty much shut you down. As a newer player, you will surely lose mission ships. Mission ships that will be difficult to replace in nullsec.

Also, in nullsec, "griefer" has a very narrow definition that does not include people trying to kill you in a mission or on your way to a mission.

The sansha implants are highly valued and the nightmare is as well. The faction frig/cruiser are not valuable. Making the LP worth your while (that is, significantly more valuable than empire LP) will require some starting ISK, the ability to move stuff to and from empire, and most importantly the willingness to examine tag prices, mod prices, built costs, and market prices for the end product. In my opinion a newer player has no chance to effectively use the LP unless you're going through a middleman or try to sell the LP directly to someone else willing to do the work.

Just make sure they aren't the local whipping boy for their neighbors in the region, or you might have a bad time. The other issue is one I've already mentioned, you will kinda be burning your bridges back in empire if you follow through with this. Repairing standings is a pretty miserable grind according to everyone I've ever heard that's had to do it.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and if you're going to do missions for sanshas, that kind of makes ratting in that area also impossible, as shooting the local rats will result in lowering your sanshas nation faction standing.

That's fine by me. I only wanted to go to Stain for the faction missions.