EVE Evolved: Mission-running - the basics, part 2

Rewards:
All missions give some ISK and loyalty points (LP) on completion as a reward. The ISK and LP reward is balanced based on the average length of time players take to complete that particular mission. This means the more difficult a mission is, the higher the reward you'll receive usually ends up. Loyalty points can be spent in the LP store on a variety of items, from implants and special faction ammo to navy ships and equipment. Because there are NPC ships to kill, encounters and kill missions carry additional rewards in the form of bounties, loot and salvage. Two special cases are rogue drone and navy ships, neither of which have bounties. Rogue drones only drop alloys which then reprocess into minerals while navy ships drop some loot and dogtags that must be collected and sold to NPC buy orders.

The bulk of rewards in level 4 missions comes from the high bounties on NPC battleships usually only found in 0.0. As much as 30 million ISK per mission could come just from bounties. The loot and salvage collected from a typical mission also adds a significant boost to the mission-runner's income and refining loot from missions is a great way of collecting high-end minerals within the safety of high security space. As it takes some time to collect loot and salvage, you might prefer to ignore the wrecks and use the time saved to run another mission.

Finding the best agent for you:
Whether you're interested in combat encounters or courier missions, if you want to take part you're going to need an agent. Agents are NPCs that live in the various space stations of EVE and give out missions to any pilots that meet their standings requirements. The higher your standings with a particular corporation or faction, the higher level and quality of agent you can use. Needless to say, the higher level and quality an agent is, the greater the rewards they'll give. Having high standings with an entire faction like the Gallente Federation will give you access to the agents in all corporations in that faction as if you had high standings to each of the individual corporations. The best way to find a compatible agent is to open your character sheet and go to the standings section. Click on the "liked by" tab and then select the corporation or faction you have highest standings with. You can then use one of a number of handy player-made tools to search the agent database for the highest quality agent from that corporation that you can use.

If you're just starting out in EVE, level 1 missions will be immediately available to you and will give a good feel for what you're in for but they aren't particularly rewarding. You can actually skip straight to level 2 agents by running a few missions and then training up the Connections skill. Each level of the skill increases all of your positive standings by 0.4 and at level 3 or 4 you should be able to use your chosen corp's level 2 agents straight away. From there it's just a matter of completing more missions to gain enough standing to try level 3's and eventually level 4s. If you gain enough standing with a corp that has level 5 agents, you'll gain access to tough group encounters available only in low security space which offer large amounts of loyalty points and valuable NPC tags as rewards.

In next week's instalment, I'll cover the ships and equipment you'll need to further your mission-running career, from frigates and destroyers for level 1 missions all the way to level 4 mission-running battleships.