Complete the Career Agents
tl:dr
Career agents give some ISK, ships (combat, mining, exploration and hauling) but more importantly faction standings with no derived standing loss towards other factions.
Career Agents
Career agents are the next recommended step after you completed the initial tutorial, these are not mandatory but it is recommended to complete them.
These will teach you about different aspects of EVE Online (PVE, Mining, Production, Exploration and will try to teach you PVP).
You will earn some ISK (you wont be billionarie) it will be enough to get you an initial set of modules for your first ship, speaking of which it will also provide you with a couple of starting ships (combat, mining, exploration and hauling).
But most importantly it will increase your faction standings.
Standings
Faction/Corp/Agent standings define how much reputation you have towards either any of those, these affect some aspects for example:
Too low:
- Faction - Faction police will attack you on that faction space
- Corp/Agent - Agents will not give you missions
High enough:
- Faction - Lower taxes
- Faction/Corp/Agent - Access to higher level agents
Before you can start running level 4 missions, you need to raise your standings towards the NPC corporation or the faction that it belongs.
Some people will complain that increasing your standings its a grind, and to be honest it is, but its the only way to access higher level agents and better payouts.
- +1 standings grants access to L2 missions
- +3 standings grants access to L3 missions
- +5 standings grants access to L4 missions
- +7 standings grants access to L5 missions
If there is a standing you want to increase that should be Faction, but that doesn't come without drawbacks, whenever you increase faction standings the other factions notice and lower your standings towards you, this is called derived standings.
Going back to the Career Agents
This is where we go back to the career agents.
Completing each of the career agents will reward you with 1.5% standing gain towards the faction of the career agent.
For an alpha account with Negotiation 3 this means an average of .17 faction standing gain per agent completed.
This is enough to bring your standings from 0 to .941 towards the agents faction.
After you add Connections 2 you end up with +1.7 standings.
Farming Career Agents
Yes, you can complete all the career agents.
Each faction has 3 sets of career agents in Exordium you can complete them all.
If you complete all 15 agents located in Exordium, you will end up with a standing of around +2.2 plus +.6 from Connections 2. This will leave you at around +2.8 standings towards the faction.
At that point you can run 1 of the agents located outside of Exordium and will put you at exactly +3.0 standing, this will be enough to start running level 3 missions.
All of this with no derived standings.
But we don't stop there, you can complete all of the career agents, not only the ones for your faction.
On average it takes around 120 missions to go increase your standings +1 towards a corp, by leveraging the agents, you only need to run 45 missions to gain on average +.8 standings towards a faction.
Now go back to Exordium and complete all of the agents.
~L3LCK Grandmaster