It’s like floating in the ocean, the slosh of pod fliuds as my Taranis accelerates into warp. I don’t get this feeling in any bigger or slower ships. It’s part of the reason why I fly interceptors. I’m probably entering the last minutes of my life as I move in quickly to tackle a Raven in the belts. His friends will probably kill me, but I should stay alive long enough to allow my gang to kill him. He and his friends should have found some other place in Syndicate to hunt in.

It’s a skeleton crew, only volunteers since they know they may die. If they live, they will have earned enough money to retire. The escape pod is in good order. I hope they make it. Their families in Poitot will do well even if they don’t make it back. You can get a lot of loyalty out of a good crew if you take care of their families.

I wonder what really happens when I die. Does my consiousness continue on? Do I just feel nothing? Do I really continue into my next clone, or do I just die here while a new person replaces me? Is my soul destroyed during the rebirth? Do I still have a soul? I’ll find the answers soon enough.

My ship is in good working order. The new armor plates whould help me last a bit longer. The guns are in good condition ready for the overheating abuse they are about to receive. The MWD and signature damper are green. The sun is at my back. It’s a good day to die again.

• L3 or L4 courier missions. These things are just awful. They give you a very small amount of standings increase, and the rewards are horrible. On the forums, you’ll hear people tell you that they can knock off 10 of these an hour and get a storyline every 2 hours. In my experience, it doesn’t work out this way. The cargo size ranges from 3000m3 to 8000m3, and the number of jumps ranges from 1 jump to 7 jumps. With a mid level agent, I was averaging 4 to 5 jumps. Each trip took about 10 minutes on average in a blockade runner. I shudder to think how long it would take in a hauler. Also, none of the courier agents give out just courier missions. There are combat missions and mining missions as well. Since my indy pilot can’t do combat missions, I had to pass on those, which means I had to take the mining missions. This brings me to the next best group of missions.
• L4 Mining missions. If you’re well skilled, have at least a covetor and a hauler alt, you can knock off any of the mining missions in about 30 – 45 minutes. The standings increase for the time is somewhat better then courier missions, and the LP awards are better. It’s like watching paint dry though, and some of the missions involve an initial bit of combat to remove pirates or rogue drones.
• L3 Combat missions. They give about the same standings increase and awards as an L4 mining mission, but they take about 10-15 minutes to run on average including overhead. If you’re just looking for standings, don’t bother looting unless it’s while you’re killing stuff. I pass on the faction related missions, since my caldari and amarr standings are pretty low now. I still need to be able to fly in their space.
• L4 Combat missions. If I had gone with my gut instead of reading some forum posts, I would have gone with these whenever I could. If you’re reasonably skilled, you can complete L4 combat missions in 30 minutes on average (including blitzing some). The standings increases are more then double L3 combat missions, and the rewards and loot (where you’re looting while killing) are much better. If you have to pass on faction combat missions, you may want to find a place where there are 2 agents nearby for those times when you get 2 faction missions in a row. Currently, I’m bouncing between a good L3 and L4 agent 2 jumps apart.

The lesson is that if you have combat skills, you should consider sticking with combat agents for any standings grind where they are available. EVE is not a perfect world, so sometimes you’ll have to do missions in a suboptimal way because no other agents are available. Usually though, you can find at least a L3 combat agent for any corp to make things go faster.

My methodology was probably a bit flawed, since my indy and combat pilot are fleeted up for combat missions, and my indy pilot was doing the courier/mining missions alone. This actually makes the combat missions even better if you can do them alone.

To decide whether this is worth your time, you will need several pieces of information. First is the going price for data cores. Go to the eve-central market aggregator and search for “datacore”. For the purposes of this exercise, ignore the subsystem datacores. Go through the list and get a feel for how much the buy and sell orders are for each datacore and decide on several you want to pursue. The average sell price for the datacores I chose runs around 250k ISK each so we’ll use that number for further calculations (a bit conservative at today’s rates).

The next piece of information you need is how many research points an agent will give you per day. Here’s the calculation shamelessly stolen from the official eve-online wiki.

RP/day = Field multiplier * (1 + (AQ + 5*N)/100) * (SS + AL)^2

AQ = Agent Quality
N = character’s Negotiation skill level
SS = character’s specialist science field level (eg “Quantum Physics”)
AL = Agent Level

The field multiplier is 3 for starship datacores (which cost 150 rp per datacore) and 1 for others (which cost 50 rp per datacore). Agent quality can be found in the info page of the agent. This calculation seems to use the base quality, not the effective quality. I’ll verify once I have more experience and come back and edit. It turns out that aq will average around 0 until I grind rep with some other corps.

This means that with a negotiation skill of 4 and specialist skill of 4, I’ll be pulling in about 76 research points a day or about 1.5 data cores a day. So 375k per day per agent with 5 agents for 30 days is about 56 million per month. This number can go up a lot if you’re willing to train negotiation to 5 (a 10 to 12 day skill) or go out and grind up better research agents.

So is it worth it? I’m going to give it a go and report back in a couple of months.

At my present skill level with a good L4 agent in hi-sec, I can earn about 6000 LP per hour and a paltry 4-5 million ISK. I’m really only in it for the standings though, and they are still better then level 3 combat missions. My current strategy is to fleet up my two characters and use one of them to run the courier missions. Once they both have good enough standings, they will run missions in parallel.

If you are about to start some standings grind, don’t forget some social skills to make the grind as profitable as possible. Negotiation, Social, Connections, and the sector connections skills like “High Tech Connections” or “Trade Connections” are the main ones to look at. Some of the skill books are pricey, but I think they are worth it if you have a long grind ahead of you.

If you get into data core research, read one of the nice guides on research agents. Aside from “Research Project Management”, many of the science skills like “Mechanical Engineering” or “Electromagnetic Physics” will increase the data core yield of an agent. Negotiation will also increase the yield. At my target skill levels (3 in science skills, 4 in Research Project Management), I should make about 40 to 45 million ISK per month in passive income per character. If I had the patience, I would consider filling up my character slots with researchers. That takes a lot of skill training away from my main though, and I don’t know if I can tolerate that.

• Both of my characters are immediately going to start using research agents. This includes about two more weeks of training on each of them, and probably a couple of weeks of standings grinding to get good agents for my indy character. Eventually, I would like to spend some training time on my inactive alts to get their research skills up to speed. Once the initial work is done, research is pretty much fire and forget. You don’t have to be logged in to make money.
• Do more research with PI as a possible semi-passive income source. One planet seems to take about 5 minutes of work a day. I could probably scale up to four or five planets per character in less then an hour per day, plus an hour gathering on the weekends.
• Become a better trader. Initially, that means don’t sell to buy orders or buy from sell orders unless the margin is really thin, or the product is too cheap to deal with. I may also get some alts involved in station trading in the smaller trade and mission hubs.
• Look into BPO research. I’ve read that one can make good money selling well researched BPC’s on contract.
• Is invention worth it? It seems like there is some labor involved in invention, but it may be worthwhile.

This new ISK sink is in addition to needing skill books for cap ships, actually buying cap ships, and generally being self-sufficient.

My combat character has bought, fitted, and sold a proteus. I wasn’t pleased with the low DPS for missions. It looks like they would be great for wormhole ops though, so I may buy yet another one. Here’s the station screenie:

I’ve been meaning to take a trip to New Eden for a few months now. It seems like something that should be done. Well, it’s fairly boring. The trip there and back was full of pirates, and the gate itself looks like a bright star. Here’s the screenie to prove I was there:

There is graffiti in New Eden. People seem to like to drop secure cans and rename them to something marginally interesting like, “killroy was here”.

…and that’s New Eden.

On another day, I was chatting with one of our newer corp-mates. He seems like a fellow who wants to go places. It might be the kick in the ass our corp needs to do interesting things. After chatting with him, I decided that running missions is not only boring, but at 2% tax, it doesn’t add a lot to the corp. I now live in the wh that our corp has colonized. It has been a while since I lived out of a POS. I’m reminded that I really need to go buy some containers… and more ammo.

I’ve been running the C1 sleeper anomalies for the first time in a myrmidon. I lost 2 drones in about 15 minutes before I put together a plan to keep them safe. Basically, if the sleepers are targeting me and they’re close, send out the drones. If they’re targeting me and they’re fairly far off, launch the sentries and orbit the drones at 500M. As soon as they start targeting drones, call them in and wait a few seconds for them to target you. It’s a pain in the neck, but it works. The loot from one C1 anomaly seems to run about 30M ISK, and they take a lot less time to clear then a l4 mission. I’ll also have to pick up a salvage boat. Running one tractor and salvager really slows things down.

This ties in with efficient ISK making. I’ve been working on skills which help me kill rats faster. It’s the obvious thing to do. Kill rats faster, make more money. The not so obvious issue is that I am neglecting a lot of skills (social skills) which can increase my income significantly without spending a lot of training time. The research skills tie into that. The more research I can do, the more money I can make.

Now why do I need to be more efficient about making money? Well, I’m training both characters into some expensive stuff now. My industry toon is going for Rorqual and jump freighters plus support skills. That’s a billion ISK. My combat toon is training for carriers and dreadnoughts plus support skills. There’s another billion. The cost of ships and fittings for both toons will easily run to 10B once I have all of the ships I could want. That is a lot of coin. Well, instead of standing around here gabbing with you folks, I should get back to making ISK.

• Scout / Explorer with a covert ops cloak and an expanded probe launcher.
• A slippery scout with the interdiction nullifier to avoid bubbles.
• Drone or gun boat with a great tank. This can be good for ratting/plexing/mission running.
• Bait ship with the buffer tank subsystem and a bunch of armor plates (200k + effective hit points).

The strategic cruisers have some problems though. They are still pretty pricey. 550M is not pocket change for me. Everyone wants a T3 cruiser killmail, so they are frequent primary targets. If you die in a Strategic cruiser, you will lose a skill level in a random subsystem skill.

Even with these disadvantages, I believe it will be worthwhile to pilot one for 0.0 operations. I’ll use one to replace my ishkur in Syndicate. If I can scan ok without the covert ops bonus, I may get rid of my helios too. Simplifying logistics in 0.0 is part of my aim. A flexible ship should help.

So how does one find and exploit anomalies? First, one has to scan them down, then warp to them and start blasting away. There is more to doing it efficiently though. There are two ways to scan down anomalies. The first way is to warp from planet to planet and use your onboard scanner. The second is to use a scanning ship and some core probes. There are other guides to probing out there, so I won’t go into detail about the actual process. The benefit of using a scanning ship is that you will be able to quickly gather up all of the anomalies (just bookmark anything that you can when scanning) and you can also scan down cosmic signatures, which can include combat sites, profession sites, and mining sites.

My usual routine is to hop into my covert ops ship with a scan probe launcher and tour the constellation, bookmarking all of the anomalies. I then head back to home base, grab my assault frigate and go blast away. If I focus on just anomalies, it takes about 30 minutes to scan all of the ones in the constellation. I then have several hours of fun mowing down npc’s.

So what’s the comparison ISK-wise between anomalies and missions in hi-sec? On a good day, I’ll get worlds collide and pull in about 40-45M in bounties, loot, salvaging, and rewards in about 2 to 3 hours. That’s a very good day and there are many days when I’ll pull in half that amount or less. So for missions, that’s about 10-20 million per hour. Yesterday, I spent about 30 minutes scanning down about 12 anomalies and about 5 hours running them. The bounties added up to about 90M isk. The loot was around 20M in named items and faction bits. I skipped the salvage, but I imagine there is about 10M or more in salvage if one was to go after it. So that’s about 20 million per hour and it looks like I can make that consistently… in an ishkur… yes, an ishkur!

What is my next step? I’m going to try to get an ishtar down to syndicate and use that. The DPS is 70% more then the ishkur can do and I can fit some salvagers and tractors on it to haul in the loot more efficiently. An ishtar will cost around 150-160 million to fit out for anomalies.

Below are my fits for Serpentis anomalies. Note that the guns on the Ishtar are for show and agro.:

[Ishkur, ratting]
Low:
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
Mid:
1MN Afterburner II
Additional Thermal Barrier Emitter I
Gistii B-Type Small Shield Booster
High:
Light Neutron Blaster II, Void S
Light Neutron Blaster II, Void S
Light Neutron Blaster II, Void S
Rigs:
Small Hybrid Burst Aerator I
Small Hybrid Collision Accelerator I
Drones:
Hornet II x5
Hornet II x4

[Ishtar, missioning SDDA]
Low:
Medium Armor Repairer II
Armor Thermic Hardener II
Armor Thermic Hardener II
Armor Kinetic Hardener II
Damage Control II
Mid:
Cap Recharger II
Cap Recharger II
Cap Recharger II
Cap Recharger II
10MN Afterburner II
High:
Light Electron Blaster I, Antimatter Charge S
Light Electron Blaster I, Antimatter Charge S
Small Tractor Beam I
Small Tractor Beam I
Salvager I
Rigs:
Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I
Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I
Drones:
Garde II x5
Vespa II x5
Hornet II x5
Warden II x5