Noob to Noob #3: Getting better missions

Missions are one of the key ways to make ISK in Eve. However, it is kind of a pain to run missions that pay 40k ISK (including the bonus) when you know there have to be more lucrative missions out there. In the Eve Uni chat channel I was told that to get better agents to talk to you, you have to increase your standing with them and their corporations. I was also told there were several ways to do that: run missions for the agent or other agents in his/her corp, or train some skills.

Well, I decided I'd run missions, since I was happily training away on my learning skills and didn't want to disrupt them. So there I was I was running missions like crazy for several days, seeing repeated missions coming up and generally getting bored to tears. And the sad thing was, my standing was barely going up at all. I think the corp I did the most work for went up less than 1 point during that whole time, and barely a new mission was made available.

So I asked my fellow students and got two bits of advice that really opened up lots of new mission opportunities: train Social and Connections. These two skills took way less than a day to train to Level 3, and they immediately opened up better quality agents almost immediately, including my first Level 2 agents. This was the best 4 or 5 hours of my training schedule I think I ever spent.

So if you are looking for new missions and new agents to give them to you, get out there and train Social and Connections. The skill books aren't too bad, the training (to level 3) is pretty short, and the pay off (at least for me) was huge!