Lesson learned

I learned a valuable lesson about missions last night, and this is this: Don't take every mission that's offered to you.

Here's the situation: I accepted a mission without really reading the mission text (we all do that, right?). Then I went out to perform the mission. It turns out that the mission was for a corp in the Amarr faction, and required me to kill lots of Minmatar rats. The mission was going to give me lots of standing with the Amarr and several corporations, but at the expense of losing standing with the Minmatar. Unfortunately, in my corp (and I'm guessing in other corps), we try to have high standing with all the major factions.

When I think of it, the only real reason I run the missions is for standing (and salvage), and raising standing with one corp or faction while losing it with another is hardly a good tradeoff. Therefore, sometimes it is better to decline a mission than to take it. Lesson learned.

Here, then, are two suggestions:

1. Read the text of the mission to find out who you will be killing, and
2. Don't take missions that require you to kill NPCs in the major factions.