Social, Negotiation and Connections are all very helpful for mission running. Social improves the amount of rep you gain per mission, negotiation gets more money per mission and connections gives your rating a bump for all friendly entities which gives you quicker access to higher level agents.

You do initially choose a race which can influence your training times for various skills. An example being perception is important for gunnery skills. All of the skill types have an affecting main and sub ability. So, by choosing your race you will be faster at training a character for a certain job type.

There are a lot of things you have to watch out for in the game. However, the GWJ people in game are very helpful and it's pretty safe initially, from a PvP perspective. Although, PvP is the economy as well as being targetted by another player ship.

It's all about the Benjamins, er, the iskamins.

They've also revamped the character creation process and the tutorial recently, and it's much friendlier to start with as well as you receive more skill points starting out than you used to.

One key thing to remember is that unlike most RPGs, your character's "traits" like perception, intelligence, memory, charisma, etc. only affect how quickly you learn skills. They don't affect whether you hit another person with your missiles, or how much damage do you, etc. The skills you learn, in turn, do affect how much damage you do, whether you hit someone or not, whether you pay less tax when you sell something, etc.

A starting character nowadays, if you put all your initial skills into fighting, for example, can be in a cruiser almost right away and a battlecruiser within weeks. You'll still need to train more skills to fight effectively with those ships, but CCP has tried to get new people into cooler things faster than they used to.

Not only have they started new players off much higher on the skill training ladder. It is now much easier to learn new skills faster because of the lowering of learning skill requirements, as well as how much cheaper implants are now. And speaking of isk, the amount of isk you can make even as a new player these days lets you do all these things without a massive grind just to get the isk.

Of course the best thing about starting now is that there are many more people around that can help you out in getting over the learning curve.

FYI: Turning in the other faction certs to the storyline agent referenced by the cert WILL give you a standing increase with that faction, but you don't get any additional implants.

Thats good info to know buzz, thanks.

/wonders if zaque can use that to increase his negative gallente and minmatar standings.

I did a low level storyline mission last night where the first kill dropped 4 signed aeronautics graduation passes as loot. I located the closest one and turned in the pass. I got a little standing with the Caldari for this, but nothing all that exciting. It ended up being a chain of 5 missions, starting with a courier mission. I am guessing this is one of the running missions though, since there were about 6 other people running through the same set of jump points.

I was trying to verify buzz's question, but it appears that he already has answered it.

Hmm, no one seems to have mentioned the fact that not all agents give the same missions, what to go for when picking agents and what the difference between Research & Development agents are, so I guess I've got my work cut out for me.

There are four different types for missions, other than story missions. They are Courier, Kill, Trade and Mine. The faction of the agent you are using determines the percentage of the different mission types.

Mission types
Administration: 50% Kill, 50% Courier
Advisory: 34% Kill, 66% Courier
Archives: 5% Kill, 90% Courier, 5% Trade
Astrosurveying: 40% Kill, 30% Courier, 25% Mining, 5% Trade
Command: 97% Kill, 3% Courier
Distribution: 5% Kill, 95% Courier
Intelligence: 85% Kill, 15% Courier
Internal Security: 95% Kill, 5% Courier
Legal: 50% Kill, 50% Courier
Manufacturing: 5% Kill, 95% Courier
Marketing: 5% Kill, 95% Courier
Mining: 5% Kill, 85% Courier, 10% Mining (II)
Personnel: 80% Kill, 20% Courier
Production: 5% Kill, 95% Courier
Public Relations: 34% Kill, 66% Courier
R&D;*: 0% Kill, 50% Courier(S), 50% Trade
Security: 90% Kill, 5% Courier, 5%Trade
Storage: 5% Kill, 95% Courier(L)
Surveillance: 95% Kill, 5% Courier

Kill missions will have you go somewhere and eliminate a number of ships, a structure or they'll have you bring back a certain item, which can be attained by killing a foe or a group of foes - knowing what to do is the easy part, knowing how to do it is the harder part. Level 1 and 2 missions are fairly simple, you watch for pockets of enemies and divide and conquer. Level 3 missions is where, I think, electronic warfare may be employed by the enemies, which you'd want to watch out for - being warp scrambled cost one of my mates a 170 mil ship a few days ago.

Courier is basically FedEx. Get a hauler and stay out of low sec (0.4 or less) space is pretty much all there is to say about these. They're pretty fast though, which is quite attractive, with regard to story missions (I'll get to these in a minute).

Trade is really just courier except you have to get the goods yourself and mining missions are just trade missions where the goods needed is ore.

Story missions are where it's at. A level 3 story mission can give a +3 attribute enhancing implant as reward, which is worth 20 mil or more. Story missions are given everytime you have completed 16 missions of the same level. Story missions also give lots of standing, which is always welcome.

When looking for agents, look for your standing with the corporation you will be working for - standing gives neat bonuses to refining and trade, in the corporations stations.
Make sure the agent isn't too close to low sec. Low sec = risk of pirates, which is a huge hazard and not worth it no matter how I look at it.

Research nd Development agents give research points. Research points are given in reward for missions and on a daily basis, depending on the agents quality and level. The more research points you have, the likelier it is that you will be awarded a tech II blueprint, many of which are worth ridicules amounts of money. It's worth noting that you'll need science level 5 as well as other skills to be able to use good R&D agents.

That concludes my ranting this time, now to hope it'll actually be of use to some people.

Thanks for the info Dread, I was wondering exactly what triggered story missions.