Missions and LP

Shortly after I started semi seriously missioning as a new player, I ended up in a discussion with kwark about lp. No, it wasn't anything like a spreadsheet comparison, as neither of us had actually done any math with lp at all before. We basically sat down and figured out that the amount of isk I was getting for my lp by running missions for republic fleet was substantially better than what he was getting for caldari navy in motsu.

Now this probably doesn't sound very important at all and really it wasn't, but it got us thinking a bit. If you could make so much off of lp, why bother looting and salvaging missions at all? This eventually moved into blitzing missions, which involves shooting only what you need to in order to complete the missions as fast as possible. By doing this we ended up with most of our income being based off of the isk/lp ratio of whatever faction ammo was at the time.

It wasn't long until we started messing around with the decline feature to decline any missions which couldn't be run extremely quickly. We found that with high enough faction standing, I think it's around 6.0, you can chain decline all non blitzable missions and still be fine for an absurdly long period of time with social skills at 3 or 4. It was also vital to get both of the lp skills up to 5 asap since that was a direct increase to your income. Now you only need security connections to 5 to have the same effect.

Another important factor was to have an agent in a 0.5 security system since the lower the security of the system the higher the lp reward is for finishing missions. We ended up choosing to base out of Emol, running lvl 4 missions for republic fleet and converting the lp into whatever flavor of faction ammo was the most profitable at the time.

Finally with the maximum available lp gain per mission in hisec, the only thing left to do was to figure out the fastest way to blitz missions. The best possible ship for this was and still is the machariel. With its absurd speed and agility as well as it's very high damage and decent projection with 800mm autocannons, it clears missions with minimal problems and is even able to hit all of the triggers in the blockade mission without being in danger if you know the spawn locations.

Soon we were cranking out the lp and actually making a decent income running missions in hisec but we still had a long way to go before anything truly interesting happened profit wise.