How to set up POCO's to have different tax rates to different groups

Player owned customs offices are the essential infrastructure that a player corporation needs to set up.

I was chatting with an otherwise experienced player in our corp, and he didn't know that I could set up different rates to different pilots.

We are doing this because in our corps; some pilots would like no fixed commitment. They might only be on a few times/month and are not sure the next time they will be on.  Other players have Command Center 5, Interplanetary consolidation 5, with more pilots than they are prepared to count.

The first pilot wants casual, easy come, easy go.  The second is considering putting up their own POS, bashing their own customs offices.  However even the most ardent PI player considers the cost of a wormhole POS, and many solo pilots will have difficulty bashing their own customs offices.

Our method of distinguishing between these two types of player, both residing in the same POS, is to use two corporations.

We have more than one wormhole; we have more than one corporation anyway.  Each corporation has 7 divisions; so I can provide 'secure' storage many players (depending on a certain lack of large hostile fleets); one corporation based in each wormhole.

Our C2 corp but owns the customs offices in our C1 wormhole.
Our C1 wormhole owns the customs offices in our C2 wormhole.

(No I have not said where we live;  anyone with a modicum of research can work it out).

We have a corp tax POCO rate of 4%, light blue tax rate of 4% and a deep blue tax rate of 0%, and a default tax rate of 5%.

The apparently simpler (but I could not get to work) method of selectively setting your own pilots to deep blue within corp did not seem to work; Corporation rate overrides standing.


I never expected to use our default tax rate.  Who would ever setup to do PI in a system with an established tower, with customs offices all owned by a player corp?  Well it happened.  After our 'interlopers' set up, they then found our towers and ... decided that ours looked far more 'prickly' than theirs did and sued for peace before a shot was even fired.  I like industrialists, and we exchanged light blue.

Profitable standing increase

Despite having all the wormhole moons I could ever want to put a POS onto, I have just finished grinding Gallente raw faction standing to 7.0 on one of my pilots.  Some of our pilots are highsec based traders and manufacturers and want access to a POS.

To anchor a POS in high, your corporation needs a faction standing of 10 times the system's security level;  eg to anchor a POS in a 0.7 system, your corp needs 7.0 faction standing .  This is based on the sum of your corp member's raw faction standing before connections and similar skills. This is easiest to do with a single member corp, and invite other pilots after the POS is anchored.


I have done storyline missions before, based on the back of the occasional courier missions (mostly done afk), but most of my faction standing is from repeating career agents (6 sets of 5 missions), Keeping crimes in check and, so far L1 and L2 Cosmos missions.

This last week I started L3 Cosmos missions, and while I have spent an embarrassing amount of time reading how to fit a cruiser for PVE (some of the rooms are restricted to cruisers), the combat missions have been very easy.  Anything that I can buy from market or contracts is bought, I have spent about 10M (and one trip to Jita) to get items / bodies / whatever the missions needed.

I used http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Gallente_COSMOS_Guide to tell me where to go, what to buy and what to do.

I didn't do these missions to earn ISK, only to grind out faction standing.  I have been surprised at the rewards for these missions, especially for the lack of risk.

I have salvaged nothing, looted nothing.  I have gone into lowsec once (making sure that the station was not camped before docking there), and avoided the last L4 mission (it required entering the  Contested Gallente Azure Chasm and purchase a 40M dogtag on contract). The last time I entered a contested area solo, I found the respawn time was shorter than my solo dps allowed, and the rooms refilled before I finished clearing them, corp mates were not on at the same time to help, and I got my required standing anyway.

Not including ISK rewards or some faction blueprint copies that I have not yet investigated how much they are worth,  the mission rewards include :

• Yun Jung Technology skillbook (114M ISK)
• Passkey to Yan Jung Relic site (170M ISK via contract)
• Social Adaption Chip - Standard (22M ISK)
• Ocular Filter - Basic (10M ISK)
• 2 x 'Meditation' Medium Armor Repairer 1 (2 * 40M)

These prices are the hover over price from Eve, with the exception of the passkey which was the cheapest price on contract.

I used two different ships on these missions; a shield tanked Vexor (cruiser drone boat) and a Viator (Blockade Runner).  Many other ships could be used, and if you can't use a viator, use any industrial the larger  haulage missions, and a fast frigate (possibly with a scout) for the lowsec run.

You can also repeat the missions for your allied faction (Gallente/Minmatar or Caldari/Ammar) for additional primary faction rep (very roughly 1/2 of the standing increase).

It doesn't matter whether you are a merely working out a bit of faction standing to anchor a POS and reduce broker fees, or a mission runner looking for some easy ISK and a change of scenery,  I recommend these missions.

Working harder not smarter

Your mission should you chose to accept it:  "I Lost My Stuff (2 of 2)". 

I do far too little PV anything.  For me so far; Eve has been farmville (a crime according to some).  Well, time to get involved in blowing things up apart from the Iterons (or even the Orca's) that I fly.  And by blowing up, I actually causing the blowing up rather than receiving it.

It's a mission from a level 1 agent; should be easy as.

The rewards : some crappy blueprint copy, 160K ISK as a bonus, but most importantly "1.725%" Caldari faction standing (or about 0.1 for me at the moment).

I do some web searching and the cosmos missions are not as well documented as other missions.  I do however find "Hint: This item is a random drop in Contested Plagioclase Field within the Contested Caldari Lai Dai Refinery"

So; it's a level 1 mission; can't be that hard.  I know I do very little combat; and what I do have is the larger ships (recently got Battleship 5 - woo hoo).  However, battleships don't fit. The acceleration gate restricts you to cruiser and below.  

Ok; I have spent some time in a destroyer doing career agent missions.  It is a level 1 mission; it will be fine.  I actually swap out the spare 'detritus' (Career missions need mining lasers; repairers and very little DPS), and head in.

This room is the toughest fight I have experienced.  Many waves of ships, 8 or so to a wave; each wave 50 k apart.  I clear out three groups, and the first one has respawned already.  Bless it.

Finally an unrelated ship turns up.  I primarily fly in wormholes, so unrelated ships mean bad things. However, this one clears up a couple of waves of ships, and finally the wave is cleared, and I race off to the acceleration gate for the Plagioglase field.

This next wave is tough. I clear 1/2 of the wave at range, then get both scrammed and webbed, and ... well I didn't really want that ship anyway - it obviously had a crap fit!

Mmm.

I grab a logi pilot and a DPS pilot and put them both in cruisers; a Scythe and a Moa, and refit my baby pilot into an Algos.  This will blitz it.

Room 1 clears easy enough and off to the Plagioglass field.  About waves of Wave 1 down; Wave 2 down; Wave 3 happens and the Scythe gets targetted and is down into armor and warps away. Grr.  Our Moa and Algos continue on.  We take some additional damage and decide to warp squad out and repair up.  Except the Algos *now* gets a web and is scrambled seeing the Moa warp to safety.  A valiant fight down to 2 remaining 'rats' before it pops.

Anyone spot the deliberate (ok maybe not so deliberate newbie) errors.  Well I do.  Fight together or warp together folks.  Look after your healers.  Work out who is scramming you and get them first. ... Fit a ship properly already.  L2P.

However, this was a Level 1 blessed agent.  How hard can it be?  There is next to nothing on the web for this mission, well at least not what I find from google.

By now hours have gone past, but it gives storyline level standing and I will not give up!

I call on yet another pilot.  This time someone who has shot things before and knows what he is doing (I hope).  I invite him to bring along 3000 units of Isogen to do the prequal mission.  It will however take until after downtime for him to get to the system (Airmia).

So; fleeted up; Once more unto the breach; and we absolutely blitz the first room.  A cake walk.  sigh.  (self confidence not too great just now). Then I notice 2 other ships in the room again; clearing crap out.  The plagioglase room goes pretty much the same.  The NPC's are downed in short order, with a whole lot of ships killed by our fellow visitors. 

Loot the wrecks, and nothing interesting.  I ask our fellow visitors what they are up to; and they are here for some reports.  We chat some more and says he thinks he might have my drop (Kusan Niemenen's Missile Launcher).  While chatting the NPC's respawn and we again clear up quickly enough; this time I get my drop.  Woo hoo.

The fellow visitor says he has found them, has 5, and I offer 1M each (someone else surely wants to buy these for cheap faction rep or maybe an alt of mine),  he offers them up on contract.  I accept.

Facepalm.  Not at the accepting the contract; that's fine.  It was that I bought cruisers (not our preferred class); spent hours, when I could simply have looked at this.

250K, in my station, as a contract.

Working harder and not smarter.

Low level missions and standing

I occasionally run an L1 or L2 mission.

Low level missions (L1 and L2) are awful in what they pay - ISK, standing gains and Loyalty points.  I understand that if you have been 'bad' then L1 missions are 'better' than nothing, but they still are undesirable.

I currently have access to L4 missions and for distribution missions these are very easy; My ship has enough cargo for 2-3 of these concurrently (Iteron IV with cargo extenders).  The ISK is not as good as trading from buy orders; but even with Margin Trading 4, I am running out of ISK for buy orders before running out of buy slots.  As I want standing with lots of corporations (at least for buying and refining ore), Mission running L4's is a good fallback activity.

L4 distribution missions pay - lets call it 200,000 ISK + the same in bonus.  L2 missions pay - lets call it 20,000 ISK + the same in bonus.  Similar order of magnitude differences occur on both Loyalty points and Standing gain.  So why bother with poor rewards? 

Connections 4.  This skill raises a 0.01 standing to roughly 1.6.  It has absolutely no effect on a corporation that has a standing of 0 or lower.   This is enough standing to make a difference for refining (my current 'preferred' activity) of roughly 1.3%.  On a 10 Million ISK refining of Veldspar, that is roughly 130,000 ISK. 

A single L1 or L2 mission of any kind successfully completed gives me the difference between a zero raw standing and a non-zero raw standing, allowing the Connections  to do it's 'magic'.

I expect to be refining well into the future at a lot of different systems.  If I am at a system collecting ore and I don't yet have any standing with them - I look to see if I can do any missions for them.  I might not get a full 'L4' mission bonus out of them this time, but the chances are that if I bought ore here once, I am likely to be back here later buying ore from the same miners.

These are not the standings you are looking for

Woo hoo - I have my standing at 5 for both Gallante and Minmatar.  I wasn't quick, but despite spending a fair amount of time in Eve, a lot is /afk (away from keyboard) due to out of Eve priorities.  In terms of time in front of a keyboard it was quick enough.

• Social 4 (standing increase per mission completed), 
• Connections 4 (effective standing improvement for friendly NPC factions, corps, and agents)
• Starter Career agents - up to 10 missions / agent; 5 per system; 3 systems / faction; 2 allied factions; (I think? I have one more starter career system that I can do - not sure)
• Lost that bet mission series
• 1 level 2 storyline mission
• Data center missions :
• 4 graduate certificate missions
• 3 x copper tag missions
• 3 other tag missions

With the exception of the exploration chain the starter career agent missions are quick enough to do.  For the exploration chain once you have found the cosmic signature sites; get enough certificates for as many exploration missions as you are likely to want to do (3 of each for a faction; another 3 for an allied faction; plus more if you want to run your opposing faction / alts).  Also buy up and reprocess any starter reward ships being sold for less than their reprocessed mineral value.


After all of this, I was at standing 5.1 with Gallante, and 5.0 for Minmatar;  should be enough to get a significant discount on my refining (6.67 standing and you no longer lose minerals to the refining stations - depending on refining skill and station level). Umm.   No.


Maybe I was told and didn't understand it.  Maybe I didn't understand what I was reading.  Just because a faction loves you, doesn't mean that their corporations will give you a discount on refining.  Faction standing gives you nice things, but not a refining/reprocessing bonus.  Corporation standing gives the refining bonus.

Corporation missions gives corporation standing.  Faction standing gives you better quality agents (hence better corporation missions).  For an agent to give you a mission; it appears that you must have, with the agent, corporation or faction the following standing:

• Anyone who can get into a station can do level 1 agent missions.
• 1.0 standing allows level 2 agent missions. 
• 3.0 allows level 3 agent missions.
• 5.0 allows level 4 agent missions.
• 7.0 allows level 5 agent missions.

Finding definitive answers to what standings are required was harder than I expected - it appears that there was a standing rules re-write making some older websites obsolete (either that or I am totally lost).  However http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Missions had an explicit table.


The missions I have completed are not wasted; they have given me 4+ standing for some corporations that I wanted anyway, and I now have access to about 80 level 4 distribution agents.

I can not chain the L4 distribution missions as easily.  My Iteron IV can only hold the cargo for 2-3 L4 missions and the agents are not that close to each other.  I will most likely play with chaining L3 distribution missions and compare it to doing single L4 distribution missions.  Gut feel says L4 is better but I should confirm it.



For the record I have been told that you can tag along with some else's L4 missions, but for frequent AFK play - it doesn't work so well for either party.  Plus a lot of players have a mild preference for solo play.

My research was faulty and I did not get the 'reward' (cheap refining faction wide) that I was looking for.  As a consolation I do have access to L3 & L4 distribution missions and cheaper refining at a few stations.

At the moment I am choosing less traveled regions (i.e. not Jita), placing dirt cheap region wide buy orders on minerals until I spend most of my ISK.  I am part way through training 'margin trading', allowing me to have more in 'buy' orders than I can cover in one hit, relying on ongoing sales to replenish ISK. 

p.s. part 3 of server maintenance is not forgotten - just coming soon.

Standing up

Do a google search for "eve grind faction standing", and you receive a lot of advice; mostly about grinding missions and storyline missions.  Do 16 missions of a certain level and you get a faction's storyline mission giving you faction standing.

I was trying to follow this advice with L2 distribution missions.  I have received better advice, both in game, and as a comment on this blog; especially for a newbie player with low standing.

Is what you are doing earning a decent standing with your required faction, corporation or agent?  Character Sheet -> Standings -> right click and show transactions for who you are trying to raise standing with.

Data Centers

Data center missions can be found at http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Data_Centers.
Per faction, there are 3 graduate certificate missions, and a series of Keeping Crime in Check missions requiring you to gather pirate tags.  You can do all 3 graduate certificate missions, and one follow up series.  From the previous link - Caution: Farming 10 tags can take over a week. Do not accept the mission unless you have enough money to buy the tags.  Personally I would recommend not even talking to these agents until you have your tags.

The starting agents are in space.  I had been trained to look for agents in stations and spent some time not even finding a station.  Warp to the data center and then you can find your agents.

Place buy orders for tags when you realise you might do the missions.  There appears to be a very wide spread between buy and sell prices.  You also may do better buying tags outside the zones (e.g. Serpentis copper tags were being sold for 400,000 in Galente regions, but 40,000 in Minmatar regions)

Edit: Despite there being 3 copper tags missions; it appears you can only hand them in once per faction.  Also the copper tag missions require 3 tags, the rest require 20 tags.

Cosmos Agents. 

Doing the data center missions above you have started some Cosmos agent missions; but there are more.  Eve wiki has pages for each faction's cosmos agents.

Starter missions

You should have completed these once already.  I let a couple of mine lapse thinking starter missions can't be worth that much.  The starter ISK is useful; the standing boost is fantastic.  There are 3 of these per faction.

A list of starter missions, their rewards,  and the source systems is at http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Tutorial_and_Career_Agents_in_Eve

Also, just in case - if a mission calls for a civilian widget and you have a real widget; strip your real one and put the civilian one in.  On one of the missions (sorry I don't remember which one), I could not scan? decrypt? salvage? with the real unit and had to dock and fit the civilian equivalent.  For all subsequent missions - I just use the civilian options where available.

For newbie ISK, place low bid orders for the rewards (also on the link above).  Many players (including newbies) will sell to the most convenient seller.  I have purchased many ships well below unskilled reprocessed value.

These missions are also much easier to do in a Destroyer than a Frigate; the additional high slots help.

Allied Faction

Do the missions for your allied faction (eg Gallante/Minmatar); there is derived standing gain from doing your allied faction's missions.  For me currently this is about 60% but the number is changing based on something  - but there are slowly diminishing returns. 

When doing the starter missions for your allied faction - either learn Frigate 2 for that faction, or take a couple of surplus frigates with you; some missions want you to blow up your current ship.  You may also want to take some Velspar, Tritanium, Cap Booster 25, Mining lasers, weapons and ammunition.   My original Gallante starter system was well supplied on the Market.  My first Minmatar starter mission system was far less so.

Conclusion

I  still spend to long per faction standing point, but playing smarter not harder has worked.