Celia Therone
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Posted - 2009.03.27 01:02:00 -
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I have some sympathy with the OP's basic point. How many newbies miss the three ten mission tutorials? I know I only found one of them, and that by chance.
How many newbies walk straight into Worlds Collide and get obliterated? There really isn't much of a sense of escalating difficulty within mission levels.
The in-game tools available for comparing agents are weak, at best. Simple things like distance of the agent from where you are, security level of the system that they're in are tedious to get. These are things that nearly all new players will interact with, there's really no excuse for them not being shiny, friendly, intuitive and easy to use.
To the OP:
In order to get access to level 2 agents/missions you have to improve your standing with the corporation that the agent works for. You get some standing for successfully completing missions (bear in mind that I haven't done this recently). The biggest standings boost seems to come from running storyline missions, especially multi-part ones. You also have to be careful not to damage your reputation by turning down too many missions, failing to complete them or blowing up ships/buildings belonging to corporations/factions that you want to remain on good terms with. You can view your standings from your character tab (click on character portrait, click on standings button, go to liked by tab, scroll down to the corporation that you work for and right click to get a log of how your standings with that corporation have been changing.)
You can also invest in social skills which give you more standings when you complete a mission or improve your effective standing.
The upshot of this is that you want to concentrate your missioning within one corporation, preferably one that has a lot of agents of different levels located closely to each other in high security space. Then as you do more missions you'll slowly see the level 1 agents that weren't available to you, become available. Then the worst of the level 2s will become available and so forth.
As to mining... Really I wouldn't bother until at least the cruiser level. However if you're determined to mine then find a level 1 mission that has a lot of asteroids in it and mine that. You're much less likely to get your can flipped in a mission that in a belt. Also you can front load some of your skill training so that you get increased returns from them whilst you're mining in your Osprey (or whatever) even if your eventual goal is a hulk.
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