Mara Rinn
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Posted - 2010.05.21 02:53:00 -
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I have been running dozens of courier missions with Duvolle labs through Freder Aernelaert and Afria Edmiette specifically because Duvolle do not offer anything else besides courier missions at the level I was looking for in hisec. Freder and Afria are "Production" agents, as such they offer mostly courier missions (including the farcical courier mission of 1m3 of frozen food to feed a station of starving people).
Now switch over to Carthum Conglomerate, for example, and have a look at Asrios. There you find a large collection of Carthum Conglomerate agents of all levels with a Storyline agent next door in Shemah. Most of the Carthum agents in Asrios are Manufacturing, a division which offers a much higher ratio of combat missions than Production. There are other Amarr Empire agents in the system which offer combat missions as the rule (Ministry of War, etc).
So right there, the main reason so many people run courier missions for Gallente versus Amarr is simply the fact that courier missions is all they can run for Duvolle Labs. Sure, you could go to Carirgnottin and run missions for Creodron, getting your storylines from Duvolle Labs in the same system - the catch is that Creodron don't offer anything of value, they have no R&D agents handling Mechanical Engineering, Quantum Physics, Hydromagnetic Physics, etc. Check the Profitability of R&D Agents to see which corporations people will be building standings with. The mix of Duvolle (Ainaille) + Federal Navy (Vylade) was beneficial for me since the trade hub nearest Ainaille is the Federal Navy station in Dodixie.
I don't dispute that making level 4 courier missions harder than level 1 courier missions is a Good ThingÖ. Just don't fall into thinking that people are running more Gallente courier missions because they're "better". That's like suggesting people in Soviet-era Russia only drove Ladas because Ladas were better than BMWs. They drove Ladas because that's all they had.
To get standings up to the required 6.8 to work with Sitaleere Beene, I had to run countless low-paying, low-standings courier missions for Duvolle (or similar numbers of missions with Creodron to get storylines from Duvolle in Carirgnottin).
To get standings to the required 6.8 with Carthum Conglomerate (Asrios/Shemah) or Ishukone (Penirgman, Altrinur), I will run a fraction of the number of missions, because each of the regular missions has better standings rewards and the storyline missions are available for an agent of that corporation (in the same system or right next door, to boot).
My assertion is that Gallente courier missions are run as often as they are due to necessity. Adjusting the difficulty of the missions won't have the impact on your metrics that you think it will (the number of Gallente courier missions will drop in inverse proportion to the rise in standings gains from each mission).
The number of Gallente courier missions will be adjusted much more significantly if you were to add a Duvolle Labs storyline agent in Ainaille (the number of Gallente courier missions will drop by an order of magnitude), or a highsec Duvolle combat agent anywhere (Carirgnottin would be ideal, wink wink).
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