Skills

The unpopular social skills are the mission runner’s friend. Alongside the offensive and defensive skills required to be able to deal with pirate threats and the ship skills to be able to transport goods, the social skills improve your access to Agents and the rewards you receive from them.

The social skills fall into two main categories, namely those relating to improving standings (which in turn improve mission pay) and those that directly improve mission rewards. There are five skills relating to standings: Social; Connections; Criminal Connections; Diplomacy; and Negotiation.

The Social skill is the base skill for all the other social skills and must be trained to Level 3 before you can train those remaining skills. As well as being the base skill, the Social skill improves the standing gains you receive for each mission you complete. Each trained level gives a 5% bonus to the base mission standing increase, as demonstrated by the following formula:

Agent Standing Increase = Base Mission Increase * ( 1 + ( 0.05 * Level of Social Skill ) )

The three other connections skills all relate to Agent, Corporation and Faction standings. Each level trained in these skills gives a 4% bonus to effective standing towards all relevant entities. The Connections skill relates to friendly entities (i.e. those that you have a positive standing with), the Diplomacy skill relates to hostile entities (i.e. those to whom you have a negative standing) and the Criminal Connections skill relates to criminal NPCs (i.e. those with low CONCORD standing). Effective standing is calculated as follows:

Effective Standing = Actual Standing + ( ( 10 - Actual Standing ) * 0.04 * Level of Relevant Connection Skill )

The description for the Negotiation skill states that it improves pay for Agent missions by 5%, however it achieves this indirectly by altering the Agent’s effective quality as follows:

Effective Agent Quality = Base Agent Quality + ( 5 * Level of Negotiation Skill ) + Effective Agent Standing

As well as the skills that improve your standings, there are also nine further skills that improve the rewards you receive from missions. The seven Divisional Connections skills improve your LP gain by 5% per level when working for Agents in the related Corporation divisions. The increase in LP can be calculated with the following formula:

Actual LP Reward = Base LP Reward * ( 1 + ( 0.05 * ( Level of Connection Skill 1 + Level of Connection Skill 2 ) ) )

Fast Talk improves the pilot’s effective security status, with each level trained giving a 5% bonus to effective security rating. This improves mission payouts as certain NPC pirates have their bounties increased depending on the security status of the pilot. The effective status can be derived with the following formula:

Effective Security Status = Base Security Status * ( 1 + ( 0.05 * Level of Fast Talk Skill ) )

The final skill is DED Connections. Apparently this skill grants an additional 1,500 isk bounty reward for each NPC pirate destroyed, but as it is not actually seeded in game its effect can’t be confirmed.