The Broker Relations skill will further reduce the charge by 25% at level five. Since the Inferno expansion, the base transaction tax is 1.5% instead of 1.0%. With maxed out Accounting skill, the best you can do is pay 0.75% tax instead of 0.50%. If you look at the chart above, you now need to get your standing in the deep red area if you want to get your total charge under 1.0% when placing sell orders on the market. Taxes are paid on sell orders whether you place the order or just dump it at the max buy price. Broker's fee is paid on both buy and sell market orders. So if you are playing both ends of a trade, you will pay the broker's fee twice and taxes once. Knocking down the broker's fee a few tenths of a percent can become a big deal over time. Also, something to note from the chart is your unmodified base standing is used, the Connections skill is irrelevant.
This is why I have decided to build up a bit of standing before I start my station trading odyssey. I have done some standing grinding in the past, none of it was any fun. However, I'm having good success so far, getting my Caldari State and Caldari Navy standing boosted much faster than I had in the past thanks to some lessons learned.
Here is the general method that I am using:
- Begin training the Social skill.
- Run a few sets of Career Agents. The business and industry agents require very few combat skills. I trained drones to get one scout drone on my navitas. This makes any altercations a breeze.
- Turn in copper tags and do the courier missions at all three Data Centers for my empire.
- Run through one full cycle of the Circle Agents.
- Grind Level 1 and Level 2 courier missions for the corp that owns the market hub station, do the faction storyline mission after every 16 missions.
- Buy pirate tags to turn in at the data center.
- Run/buy COSMOS missions using a guide like this one.
I didn't do anything until I had Social IV and I held off on doing COSMOS and some tag turn-ins until I had Social V. A few afternoons of multitasking courier missions with real life concerns coupled with about two hours of COSMOS missions and I'm sitting at just below 3.0 effective for Caldari State and 2.5 with Caldari Navy. I've spent about 100 million isk on COSMOS drops and the Guristas tags I've turned in so far. The more expensive tags like bronze and gold I am going to wait until my trade skills are high enough to place buy orders. The set of 20 bronze tags currently runs over 150 million isk in Jita. I paid a million for the only drop you need in the very first COSMOS mission and the standing bump is close to some of the tag turn-in missions.
Another way to quickly boost standing is by gaining militia standing. For every 1.0 in effect standing with the militia corporation, you go up a rank. That is accompanied by a healthy gain in faction standing. The best way to do this is to run the missions, and I am not training up for a stealth bomber with T2 torpedoes just for standing with Caldari State. However, what I could do is briefly join the militia and run defensive plexes in contested systems. Since the Inferno expansion, the entire warzone is usually contested. One promotion should be easy to come by, maybe a second. However, after that it becomes tough to gain promotion through plexing. No combat skills are necessary to defensive plex, just the willingness to warp out like a weasel when someone comes at you.
In the end, I think it will be worth it. The decreased cost of trading will help me get the edge and keep at it when margins get tight. Besides, what I've been doing to raise standing can hardly be classified as high end gaming. There has been very little to be paranoid about, which is a departure from my usual gameplay.
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