COSMOS and why they were designed by a sadist, Part 1

So here I am, evacuated my assets, with nothing left in the wormhole. It's an exciting time of change for me. I only had few corps during my time in Eve, which is 5 years now. Some might say I am/was missing out, but from what I see, I was lucky to meet and fly with a great group of people that made me stick around. Since corp is disbanding, it's time for me to look for new home, but before I do that, I need to take care some of personal agenda first, that is done solo:

• Grind faction and corp standings for my 3 new trader characters;
• Do pilgrimage trip;
• Do ninja salvaging (before I join low sec pirate corp and go -10).

COSMOS

I have a lot to say about COSMOS missions and it's not positive. I am not a fan of running missions (security) in general, but I have done some. Most missions are quite straightforward. Go in, kill this, go out. Some you can blitz, some you need to take full waves. However, even the worst missions probably won't be even close with bullshit amount that you have to deal with in your standard Cosmos assignment. 

I have done Cosmos first time around 2-3 years ago. I was grinding standings for my first 3 traders and if I remember correctly, it took me around 2 months to get to 0.28% - 0.30% broker fees. At the time I was quite poor. I could not afford buying most of the stuff off the market, so I needed to obtain them old fashioned way. Granted, I had 4 pvp alts supporting in running missions, but that did not give as huge advantage as you would expect. Later you will see why. I am now embarking Cosmos journey, that I swore "never again". Unfortunately, standings grind is necessary evil for anyone who considers trading. If you have pvp alts, fastest way is to do Cosmos missions, otherwise you are stuck with lvl3 distribution missions and some datacenter agents that you can "buy" your way to better standing. I prefer to just be done with it and forget about it. My goal is 0.3% or lower standing. The good balance, between effort and profit, I found is usually 7(faction)/7(corp) standings. It gives 0.284% of broker fees. Here's the standings table.

COSMOS journey

Since most of information has already been documented by some people of the community (I love you guys), first step was to get proper guides for Caldari, Amarr and Gallente. I found this nice handy Agent toolkit. It seems to contain most of, if not all, information on high-sec agents. It has nice layout in order from lowest to highest level agent, also sorted by the requirements and location. There are few minor nuisances though. Assuming you start with neutral standing, your gain is so high and fast, that you can jump order from lower to higher agents in the same system rather than doing everything in a row, based on level. This way, you don't need to travel long distances and be coming back to same system once you start next level.

I start with tutorials and proceed my way down the list, marking x for complete, z still in progress and - for agents that are called storyline, but doesn't give any standing towards faction whatsoever. Not even Caldari Navy corp. What is the point of keeping them in this list? God knows.

I do some upgrades in my strategy this time. First, now I have isk to spare so I can buy a lot of things off the market to speed up my process. Second, instead of using 4 pvp accounts for overkill, I use 2 trader accounts with 1 pvp account following each. Since there are a lot of waiting, transporting to be done, to maximize my time, I do 2 faction grinds simultaneously. I chose Caldari and Amarr to start with. 

So where is the sadistic part, you ask? Because even with 'deep' ISK pockets and multiple accounts, running Cosmos is a massive pain and time waste. I will write about my experiences in the next part.