Career agent missions update

[Jack Colquitt]

As a new player, career agent missions were one of the first topics that I consulted from the E-UNI Wiki. First of all, kudos to all the previous authors/editors--they did an impeccable job of keeping the information detailed and at the same time accessible to all.

I recently had a chance to revisit career agents while I was farming the empire standings and discovered some potentially useful information that I couldn't find in the Wiki. So I set out to complete all 12 career agent stations while taking some detailed notes, and took the liberty of updating the career agent mission pages. Some of the highlights are as follows:

(i) Some items given to the player are faction-specific. In advanced military mission 4, for example, Amarr and Gallente agents give you a remote armor repairer and Remote Armor Repairs skillbook, while Caldari and Minmatar agents give you a remote shield booster and Shield Emission Systems skillbook. In advanced military mission 7, Caldari (missiles) and Gallente (drones) agents give you a new weapon system, while Amarr and Minmatar give you a civilian version of weapons you have already been using up to that point. Whenever these differences arise, I made the distinction using faction icons.

(ii) Some missions such as business mission 10 offer you the option of manufacturing the items you need to turn in. In these cases, I included precise types and amounts of raw materials needed to manufacture them. Whenever the required materials are different from one faction to another, I used a table format to present the information in a concise manner.

(iii) On a related note, the previous version had the tendency of emphasizing production/manufacturing (e.g., for industry mission 6 or business mission 6) over buying the items off the market. However, I've seen quite a few people getting preoccupied with the misguided notion of self-sufficiency (i.e., they think mining the ores, reprocessing them, and manufacturing the goods themselves should be cheaper than buying the item off the market -- which might be true in some limited circumstances but necessarily in general) for these missions; hence I added a few lines explaining that it is actually quicker and cheaper to use the market. Of course, all the necessary information for producing the items by oneself is still kept intact.

(iv) I also added some considerations for mission ordering in the main career agents page. You are not locked into any order, but finishing one mission over another can sometimes be convenient.

(v) Some minor grammatical/punctuation errors were also fixed, along with some unnatural sentences.

Granted, these updates are relatively minor--still, I hope these new additions help out new players and anyone who's trying to revisit these agents for faction standing. There are some other pages I'm looking forward to updating in the future, so hopefully I can keep up whatever little contribution I can offer.

[Arin Mara]

Excellent work Career Agent Missions give minor rewards, but they should not be neglected as they are among the first Missions completed by novice capsuleers.

It is odd how these pages don't follow the pattern of other Mission and Agent pages:

• Career Agent Missions don't use the Missiondetails Template
• Career Agent Missions don't have their own pages
• Career Agents don't have their own pages and Mission aren't transcluded into their page

What does everyone think? Should we try and make these pages conform to these conventions?

[ElectricHaze]

I like that the career missions are all on one page. Most of the time, all of these missions will be done in quick succession, so there is no need to make a new player search the wiki more than necessary.

I do think that it would help the readability of the page to use the "mission details" template format. The current wall of text is a little intimidating. A lot of the extra detail on the page is very helpful though, so it might require a little modification to the typical "mission details" template to make it work well.

[Jack Colquitt]

My two cents on each of the points:

(i) I think using the Missiondetails template might be a good idea to enforce some form of uniformity and improve readability. There may be one challenge, though: due to the introductory nature of career agent missions, the wiki entries are written in the form of a guide--e.g., step-by-step instruction for even the most basic things as using the market or initiating an industry job, plus descriptions of what some of the modules do, etc. Maybe we can condense all the basic information (objectives, rewards, etc.) into the table and include a detailed guide underneath?

(ii) As for the missions not having their own page, I'm a bit split between the two options. The current format (everything in the mission chain in one single page) does its job, but if we could organize them as in individual Epic Arcs (one meta page + an individual page for each of the missions + a list of all missions in the chain for easy navigability), it could be made neater without sacrificing too much of navigation issues. Unfortunately, I don't have the mission transcript/exact enemy composition and other relevant details found on Epic Arcs - perhaps we can keep them simpler than Epic Arcs, since these missions are designed to be accessible to new players?

(iii) I'm not sure splitting the missions and separately logging them in individual agents' page will be a good idea. Except for some faction-specific details, these missions are exactly the same; so treating them as individual mission chains will unnecessarily duplicate the same information 12 times. I don't mind, however, creating a page for each of the agents with simple descriptions and a link to their respective career missions--just for the sake of satisfying my completionist mindset.

I, too, agree that the wall of text can often be intimidating. So far my focus has been on adding details without modifying the original entry too much--out of my respect to the original author--, but I do believe I can make the writing more concise as well.

[Jack Colquitt]

I've applied some modifications to Business Career Agent as a showcase. All the basic info on type/objective/rewards are now presented using the Missiondetails template, and the wall-of-text has been condensed down and replaced with bulletpoints.

I think I like the new look better, and any further modification (including reverting back to the previous version or creating separate pages for each agent/mission) shouldn't be too hard. Let me know if you have any suggestion!

[ElectricHaze]

I think that the Business Agent update looks much nicer. Good work there!

[Arin Mara]

The pages look excellent! Well done. You have a very good eye for detail.

I'll have to brood over whether to split the Agent and Mission pages and if I want to make a new template for Career Agent Missions. In any case, this is a great improvement and we can stop here as far as I'm concerned.

[Rayanth]

Excellent work on this! They look much, much better.