An Hour of Missions

Whenever any PvE activity in EVE Online is brought up, there is always one question that quickly pops up:

"What's the ISK/h like?"

Now to an extent I understand this focus on profitability - many people do not enjoy EVE's PvE and only take part in it to fund the things they actually enjoy, so they seek to minimize the time they spend doing it. However I would advise anyone to not blindly look at the pure ISK/h they can make running certain content, but also at how enjoyable - or at least palpable - they find running said content. A player doing an activity that rakes in 100m ISK/h for 10 hours after all makes more ISK than another player that does an activity with an income of 200m ISK/h for 3 hours.

Missions are actually in an interesting spot here, as their profitability is highly dependent on how advanced the person running them is. A player who has just gotten into their first battleship will only make a fraction of the ISK a seasoned burner pilot rakes in. This has the unfortunate side effect that one getswildly varying numbers when one asks "What's the ISK/h of missions?". Is it 50m ISK/h? 100m? 200m? 400m? Recently I recorded myself running missions for an hour, so let's answer that question.

"What's the ISK/h of missions at a very high level?"

1. Methodology

Missions were ran in a low 0.5, with maxed out reward skills, with no mission offered before the test, and the last mission had to be completed within an hour of the first mission being accepted.

The ISK made come from 3 sources:

1. Direct ISK, gained either from bounties or from mission rewards. As a caveat, I have recently began to run Anomic Teams with two characters resulting in the 5m ISK bounty being split between those two characters. Thus 2.5m ISK will be added for each Anomic Team.
   
   
2. LP, gained from completing missions. Value highly depending on the quality of the LP shop of the corporation being flown for. This test considers 1 LP = 1700 ISK.
   
   
3. Guaranteed Items Drops, more specifically Zbikoki's Hacker Card which drops from "The Right Hand of Zazzmatazz" and "Damsel in Distress". Valued at 10m ISK a piece.

My mission character started the test series with 2,788,566,656 ISK on their wallet and 600,268 LP with their main corp.

2. The Test Series

The first mission was accepted on 13:00 EVE time on December 19th, 2021; while the final missions was turned in on 13:59 EVE time on December 19th, 2021. Within this period the following missions were completed:

1. Anomic Agent (Blood Raiders)
2. The Right Hand of Zazzmatazz
3. Anomic Team (Enyo)
4. The Right Hand of Zazzmatazz
5. Anomic Team (Enyo)
6. The Blockade
7. Anomic Team (Jaguar)
8. The Blockade
9. Anomic Agent (Angel Cartel)
10. Anomic Agent (Sansha's Nation)
11. Anomic Agent (Angel Cartel)
12. The Right Hand of Zazzmatazz
13. The Blockade
14. Recon 1/3

 Overall, I would consider this selection of missions to be above average, but not extremely so.

3. Test Results

3.1 Direct ISK

After the final bounty tick had come in, the wallet balance of my main had risen to 2,889,858,721 ISK, with an additional 7,500,000 ISK due to split bounties from the three Anomic Teams. Thus 108,792,065 ISK had been gained directly.

3.2 LP

After the final mission the LP towards my main corp had risen to 746,283 LP, meaning 146,015 LP had been gained. Converted into ISK at the aforementioned 1700 ISK/LP, this represents 248,225,500 ISK being gained through LP.

3.3 Guaranteed Item Drops

3 Zbikoki's Hacker Cards have been looted, equalling 30,000,000 ISK.

3.4 Total ISK Gain

Adding up the direct ISK, LP and items a total of 387,017,565 ISK have been gained within the time of this test.

That's a lot.