I agree that the courier missions are have way better income for the new player than other activities (some people say artifact scanning is good, but I am not sure what the NIC/hour is).  Courier missions, as pointed out above, is that they are very consistent in the income, really easy to side-train into, have no competition, and are extremely boring.

I think that we all agree that no other mission up to an and including lvl2's (and lvl3's? I haven't done those) provides a similar income.  Other activities do, but not missions.  Therefore, the missions are not balanced well.  The only reason right now to do lvl2's is for standing gains.

I gave my alt Nav 6, Industrial robots 4, parallel assignments 4, with lots of EP still remaining from the initial 20k.  He easily pulls 1m from lvl1's in a LWF sequer.  From the profits I bought a T4 LWF and now it is bringing in even more.  But with the highways, a T4 is not really necessary.  You regularly arrive before the "molecular instability" runs out and have to wait.

My main is a week old and specced purely in combat, with no EP in unrelated areas.  I finally found the optimal spawn for me, that has my guns pretty much firing non-stop.  In a T3-guns, triple-tuning assault  bot I am now pulling in > 1m/hour (hard to judge how to value the dropped mods), if noone comes to contest the spawn.  I have no idea where the "easy 2 mil/hour" for a new character.  Maybe if  I was a month old or was in a Mech, but not right now.  While I get similar income (and finally have more fun), I am not getting standings.

So, something needs to be done about the courier missions or at least their balance against other missions.  If I was a game designer, I would try to make the payouts dynamic based on # of missions run.  But a simple tweak to the numbers might be ok, as well.

795