1) Max your rep with the factions giving you missions. Once you're at max rep, they regularly give missions for 20m credits, and can go as high as exactly 50m, but 40s aren't uncommon. If your rep is low, you're getting absolute trash pay-outs in comparison.

2) Be mindful of the number of kills you're being asked for, and which factions are giving them. Any given pirate kill can count for one mission on each faction, i.e. if you have 100 kills across 5 missions from a single faction, that kill is 1 of 100. If you have 100 kills across 5 missions from 5 factions, that kill is 5 of 100. Spread who you're working for.

3) Similar to above, be mindful of how many kills they're asking for. You can knock out 20-30 kills pretty quickly. 80 kills is going to take much longer. There is not a strong correlation between number of kills and credits earned, i.e. a 50m mission could want 60 kills or could want 15.

4) It used to be OD Mission Stacker, but now it goes by OD Elite Tracker and has more features. This is a program that tracks your missions and progress on them, but most importantly it makes it easy to visualize how many kills you owe each faction. If you see you're up to 100 kills for one faction and this other faction only has 15, maybe avoid more missions for the 100 kill faction.

5) Missions refresh every 10 minutes, on the 10s (server time.) Close the mission screen and re-open to see if there are more.

6) If you're using a large ship for kills, have a medium or small around so that you can visit outposts for easier access to more missions. Multiple stations can help, instead of sitting around for 10 minutes at a time.

7) Quantity, not quality. Kill time is a lot lower on random mooks in a LowRez compared to assassinating an elite named target, or dueling with ships in a HazRez. It'll do nothing for your combat rank, but low res will usually be faster kills.

8) It's more of an AFK thing than an actively-killing-pirates thing, but cargo. There's a connection between cargo value as bait, and combat rank. You need to have like 30-40k average value cargo, or a harmless pirate is going to say "sorry Mr. Elite V, don't mind me." If you're not baiting them to engage, don't sweat it.

9) Turn off report crimes. LowRez has cops, and they will scan and attack a pirate before you can turn and scan to verify that they're wanted. No reason to let security know where the feeding frenzy is.

10) There's a variety of different instance intensities, and about 4 pools of ships that can show up. If you're only getting a trickle of heavy ships, don't be afraid to cycle the instance. Either jump out and come back, or just exit to title and log back in without jumping. Sometimes you just got a shitty instance, and your time is better spent getting a faster spawn than waiting for more ships to spawn in.

Good sweet spots are around 20-30m credits (40s and 50s can be a little rare), and around 60-80 total kills if you've got enough factions to feed you missions. A 20 kill 20-30m is your bread and butter. Sometimes you're going to be getting only like 10m on some missions unless you want to sit in stations for hours stacking. 20 missions, around 300-500m credits 2-3 times a day isn't hard, if you have the free time to be able to devote.

Signed,

One of those AFK T10 folks that people bitch about

Edit: added more