Courier contract issues with citadels

The situation:
Recently I discovered a massive effort by Fly Fearless to post with as many characters as possible as many courier contracts to citadels for the sole purpose to deny docking rights as soon as contracts were accepted. Contracts are being issued both by FF people and by people who left Fly Fearless (EVEWho Leave history of their main corp). As you can see, FF alone has nearly 3000 characters and characters who left FF number nearly 7000 characters.

The problem:
I block almost any contract issuer in the contract window that issues contracts to structures for the purpose of denying access after contract acceptance. Those are in addition to jita contract scammers. Right now I am hovering around 400 blocked issuers, out of which 50 were blocked in the last 4 days. The total number of possible blocks in the contract window is 1000. 1000 possible block slots is 1/10 of the number of characters this group has. Even if only 10% of the characters in this group participated in this massive effort, they would exceed the maximum number of block slots. And there are a lot more groups who issue courier contracts for the sole purpose of denying access for the contract taker.
As of this moment, my courier contract search yields 464 contracts with my filters. At least 250 out of these are courier contracts for the sole purpose of denying access for the contract taker.

You have 4 ways to fix this:

  1. You finally follow through with your word and introduce a post box on citadels
  2. You make it possible to block Structures rather than characters. In other words, in addition to “Ignore Contracts from this Issuer” we have another option like “Ignore contracts to this structure”. I do not see any issues with implementing this because structures have IDs just like players. The blocking process should be exactly the same.
  3. You give us the filter option to ignore all contracts to player structures.
  4. You remove the 1000 block slots cap in the contract window and allow unlimted numbers of charcters/corps to be blocked. You should also allow the manual entry of blocks and not just from contract search results.

Since people have become incompetent to scam people any other way, I doubt that option 1 will ever be introduced because both CCP and scammers are too incompetent to scam people in more difficult ways. This leaves options 2 and 3, which do not impact docking rights scammers at all and make it easier for contract takers to avoid the contracts without the data base clutter that option 4 would most definitely create. And we all know how much the data bases already buckle under the load normal activities cause.

One of the solutions is necessary so that the situation in the first screenshot does not turn eventually into the situation of the second screenshot:


One way or another: Get your act together and fix the mess that you create instead of ignoring the pile of steaming waste for years.

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Do you really think insulting CCP is the way to get what you want? I’m sure they’re going to leap right on this now that you called them incompetent…

I am a firm believer in the Carrot And Stick policy. I gave them the carrot with the 4 suggestions on how to fix the issue, the stick has to be on something. And since CCP pokes sticks at us all the time I do not see why I should refrain from doing the same.

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Shrug. Whatever floats your boat. It just seems like you’re sabotaging your own effort here.

Look at how old Fozzie’s post is, look at how many topics and posts in official General Feedback threads have been posted since introduction of citadels. You cannot sabotage something that CCP already ignores. But you can make other people answer in your topics and make them look active so that they pique CCP’s attention. So, thanks for contributing. :slight_smile:

Besides, I am growing really tired of getting sabotaged by CCP and that CCP ruins every single feature and new feature like this just because they develop and act shortsighted.

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LOL! You’re welcome.

For the record, I think the idea of being able to put structures on a block list is a great one.

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I’m concerned by the current trend. Courier contract hauling is my preferred and enjoyed activity in EVE.

I’m a hair over 500 ignored issuers, I was at around 400 a week ago. If the current rate of increase continues, I’ll be at the limit of 1,000 in 1 to 2 months, and left without a good solution to manage the contracts screen (kind of crucial to what I do.)

I personally think that the best solution would be point (1) from the original post, the implementation of a Dropbox mechanic allowing delivery when docking is not possible.

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FIX IT!

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Is the entirety of fly fearless one giant scam? Who would do such a thing. This is really concerning.

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+1 for option 1.

Also ‘Ignore contracts from this Corp’ is another option

It’s a mess at the moment

Fly Fearless has been under attack by CODE. griefers for the past year. This is obviously just another attempt by the Kalornies to discredit the honest miners in Fly Fearless.

In short, this is FAKE NEWS.

Recently I discovered a massive effort by Fly Fearless 2 to post with as many characters as possible as many courier contracts to citadels for the sole purpose to deny docking rights as soon as contracts were accepted. Contracts are being issued both by FF people and by people who left Fly Fearless (EVEWho Leave history of their main corp 1). As you can see, FF alone has nearly 3000 characters and characters who left FF number nearly 7000 characters.

Transparent CODE. propaganda. Try harder Kalorned.

I just want to say - I did not do anything wrong. I find the actions of this alliance, Fly Fearless, to be abhorrent - Scamming hard working haulers, the backbone of EVE Online logistics and economic vibrancy, is the lowest of the low - for an entire alliance to be created with this purpose in mind is reprehensible.

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OR you could stop hauling public contracts like a poor and save us all the trouble of reading your trash.

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Is 100% allowed within the game mechanics. This would be why public contracts for hauling that are not to a public station should be ignored. If memory serves there is a filter for that.

Typical Fly Fearless. Now that you lads have taken up scamming, you really should own it. Accusing your critics of being Kalornies and Kalorneds is poor form.

I keep hauling until morale improves.

I kind of figured already that CODE or CFC might behind this as some characters have been in CODE, CFC and their bios contain clear CODE trash messages, as well as their current corp’s infos if they are in a player corp. Fly Fearless leadership may want to go on a cleansing rampage as every day more and more characters start posting contracts.

Stop being a pathetic carebear. You know what strong and successful logistics players think about scams like this? They love the scams. Every time some idiot carebear gets scammed like this it means the supply/demand curve shifts a bit in favor of the competent haulers as their competition is Darwined out of the gene pool. Be the strong and successful PvE player and celebrate scams. Don’t be the pathetic failure who can only whine and cry about how you’re too stupid to succeed in EVE.

I’m a moderator of the haulers channel. If you’ve ever had to get something moved in highsec (or low), or had to get things out of npc nullsec, chances are you’ve used the service or at least heard of us - we’re akin to pushX and red frog in that we get things moved, the major difference being it’s more a free market anyone can engage with than a single entity with set prices. We try to be a friendly and welcoming community for anyone that needs to use, uses or is interesting in using the courier contract system. Naturally, that also involved removing scammers - from our channel, from our mailing list, and adding to the pretty much required-for-hauling-today safelist (https://goo.gl/WurcE2) that shows scam structures and scam/gank issuers. We try to educate haulers and issuers that are new as to how the mechanics work.

This corp/alliance (mission ready mining/fly fearless) showed up on one of the mod’s radars as they were posting scams. The only thing that was unusual was that this wasn’t just a few structures by a handful of scammers (one character and a few alts is very common). No, instead we ended up adding 60+ alts just the first day, as well as a dozen or so structures, all involved in current scams or owning structures for said scams. Most of these were ex-members of fly fearless, most were about the same age and joined or left around the same time - it’s rather obvious at least 90% of this giant corp with seemingly very little activity are alts, probably current SP farm alts or just from back when ghost training was a thing (it would explain the thousands of characters).

Despite what Merin Ryskin above me says, there’s not a single succesful hauler who “likes” citadel scams as they are currently. Scams are part of the game, yes, but as is there is a game mechanic that forces one player to lose ISK to another player with no clear in-game way to differentiate between legitimate or illegitimate. We’ve seen characters put out 10-12 contracts to their own structure with alts to appear legitimate, or use actual legitimate contracts only to then make big cash. There simply isn’t a way to avoid these completely, long term. And once a courier contract is accepted, despite it being a game mechanic that’s meant to enforce an activity between two players… one side can simply press a button to break the contract and automatically get whatever ISK sum they set as collateral, usually in exchange of an empty container (and you can’t see it’s just a container before the contract, either). It’s not “crying about how you’re too stupid to succeed in eve”, it’s an issue with unclear and unfair game mechanics with insufficient tools against them available in the game.

There’s industrial scale scamming starting to show more and more, and the tools that allow people to avoid it are simply lacking. Ignoring structures could be a good idea since it takes time/effort to set up structures and move them regularly - scams should at least take some effort, akin to a bait contract that you gank the hauler of. Lacking that, at least the number of people you can ignore contracts from should go up so that a few people with 400 alts won’t make current haulers literally unable to keep scammers off their screen. The citadel drop box is also something that’s been requested by pretty much all haulers since EC’s were put in the game (which was 2 years ago!) due to how their mechanics allow scams with zero effort or risk - it would be good if CCP’s oversight in that finally got fixed in the end.

To those not aware of courier contract mechanics: imagine if you bought an MWD from someone on the market. You put this on your ship, go flying and then your ship instantly explodes with no way to avoid it - turns out the seller of the item had done something you had no way to tell after you used the game mechanic (purchasing). On top of this, them doing this cost them no time or ISK, it’s a free item to them that they sold for your ISK. The seller is known for doing this and you don’t get any proper way of filtering them out permanently - they’ll just make another alt and continue after a few days/weeks of doing it.

Does that sound like a fair mechanic, or engaging gameplay? That’s largely how courier contracting works now: if you engage in the game mechanic, you need an out of game blacklist/communication from other haulers and a reliable ignore method ingame to avoid scams. As Dyver Phycad has posted, the former has been an ongoing issue (that i frankly don’t know if CCP will fix anymore, it’s been two years) and the latter is quickly looking to be simply not good enough in today’s alt-frenzy eve. Scams are good to have in the game. Zero risk scams that also take absolutely no effort are not. Even the people spamming scam item contracts in jita local are needing to put in actual time and effort. Traditional scams with a gank squad run the risk of the hauler taking an odd route or otherwise slipping by. Pure profit without risk, at the expense of guaranteed loss for other entirely unrelated players that had no way to know, is simply a bad mechanic to have in eve. If we can’t have a solution to the actual problem, at least make the tools be able to deal with said problem.

As a sidenote, those that say “just don’t take citadel contracts” need to take a look at the state of the game. By CCP’s own numbers 90% of industry happens in structures. The main things that require hauling via courier contracts are industry and trading - as well as people needing something moved one-off. Trading is still mainly between stations, but both other parts involve structures a lot of the time. Not hauling to any structures is akin to ratting with only one weapon in your high slots, mining all day in a mining barge with no boost and low skills, or running lvl 2 security missions for isk. Sure, you can do it… but you’re missing out big time. CCP has seen fit to ensure people use these structures with nice bonuses. As a result, people use them and you can’t ignore them permanently without cutting your own potential vastly short.

This turned out into a rather long post, but seeing the usual CODE messing about happening in here (hi, cohenberg. Do these scam alts happen to be yours? What about Bayley, an obvious alt with 16m read time on this forum? :P) i figured i’d provide my two cents. Okay, i guess it turned into a dollar, but you get the idea.

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On the haulers side it’s easy, just don’t take contracts to citadels you don’t know for sure are safe. That’s not that difficult. It’s much more annoying for the issuer side, as you don’t get your stuff hauled to an obscure citadel.

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