I was not even speaking of Public Courier contracts. My Example was private contracts, like within a corporation. It is exactly like Commercial Logistics in real life. This is not Space FedEx.
Edit: To be specific: You order 20 Pallets of Pears from Farm place. You don’t use FedEx or UPS or DHL or whatever local delivery company to deliver it. You hire a Trucking Company to drive there full size rig all the way there, load up with 38000 Pounds of Pears in there trailer and deliver it to were ever it needs to go.
this game is literally built on player trust and co-operation
the game should not have to protect you from you. i mean it gives you a warning telling you “you may not be able to dock” i mean do you take any amount of self responsibility for you actions at all?
I’ve personally made billions of isk as a courier via various alts. I’ve run public contracts, Red Frog and Black Frog contracts, and private contracts for multiple nulsec alliances.
It is definitely riskier running as a solo operator picking up public contracts. It is also the least profitable way of doing it. But even so, it is possible to run public contracts for legitimate customers and not get ganked.
If you would like to make another try at being a courier, and are open to learning from more experienced pilots, Red Frog is an excellent operation to work for. Their operation represents years and years of accumulated wisdom from experience, and their system does a good job of managing the risks involved in hauling.
But maybe hauling isn’t for you. It certainly isn’t for everyone.
But yes, courier contracts are a valuable part of the ecosystem, and they do work, once you learn how to use them wisely.
The reason why the OP believes that they are of no use, is because the OP is an egomaniac who does not consider that he is not what the world revolves around, and does not consider that there are people out there who are smarter than him.
As he fails at a task, in his min, everyone else also fails at the task, because - to himself - he is “the bar” and others “above him” simply do not exist.
I’m rarely in high sec and quite lazy. Consequently, I use public courier contracts all the time. Courier gets isk, I get my stuff moved for me. Win-win. My orders get filled all the time. They are nearly always completed. I’ve had maybe 3 fail in all the years I’ve been using them.
Courier contracts are cool and they’ve created an entire profession with some pretty good corporations in EVE. They run like clockwork and not even the gankers can stop them, and Red Frog for example gets ganked regularly.
Only the fact that the new structures can be used this easily to scam pilots out of billions of ISKs is a bit over the edge. This could have indeed been given some more love by CCP and seems overall unnecessary.
Gankers need to scan ships and organize fleets before they can reap their rewards. But station scams can reap the full collateral, require no fleets, no effort, have no standing loss and no ship losses, and all with just the click of a button by a single player.
Scams are all right, they are unavoidable in some cases, but whatever CCP thought they’d be doing here did they really give an unholy buff to scams no doubt.
So I cannot say that I’m on the side of the scammers. To them is it the biggest gift they’ve ever gotten by CCP.
It really isn’t that easy. If there is a courier contract to a Citadel, it says in big, bold, red letters that “You might not be able to access this facility” or something of the like. People just need to read the ‘fine print,’ if you will.
It is enough to effectively render all public couriers to structures useless. Nobody is touching them unless the involved parties know each other well enough, in which case they can just use private courier contracts. The combo of public contract and a structure now is effectively a scamming tool.
But it also affects market orders and factory / research slots, too. Anything you leave at a structure and don’t take with you immediately has a chance to be used against you for a ransom.
The problem I see is that there is no “in closing” state for structures, where pilots who have on going business with a structure are still allowed to finish their business (i.e. with a dead line).
So when you play EVE right, then you avoid publicly accessible structures for any kind of business other than the dock-trade-and-run transaction. I don’t believe it’s in the full interest of the majority of the players. The public access feature is just a massive playground for all sorts of scams and little more.
It would be good to have three states concerning public access.
“Open” means the public can come and start doing business at the structure.
“In Closing” means only pilots with on going business are allowed to dock and to conclude their business. No new business can be started. Pilots, who don’t have any ongoing business cannot dock nor start any new business. At the end of a deadline (i.e. 14 days) will the structure be closed to the public.
“Closed” means the public cannot dock or do any kind of business at the structure.
As a result will now the player owning the structure need to have read the “fine print” when opening it to the public, and less so the rest of New Eden’s players.
You got scammed? good, now you know. A huge thank you to all the Red Frog and Black Frog pilots who helped my business all those wonderful years. Thanks.
Just as with any other public contract then. When swinging by Jita I sometimes see these “quitting EVE, selling my stuff” announcements where the seller asks, say, 10 billion but the contract is listed as 1 billion. A quick decision might be that it seem a steal to buy, but if you start looking at the items listed you will also realize that the actual value of the sale is way less than you’d pay…
Still, if people can also close the station after you take the contract (or blow it up) something should perhaps be done about that. A “Force Majeure” clause in transport contracts, maybe? Or a requirement for a backup destination?
