Custom Office - Contract PI

I would like to have the ability to contract PI to another pilot from a custom office.

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I’ll ask about it.

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Did you manage to ask? Is it possible to implement this?

I asked - they are aware of the request.

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tell what kind of contract , ill tell you how it could be abused … :stuck_out_tongue:

please tell us , Buggs!
ok how about the resulting infinate storage hack .
fill the customs office with product , and contract it to an alt . the pi goes into contract limbo , and the customs office is emptied .
repeat .
when you’re ready to haul , pull up in a frieghter . cancel the contracts one at a time . the pi appears back in the customs office , and you transfer it to the frieghter.
repeat .
grats you now only have to haul every couple months . brilliant !
of course you might miss-click and cancel two contracts , impossibly overloading the customs office .
simply file a petition, and it’s ccp’s problem …
go team !!

I personally would prefer that the guy doing the PI would be forced to haul the stuff to the local NPC station to do that. In fact, I’m not a fan of the whole ability to pick up material without even getting on grid even without the ability to give stuff to an alt. But one thing I do like about the current system is a hauler never needs to leave an area of the sentry guns (in Empire Space).

I would advise against it. It will further remove PvP options because people no longer need to fly to their POCO once their storage volume fills up, where they could be catched by another player. It encourages even more remote/afk alt-char gameplay.

Instead they will just contract it to someone else (most likely their own hauler alt or a corporation hauler), clearing their POCO volume and keep producing. That other character could have multiple contracts pending from different “sender-accounts” and just waiting for one good moment where the local is empty or he has a big support fleet available and then collect everything in one run with a freighter (or even JF with a safety-cyno to instantly jump should someone enter the local), by accepting one contract after another. Outsiders would have realistically zero chance to disrupt the POCO clearance, since nobody can camp a system 24/7 over longer time periods. The POCO owners would just need 5 clear minutes to collect the PI stuff from basically unlimited accounts and weeks. And anyone should be able to see why that is a bad idea.

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I have always wanted to be able to contract out the movement of PI products to/from the POCO to a station; similar to when I remote buy PI products at Jita station and arrange a courier contract to move the items from there to another station nearer to my POCO locations.

The reason is simple: I am lazy and try to reduce the risk to myself in having to fetch it myself. I can pretend it is for efficiencies, but it is really just laziness. :wink:

The time a ship is exposed, would be the same, if I or someone else flies the industrial hauler to pick up products. Baring the experience difference between pilots.

Contract limbo, could be an issue. But, how is it handled in player stations with awaiting contracts, and they get blown up?

I second this.

can also easily use contracts to circumvent POCO storage limits, and 40+ chars contracting to a single person means they can easily fill a freighter and it all back to safety, or jump it to absolute safety, instead of requiring the PI chars to fly ships, or heaven forbid, invest SP into agility, defense, and more than the bare literal minimum needed to sit in an itteron PI hauler as is generally the case with these "min/max"ers.

PI is already barely worth the effort from an isk perspective, and allowing the larger groups to more easily get a lot more out of it is a stupid idea that further devalues things.

The solution to this issue is to limit the length of the contract.

The “guy” is the same person if he/she contracts it to their alt. Regardless, someone has to go and pick it up on grid.

Someone has to go on grid to get it. Again, you can find a solution here by limiting the length of the contract.

And while we are on this subject of PI/POCOs, why is the volume of a Custom Office set the way it is? Industry has increased the focus/volume requirements on PI yet, no other changes have been made to the production of PI to accommodate for its increased need/use, either via storage capacity and/or either via planet production rates. I’d also say please increase the storage volume to align w/ the new volume demands in INDY and/or also please increase the rates of production on a planet.

you’d have to disable import / export until the contract was accepted , to avoid hacking around the customs office capacity .

that still reduces the risk to all the players using the customs office , by requiring only one ship , one trip , to haul everyone’s pi .

see above,

That isn’t a solution. When the player spams alt+tab to the next screen to accept the contract, the “length of the contract” means nothing. It fails to address anything.
It is a “I want everything and without needing to risk anything” and causes a serious issue of PI alts that never need to get undocked into space.

Ok I see your points thanks for the clarification. I was thinking about 1 planet 1 character with one alt so the time needed to refill that custom office could not possibly be accomplished within X # of days. Your point is that someone could have many ALTs and just contract all of those ALTs PI to one cargo ALT at one time. Got it.

Keeping everything at different amounts: silos, launch pads, the POCO, and even ships, makes the overall task difficult. IMHO.

But that also means there is not one specific setup to maximize the PI process.

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