Freelance Sucks (PSA: Everything is a Scam)

Communications Center General Discussion
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TLDR: I would be very cautious about accepting any Freelance contract. It appears as though (some) intel is being relayed back to the contractor.
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So I thought, what could it hurt to check out the new Freelance projects. Took me a few minutes to find one that wasn’t a blatant scam attempt to lure me into low-sec for a gank and was available anywhere to characters older than 1 day old.

“Kill NPCs Anywhere”. OK, sure - I’ll bite. $20m up for grabs for 1 million points. Seems fine on face value (my slice of the pie is capped at 100k points for $2m). Not great - but if I’m killing NPCs anyway… I accept.

As soon as I undock I get lit up by 2 ships on the undock who proceed to lock and do a poor job of scanning me. Weird - never (ever) happens in this system. Whatever - I proceed to “Guristas Extravaganza” anyway to give it a whirl. Mid-way through I notice that my progress reads “0%” - which seems really strange considering I’ve killed quite a few NPCs.

Then I look at the finer print (actually, there’s no print - I just figured it out) - the 1 million “points” isn’t total damage but total NPCs killed. So my slice of the pie requires me to kill 100k NPCs at the bounty rate of 20 ISK per. While I’m scratching my head a suspect Proteus jumps through one of the mission gates. This also almost (never) happens.

The only thing I can infer from this is that the Freelance contract issuer gets some information on where you’re redeeming these kills. Because I was literally the only player in the system prior.

Barring any information to the contrary, I would be very cautious about accepting any Freelance contract. Beyond the outright scams (some not so obvious), it appears as though you’re feeding some free intel to folks that quite literally want you dead.

CCP could certainly clarify, but based on how much of a train wreck Freelance currently is (and the fact that CCP is basically off for summer holidays) - I don’t expect them to be forthcoming.

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LMAO. That didn’t take long.. :joy: :rofl:

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:face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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I’m not surprised that people use the new freelance jobs to scam.

I wonder if it also is used for any legitimate jobs. Has anyone seen some?

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Not so far :wink:

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This whole fiasco reminds me of when nuPLEX was introduced and people were posting their contracts of 1 PLEX titled 1 month Omega time at a discount of 25% but of course without mentioning that was oldPLEX and it actually costs 500 nuPLEX to pay for 1 month of game time.

It was funny to see returning people not being aware of this fact were eating up the contracts like candy then complaining in Jita local.

:face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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In a game where you can just trust your allies or corpmates half heartedly. How much more the Neutrals and Reds when they offers direct jobs and contracts.

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I think it’s more like: your corp and alliance mates scam and awox you as a joke while strangers do it for profit and (their own) fun. :thinking:

:blush:

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Did we really expect anything less, though? :man_shrugging:

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Cunning.

I like it.

The new mechanic stays :stuck_out_tongue:

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The bee in my bonnet is how it serves absolutely no purpose out of nullsec. Other than luring people into getting ganked.

Pay strangers to mine.
Not mine for you, you get none of the ore.
You pay them just for the act of mining.
For absolutely no benefit to yourself.

But you know where they are so you can gank them. So I guess there’s that.

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Aren’t index’s tied to activity though?

So if you wanted to push up index affected by ratting but didn’t want to spend weeks ratting you would just pay others to do it in x system for you

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Oh totally. As I understand it :slight_smile:

You make a Strong and valid point, But I was referring to specifically to its use outside of null.

I had been hoping for something a little easier to advertise than a buy order for crowd sourcing some supplies.

I guess it could still be part of that, but not on its own.

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I have yet to see a freelance contract not scream scam and come be ganked at your leisure for everyone’s amusement. What a total train wreck this thing is. I was hoping for better, but this is even worse than equinox. No purpose, no reason. Just an ability to lure the unwary into a situation. They could have easily avoided in the first place. SMH

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To make one do ratting in a system on eneeds:

  • ship(s) in the system
  • access to market for ammo/drones/implants/spare ships
  • place to dock
  • some protection from neighbours

Now imagine how You would provide all of this to neutrals to make them rat in your deep-0.0 system? I believe it would be a lot cheaper and better to invite renters. Againm this will make all related questions solve faster and simpler.

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For sure outside of null its basically just bait, but it was designed for null blocs to use rather than the rest of us

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That’s the point!

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I got one going. 50% done with 4 days left. Meant for militia pilots who are relatively new or low-SP alts. I could probably offer a slightly higher reward next time, but we’ll see how much of a dent (if any) this bundle of ISK can make.

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