EVE New Citizens Q&A

Sorry to ask that, I'm new here.

So why do players create hauling contracts? Why don't they take the cargo they want delivered themselves?

What do they get creating contracts?

Time is valuable. Hiring someone else to do it saves a lot of time.

Also,

Players like myself do not have skills trained for any industrial or transport ships. So we rely on others if we need stuff moved.

Same reason you hire a company to move your furniture when you move into a new house.

Why does a company in the real world send stuff with UPS instead of delivering it on their own?

No one else mentioned it yet, so:

some folk put up player couriers because it can be handy to know where some industrial ship starts a trip from and where it is supposed to arrive at within a certain time frame.

Not used too often and pretty easy to spot, but you can certainly use couriers to collect intel and target selection in game too.

Been playing for a bit myself, and contracts I've put up and most I've seen do tend to be of the 'I can't be bothered to do it' variety however.

It could be because your corp is currently under war dec and you need stuff moved. However it's mostly just convenience.

The industrial side of this game is very much like real life in that if you try to do it all then you won't do any of it well and if you specialize you can do well. So there are people that can make more isk in the time that it would take them to hauls something doing something else and if they don't like hauling they hire someone to do it.

I'll use Jump Freighter construction as it is probably the most complicated. So you could buy all the moon goo and set up a tower and do all of the reactions yourself to get the base materials to build then you could build the components and then build the cap ship components then go mine the ore and reprocess the minerals and build the T1 cap components for the T1 hull then build the T1 hull then combine the T1 hull with the T2 cap ship components to make the Jump Freighter.

Or with a little homework you could find out the short cuts in that process where in many cases it's cheaper to buy the finished product than the base materials and then have all those various products and / or parts delivered to a spot where you will do the final construction. Basically you look at each step in the paragraph above and decide if it is profitable to do your self or buy the parts that skip that step. But as a rule you'll not find a good deal on what you need where you are building so it will involve hauling and if you don't want to spend all week hauling then you use a service like Red Frog or just put up a contract.

Be careful if you are looking into hauling as a profession however. Most people that haul for profit usually don't accept the contract on the character that is going to be doing the hauling. People can potentially put up some low value good for a high deposit and then gank you so that they can keep the deposit.

Another popular reasons for courier contracts is to scam others out of ISK. Be wary of one day courier contracts with large collateral.

laziness

it's a bait contract


just 2 of the many reasons

Depending on the size of your package, creating a courier contract might be the only reasonable way to transport your goods.

For example,
a frigate can carry a few hundred m³
a cruiser can already carry a few thousand m³
an industrial ship like a mammoth can carry up to 40.000m³ roughly
.
.
.
a freighter runs upwards of 500.000m³ (usually ~600k to ~1.2mil), or a thousand frigate holds approximately filled with goods.

So if you were in possession of 30 packaged cruisers you just built in a system with low industry costs (which vary depending on system usage) and wanted to get them to jita for sale, that'd be quite some time hauling with anything but a freighter.

And most people don't have the skills to pilot a freighter.