EVE New Citizens Q&A

Red Frog are the best, but hauling things is largely a dead career unless you can do the dangerous jobs

It's an investment. You could plug in a PLEX one time to get some starting collateral, and then use it to run contracts. Basically, if I use a courier contract it's because I bought some ships in Jita and I want them moved to my base while I'm under a war declaration and it isn't safe for me to pilot them myself. Obviously I'm not going to create a contract without requiring collateral equal to the value of my cargo, because you could just "fail" the contract and keep my shiny ships.

So that's the trade off. I'm not going to waste millions of ISK on a courier contract for worthless stuff, and I'm not going to let strangers haul my valuable stuff without putting up collateral.

Tau is right -- you could run NPC courier missions endlessly and graduate to player courier contracts when you're ready.

Red Frog (Red Frog Freight, Blue Frog, Black Frog) and PushX are the 2 most known hauler corps / alliances in EVE.

Red Frog though is a Freighter only service, so you will need a proper skilled freighter before you can even consider to be part of the Froggers.

Don't know if PushX does allows T1 / T2 Industrials.



p.s.

Don't expect big payments and/or low collaterals on ANY player courier contract. Specially with public contracts.

Hauling pays *terribly*.

I know because I post a lot of public courier contracts, and ones that I feel are just terrible get done all the time.

Orca sized parcel, 1.2 billion collateral, and a choice of either 15j through highsec but passing through Uedama (the most dangerous system for highsec ganks) or 14j with 1j through low - this gets done, regularly, for 10-18 million (depending how fast I want it moved).


As for collateral - Contracts will usually be high collateral, because there's not all that much reason to move low value items around (except in bulk), and if the collateral isn't more than the value of the goods, the courier will just intentionally fail the contract and keep the goods.


As for buying PLEX - I advise against it. What you learn going from the few tens of millions you have now to your first billion will serve you well in turning that billion into ten, twenty or fifty billion. (You'll need to learn different skills if you want to turn fifty billion into four trillion).

Agreed completely.

PLEX is very bad advice - a potential near-billion loss with a T1 hauler just waiting to happen.

Caveat emptor v0v

Good information has been provided here on how to get into the trade. I can only add that there's a "Haulers Channel" which posts freelance jobs with reasonable collateral and often very good rates of reward. It's frequented by over 400 people, both freelancers and clients, I think.

I'll only ever be on one side of a courier contract, and that is the side of creating contracts that pay peanuts, and are over collateralized

in short courier contracts are almost never worth doing, yet for some reason people do them. And as a new player they just sound like an invitation to get ganked, or accidentally take one that takes you into an unsafe system (note I didn't say low or null sec, various highsecs are especially dangerous for haulers).

All hauling corps are middleman. They provide courier contract obfuscation by reissuing contracts to the actual (self employed) hauler. They don't and cannot provide contracts without collateral to you because that would make them very, very broke within a day or two. They do provide you with protection from cunning individuals that can match your name in the contract list with the output of locator agents. It is not hard to part a foolish hauler and his collateral.

If you specialise in haulers you can get a sizable and reliable income after you got a freighter and 5B ISK liquid capital (and a Rapier alt). There is the option to use cloaky haulers and run to 0.0 but that market is rather small and comes with plenty of risk.

low/null hauling.....

You do know you dont even need a webber...as they are useless for jump drives

Red Frog is a (jump) freighter only system.

Hell, if you get caught using anything other then a freighter, it's instant kick from corp.