EVE General Discussion

It has been a while now since CCP introduced the "new" Contracts UI into the game. This was done even before the Incarna debacle, and the input from the community did not really shape Contracts in any way. They got released in exactly the same shape and form as the initial "alpha version".

Now, with devs back in the forums in force, is a good time to talk about what works, what does not quite work, and what is broken in horribad ways.

I used both the old and the new Contracts systems extensively, as I am a professional trader.

First, the good thing(s). There are two: the inexact type matching, and speedier search. Thank you, CCP. These were problems that needed fixing.

The bad thing:
Search by contract description has been removed. This looks like a misguided attempt to kill the "Raven -> Raven Navy Issue" scam. The scam is still alive and kicking - check Jita local and you will see what I mean.
The change had two (not totally) unexpected consequences.
First, the scammers now spam local channels more, and are generally WAY more annoying.
Second, it has become harder for legitimate sellers to sell rigged ships and obscure modules. Before the change, I could search for "CNR 3x CCC" or something similar, and get meaningful answers. I could also describe speed-related modules as "for Dramiel" , or I could mark Dread Guristas modules as "same as Caldari Navy". Now, I can't do any of these things.

Now, for the UGLY:
Sorting is still done both per page and per-serch query, separately. In combination with the new, speedier contract interface, this gives rise to a new garden variety of a trading bot.
See this screenshot to understand what I am talking about.
With new contracts, you can list a contract every 3.5 seconds, as the bot above. This way, you can price fix stuff with unheard-of efficiency.
Of course, the keyword here is "bot" - I approve of price fixing otherwise.

Dear developers (CCP Atlas), could you please chime in here?

Are you going to return the search by description? Are you going to do anything about search and sorting? Are you going to ban the BOTS?


TL:DR version: "new" contracts are nice, but CCP killed one much used and loved feature. Also, there are bots. Please fix.

How do you know he wasn't a real person?

I mean really....if you have a stack of fed navy webs like that i wouldn't sell them all in one big pile either, I'd methodically make a contract for each one to sell them individually. If I do this often enough I can get into the rhythm of setting up mass contracts with a very similar delay between all of them much like a bot would look like.

Ellie, do you know that copying contracts only takes a few seconds?

edit: I agree with the lack of description and per-page sorting. That is just BS.

that was a rather long winded speech just to publicly accuse a player of botting

so if he's not a bot does he get to sue for libel?

I actually like the new contracts, but one drives me crazy every time:

If you get a new contract assigned to yourself and click on the link on the summary page it jumps to the search tab and it shows NOTHING if you have set "exclude buy orders". Maybe somebody can tell me the logic behind this. I'd rather go for a reset of filters so I can really see the contracts assigned to me, instead of feeling that there's a bug or something fishy going on.

Please CCP, fine tune the working features and listen to the players. Look at PI how horrible it is to use (still)!

Nope, you did not get it.

CCP took out one of the features that made contracts interesting, that is search by description.

There is no anti-bot delay built into the new UI, and search is still broken.

The result is that the game is less fun to play. There is one less dimension for competition between traders, and there are guys who do... stuff like what I posted on the screenshot.

Is that clear enough for you?

Hi there. I'll attempt to answer each one of the grievances with contracts to the best of my ability.

New contracts has less features than the old contracts
No, new contracts has a lot more features than the old one. The title of this thread says "New" Contracts: less features and more bots but maybe what you meant to say was "a removed feature and more bots"?

New contracts was developed without any input from the community
That is very far from the truth. Input from the community did a lot to shape the featureset of the new contracts. You can see some of the discussions on the original blog thread and in other threads at the time.
There were a lot of changes between the initial 'alpha' release and the final version. It looks like you have some bad information there.
I doubt that any other feature in recent years has been developed with as much player feedback as the new contracts search (and related features). I'm frankly a little offended.

Search by description was removed in an attempt to thwart scams
We put a lot of thought into this one and I don't like to remove features.
However, in this case, we saw that the descriptions were not used much except for scamming (I don't remember the exact numbers) and were not something that was easy to use for searching.
We also saw when looking at the numbers on TQ that people were not using the description search very frequently, so this feature wasn't being used much.
Lastly, the need to put in a description and by association, the search-by-description feature were originally implemented because contracts lacked the advanced filtering that it now has.
In your example of a freeform search you mention "CNR 3x CCC", but there weren't any unwritten rules on how to format the description within the community so that particular search might get you a hit (more likely it would yield a few scams) and you would probably not get a hit on many other CNR's such as the ones with a "CNR + 3 CCC" description.

I don't see search by description returning because it wasn't much used and the new filters are so powerful.

Scammers spam local channels more because of the changes in contracts
That's interesting. I can't see any evidence to corroborate that claim. Do you have some numbers?

Sorting per page as well as per query gives rise to a new type of trading bot
I can't see any relationship between the example that you posted and this feature. Previously contracts were returned to the client sorted only on creation date and all sorting was just done per page. The addition of sorting the entire result set on date, time left or price is one of the biggest usability enhancements that contracts received. There are a few things that simply cannot be sorted on the server such as number of jumps so we allow sorting each page as well for those fields.
I don't know what you want us to fix here.

Someone who can create a contract every 3.5 seconds for over a minute must be a bot
I don't know anything about the particular example that you cited but the 'copy contract' feature allows you to create identical contracts in around ~2sec each. All you have to do is right click on the context menu in your newly created contract and click 'copy contract' and then click the next button 3 times. Takes you 2 seconds. I just tried it and created 30 contracts in a minute, very easy, and I'm not even a bot.

Why let it bother you, why not just right-click->ignore and move on?

Search in the new contracts system is broken
What is wrong with it, have you filed a bug report? Do you mean that it's 'broken' because you can't search by description or is there an actual problem that is causing incorrect search results?

ooops

Oh look it's CCP!


Please update the market interface and make the UI faster. It's a pain having the client and/or market window lock up for loading sell orders!

Never has someone been PWND so hard in the history of EVE forum posting.