EVE General Discussion

I feel it is my obligation to bring to light a rather disturbing situation that has developed on the contract market.

What if I told you that incursion runners were truly paupers. That even the largest tech moon holding 0.0 alliances made laughable income from those moons? That a single player could make hundreds of billions by exploiting a CCP mechanic to the appoint of nearly breaking the game. That a handful of these people could cause irreparable damage to the Eve market by succumbing to RMT

By abusing mechanics put in place after the last contract page overhaul, single eve players that have known this secret have created an isk empire of dangerous proportions. While i do not frown on the good fortune of fellow eve players to make good isk, we can not over look the dangers of a single person being able to amass many hundreds of billions of isk, alone, at zero risk. How many RMT botters would pass up such an opportunity to never be worried about a gank again (or worse being reported) and produce that much isk, just in Jita, with minimal time invested never undocking.

You see, the new contract page has the old heading filters (just as sort by name, time, PRICE), however if you do not change the drop down menu in the top right, these filters only affect what is show on a single page, not the entire list. The default menu setting is to show the oldest contracts first, not the cheapest.

"I'm sure they'll eventually wisen up and scroll through the list and find out how dumb they've been"

In the past this was true, however by placing a full page of contracts you dont actually plan to sell, you create a "buffer" in which no other contract price will ever affect what the player sees until either the contract group expires or enough is sold where they no long have control of the full page.

Thus many players unwittingly buy mods at literally double to triple their actual going rate. Nearly all popular faction mods have such systems being built where hundreds of contracts are put up and sold at rates that appear to be much faster than their normal priced counter parts. Even more frightening is that by judging the speed in which the contracts are made, coupled with the fact that these huge blocks are identical copied and pasted contracts, shows that there is in reality only a handful of people abusing this system that are only limited by two factors. A, having the initial isk to purchase 2-300 of the mods to create a contract block, and how many alt corps and alt characters they can make to have contract slots.

The biggest problem is that for a new person to realize that things like republic fleet gyro stabilizers aren't actually worth over 120m isk each, is that to find a cheaper contract would mean going through literally dozens upon dozens of pages.

Acquiring the mods is simply assuming you have isk. Many of these people have mailing lists where they "generously" purchase in bulk large quantities of mods at just below normal market price. Older players with their contract setting placed correctly simply think they're good a deal oblivious to how much these people are actually selling the mods for.

"Well I'm sure only a few people fall prey to this"

No true, the fake contract market is actually in many cases larger than the regular market. Infact on the corp histories you can find buyers than have ranged from massive O.O alliances, whose convoy purchasers didn't know better, all the way to lowly new Eve players working towards their first faction mods.

The massive level of abuse happening here, and risk of it being an RMT disaster that could destroy the entirety of the eve market warrants CCP notice, and fixes.

Don't believe me? Set contracts to oldest, pick a popular mod, and check the seller's contract histories. Some of these groups are well over a trillion in isk moved. Over the next few days I will be following the contract history bread crumbs to help expose, not only who control's these dummy contract listing corps, but hopefully find their actual mains.

Enormous amounts are also scammed from people via local-spam. I do not see any problem with this. If you are buying expensive things via contracts, you better know how the market and contracts work. If you don't, you didn't deserve a low price anyway. The contract system is fine as is, and it does not need hand-holding. Some better education, though, and getting the info out? Sure.

Also who the hell calls 0.0 space "O.O"?

Basically, thats the weirdest part. The scam market is as large as the non-scam market.

In terms of RMT I can't of course prove that any of them are doing so, nor would I even accuse them directly. What I'm really saying here is, that when you have an operation easily handled by 1 to 2 people, and if done right could easily do 3-400 Billion in isk profit a month, takes less skilling that bots without the additional overhead of the bot programs. You're creating an unnecessary risk to the whole of the eve economy.

The main problem here is that the mechanism for finding out something is wrong is flawed especially against newer players.

By just clicking on sort by price header, many would just assume thats sorting the whole list, not just the single page, and to be proven otherwise they had to go back 20-30 pages. Its an awkwardly designed system, none of which is detailed or warned to new players.

At least when you're badly sorting on the conventional market you can still see other prices that would give away that something is amiss in your sorting.

Not that it prevents it from occasionally happening, nor that mistakes shouldn't be punished. Its the that the whole system isn't transparent enough to new players.

I agree on this point, though. The interface could use to be better. This is a "new players are getting screwed over by a bad interface" problem, not a "the economy is exploding" or a "RMT" problem.

Ninja Edit: also nice forum alt. As much as it pains me to see yet another one of those, at least you picked a good name.

Not empty-quotin' !

Maybe .. As you cant prove it got nothing with RMT, as Contract Detective cant prove it got something with RMT:.
both scenarios are perfectly possible ..

Some of the people doing this are more and less aggressive to each other when comparing charging rates. A certain character to investigate Wrathful Penguins, and his apparent alts Vengeful Penguins, and his(she) contract making corp Quafe LP. We know these are all connected because the contracts are at the same price done exactly in order with each other in spam blocks. Looking at fed navy webs their next slew comes up in about 8 days priced at the cheap 124m price. Check out their contract histories to get an idea of how much just through these three entities they've pushed. Theres literally hundreds (perhaps thousands) just in the last couple months or so of faction mods sold, through Quafe LP

Also with a little killboard investigating, he(she) seems closely tied to a little corp named The Hatchery.

Sometimes I sell overpriced stuff to people who obviously clicked buy without checking the market first.

Obviously that makes me an evil RMT'er.

I am first to admit i can't prove RMT, I simply can't access API/private contracts. I'm simply stating that an insanely large profit is here, and under the circumstances that its so easily done with such minimal work/risk, that produces profits that could dwarf most peoples psyche, ends up being a potential risk to being abused by RMT. If it isnt being exploited now it very easily could be in the future.

Is it a red herring? Perhaps, but to see this happen on this grand scale makes you question the validity of the current mechanics.

I would say this at the very least warrants CCP looking into some of the accounts when a large number of accounts share an IP like this, its a precaution to take much like how CCP keeps a close eye on people like somer blink. Theres nearly a trillion isk moving around every month in this market.