EVE General Discussion

People jump on the good contracts fast. Don't like the bad ones, well then don't take them. The system is self correcting like that.

There's a sucker born every minute and many of them become haulers in EVE.

Unfortunately, all of those contracts will end up being picked up by someone and moved, so the system perpetuates.

If you are looking for more reasonable pay, join the Hauler's Channel.

There are some general guidelines that most people follow in there and always a steady flow of courier work.

Contracts and their compensation are completely determined by the players so I am not sure what you want the CSM to do about it.

The reason they pay so little is that piracy has been nerfed and nerfed to the point it is almost always unprofitable in highsec, and near impossible in lowsec due to the ability of ships to jump from tether to tether in complete safety. CCP Quant's numbers show only a tiny fraction of one percent of goods transported in this game are stopped by pirates. Therefore, you aren't really paying for risk but just the time of another player to click a couple times to move your stuff. How much do you really want the other players to give you for a few moments of your attention?

The market has decided hauling is a low-effort, low-risk activity and pays accordingly. Your best bet is to find someone who needs either large amounts of material moved, or moved quickly, that isn't served well by public contracts and add some value to your services so you can charge more.

If this information is correct CCP already announced a “drop off” feature that should make hauling contracts more attractive again. To scam a hauler for the collateral you will have to blow up the ship again.
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=6801876#post6801876

I've done some of those smaller contracts before, and they can be worth your time. The first thing to do is achieve economy of scales by accepting more than one contract at a time, when they are deliverable to the same location. The second thing I do is use a small and fast ship to make the trips as fast as possible. I typically use a warp speed and agility enhanced tech I industrial with more than 30k eHP, time to warp of about 4 seconds, and does more AU/s than a shuttlecraft.

Taking multiple small contracts like this I can easily get 100k ISK per jump - and considering that I am about 3 times faster than a freighter that works out to fairly equivalent to freighter pilot income rates. As I can do the Jita >> Amarr >> Dodixie >> Hek >> Rens >> Jita run in about 30 minutes. There are also some pretty nice regional delivery runs, and the trick is finding large numbers of hauls in the same region, or deliverable to the same location.

Typical figure I work with for operating a tech I industrial courier is about 100k ISK per jump. If they don't pay this amount, or I can't find any concurrent jobs to the same destination or from the same location, then I don't take the job. For a freighter 500k ISK per jump is the standard figure.

As for the collateral it should be high, because, that is tied to the value of the products you're transporting - and that is how you know the job is worth doing.

As mentioned above, join the Haulers Channel, if affordable only take couriers from there. Scams are not allowed there and people announcing tiny rewards or otherwise "funny" contracts are quickly talked out of it by the community. Though the good deals come with collaterals in the 2-5B range and require a DST at lvl4 minimum. On the lower end there is too much competition of newbies, crashing the prices.

I did join that channel ;p and it's pretty sweet.

I was thinking someone in CSM could put forward an idea to enforce a minimum reward that scales correctly with collateral, but with this channel of non-scam jobs, it's not such a huge deal.

The beauty of spontaneous order and emergence.

Quick CCP nerf this into the goddamn ground!!!! It is just bad game design!!!!

You know what... I'm gonna call it. Horrifyingly bad ideas like this need to go in F&I where they can be properly ignored.

IB4L God willing.

500k per jump is, I believe, the typical fee for purely high-sec. 1m for low-sec. And null is typically handled by your own alliance's logistics, so use the setup they provide.

I've put up couriers for 500k per jump and they were picked up as soon as I clicked "yes I'm sure". Those 200k per jump, as mentioned above, you're only seeing them because the thousands of players who do courier missions don't like the pay, so they're not taking the contracts.

Someone might, eventually, if they can combine a whole bunch of loads into a freighter going to the same destination, and just add that contract on top. Contracts going from / to Jita, and that Jita - Amarr, have very high likelihood of being picked up; there's probably at least 100 freighters moving between trade hubs daily.

Which is why the guy is offering less pay and can still get someone to transport his stuff.

Otherwise, as mentioned above, the contracts interface is a completely open interface to let us do things that we can't do with just the market, and we like to keep it open like that. Other MMO's just have a trading / auction system and that's it.