EVE General Discussion

If a delivery contract to an NPC station pays, say 10 million as you note, and you are looking at a citadel contract for the same amount you absolutely should NOT take it because when you adjust for risk, that reward is actually LOWER.

Prices of things need to be adjusted for risk.

Suppose you have a safe investment and it pays 3%, then you should not be investing in something that also pays 3% but has non-zero variance. That is just bad investing. Similarly with courier contracts. If one type of contract has greater risk than another type, then there needs to be a price differential reflecting this additional risk. The way to achieve this is for people to NOT take the courier contracts with additional risk until the price adjusts to accommodate that additional risk. That is how markets work. Why is everyone trying to take on of EVE's unique features and break it: the player driven market.

Okay, not everyone locks people out. You are starting with a flawed assumption, that you should have 100% chance of success when delivering to ANY citadel. That is wrong in a largely player driven game. Some citadel owners are going to scam, others are not. This means that the probability of any given contract being a scam is greater than zero but less than one.

Here is the difference:

I am arguing this:

Prob(Scam Courier) is in the set (0,1)

You are arguing:

Prob(Success|given courier is a scam) = 0.

You probability is correct, but you are not really taking on my argument. I am arguing that given the probability I note above, citadel contract prices are too low if they are equal to courier contracts to NPC stations. Their prices need to rise to cover the additional risk. That way when you do get a scam courier contract it is just part of doing business. The higher prices of the other citadel courier contracts will offset those losses.

Further, as a player builds a reputation of trust then they might be able to negotiate new rates with individual haulers or hauler organizations. All of this kind of emergent game play you want to toss right into the rubbish bin and kill it with a simple top down mechanical fix. Sorry, but that is not the way the game works.

The counter, BTW, is not taking courier contracts to citadels until the prices adjust for the additional risk. That is how markets like this work. If something is priced too low given the risk, you just don't take it on. Why is this so hard for people to grasp.

Seriously, what is the counter to a contract scammer spamming Jita local? There is none other than just ignoring them. Same thing here. Leave the contracts until they adjust for the additional risk. These transactions are totally voluntary...so don't accept them.

I don't know. My question would be, outside of this issue is there a valid concern with having a delay to shutting off accessibility. From just the limited standpoint of courier contract scams, sure something like that might be interesting in that it could create a race against time with both sides trying different strategies to win.

What I do oppose is simply removing any and all contract scam risk via CCP diktat.

I disagree on several key points.

First... not taking part is not a counter. I could say the counter to someone using a warp scrambler is to never leave the station. Never leaving the station is not taking part at all in the contest... the COUNTER is using warp core stabilizers.

Second... I disagree that Jita contract scams are the same. The key difference is the contract at the TIME IT'S ACCEPTED is set. If you read the contract, you decide if buying a gecko is worth a billion isk to you or not. But with a hauler contract a key component (the ability to dock at the destination station) can change after the contract is accepted. That change AFTER the acceptance of the contract is a key difference. If it wasn't allowed, the same answer to contract scams would be true... read the contract and make sure it's above board. If you check your access... you're good. The problem is that doesn't stop the scammer with the citadel access scam... there essentially is no way to stop it if you accept the contract.

I honestly can't think of a situation in Eve other than this where you couldn't conceivably succeed between the acceptance of a mission/objective and the conclusion. If I go on a mission in LS and there's a carrier waiting to gank me... I could have friends bring 30 carriers. I can win. I might not have the resources or the ability to organize my counter quickly enough... but it's possible. If I accept a courier mission to a LS station and there's a camp of 50 enemies waiting for me... I can bring 1000 friends of my own to clear the way. I may not have 1000 friends... but it can be done.

Yes... I understand there aren't always going to be carriers waiting to gank me in LS missions or gatecamps stopping me from delivering to LS stations... but the point is that even if those things DO happen, there's a method of me still succeeding. If a citadel blocks access... no method exists that I know of to deliver the cargo. (unless an unaffiliated player can deliver it for you... but I don't think that's possible)

As for the prices... I'll repeat a post I made earlier. Red Frog charges 17m to move cargo with 1b collateral from Jita to Amarr. If you did the same trip to a citadel in Amarr, but there was a 10% chance of being locked out... you'd have to have a reward of about 119 million to account for the fact you're going to be unable to deliver one out of 10 contracts. Even with that low scam rate... that pretty much kills the possiblity.

You are confusing ex ante and ex post. As such we are talking past each other at this point. Such mixing of ex ante and ex post also renders your position probabilistically incoherent.

Look, if you want to deflect rather than address the issue at hand, that's fine.

The point is that in every other area of eve, it is possible to complete an objective once a mission (or contract) has been accepted if it was possible to complete the objective before it was accepted.

If I take a mission... it can be completed. Even if I have to travel through 10 camped LS gates... it is actually possible to overcome that and complete the mission.

If I take a courier contract to a public station... it can be completed. Even if I run into 10 camped HS gates by CODE gank-squads, it is possible to overcome that and complete the mission.

If I take a courier contract to a citadel... there exist ways it cannot be completed even if it was able to be completed when I accepted the contract. Even if I have backup from a 5000 member alliance... they can't help. I don't have time to blow up the citadel before the contract can be failed.

That is what separates citadel courier contractsfrom other forms of scams. In other contracts you get exactly what you're promised when you accept. If the contract described as "cheap skill injector" is actually selling you a mjionir missile for 200m isk... that's what it says in the contract and that's what you get when you accept it. But that courier mission that is deliverable when you accept it becomes undeliverable after the contract is accepted. It becomes impossible AFTER it is accepted.

I also find it interesting that you ignore what the contract courier prices would actually have to be based on your own assumptions.

I'll point it out again. For a delivery with 1 bn in collateral... the cost to deliver to a citadel if you assume a 10% scam rate would be a bit over 100m more than the cost of going to a NPC station in the same system.

Red Frog cost to bring a 1bn collateral package from Jita to Amarr - 17m.
Cost if you assume a 10% scam rate - a shade under 119m

It is a cost benefit equation, but your suggestion of a 33% increase in delivery cost is foolish given the reality of high-sec courier contracts. You're looking at over a 5-fold increase in price.

No, I'm arguing that an accepted contract or mission should always have a possibility of completion, even if it's extremely hard.

Otherwise, the side OFFERING the scam contract has no risk.

When you allow the ability to remove the ability to complete the contract, it then becomes IMPOSSIBLE (not difficult... but impossible) for the scammer to lose.

I understand eve allows scams. But while those scams generally use game rules, they aren't usually used as an argument for not changing the game rules. You're kind of crossing into new ground doing that.

Who gets hurt by allowing deliveries to an external container for deliveries on a citadel? Nobody does aside from the scammer. Scams in Eve don't bother me... but I fail to see the wisdom in a simple change that eliminates scams and encourages more people to actually PLAY an aspect of the game (taking citadel hauling contracts) being discounted because it hurts... scammers.

It would be like arguing the creation of the EVE API system as it is today is bad because it makes it harder for spies to get into corporations. I remember the days when you had to take a screenshot of your login screen and e-mail it to the corp to try to prove you weren't a spy. The API now makes finding spies easier. I don't remember arguments to prevent the implementation of something that helped lots of other groups simply because it hurt a type of scammer (corporate spies/thieves).

It's just... nonsensical.

That is completely arbitrary and makes no sense. It also does not align with the way the day trading scam works. In both cases the moment you take the contract, you lost. I personally think people would find the failing buy order to be more insidious than the very obvious locked out of the citadel mechanic, because the lockout is an obvious requirement that citadels have, and the very interface you select the contract has copious warnings, where as the failing buy order erodes trust in the market mechanics and is hard to understand if you are not aware of the daytrading skill, and there is no warnings.



This is also a completely arbitrary concept, that makes no sense (diffrerent activities have different risk profiles, there isn't anything unexpected about that), and in any case there are obvious risks running the scam.



This is completely true of the daytrading scam too. Its also completely true of the scam with the skill extractor/injector substitution. Its true of the local shellgame contracts that are completed already (only the scam one isn't). The moment you take the contract you are scammed.



If we remove all hauling scam contracts, then haulers that can see the scams will be hurt because the people who can't see the scams will be more competitive. You won't be able to use contacts and build up a business of private hauls because every afk freighter will happily take every citadel delivery.

They do have risk,
Without a defense fleet a space house can be killed with two vindis and a couple of logi boats (like three).

As i said previously, you can treaten to burn the damn thing down.
And if that dosent work, actually burn the damn thing down.
If you cant, you shure as **** can pay someone else to do it.

I had trouble with this sort of thing once

And before anyone jumps in and say, "Oh, but that won't recoup their loss." So what.

Let me introduce you to the ultimatum game.

Bascially people, and even chimpanzees apparently, care about fairness and reciprocity. So much so, that people will incur a cost to "get even" with someone who has screwed them over.

So Ralph is suggesting a viable option and even a possible counter. Go burn down their house they are scamming with.