Player Features and Ideas Discussion

One of the basic principles of EVE is an open market. Courier contracts are priced as they are because there are people willing to haul at those rates. If it's too low for you, that's fine - because I can just find another hauler who will do it at that price.

What you're proposing is similar to a miner saying "selling Tritanium at 2.5 ISK each is too low, there should be a fixed minimum sell price of 5 ISK."

Now if you want to do something constructive, do as your thread title says, talk to the "cargo pilots", unite them, and get everyone to refuse any contract priced too low. Or even accept it and break it, to further inconvenience those issuing them. If there was a significant drop in people hauling for the current rates, we would have to increase the payouts or haul things ourselves.

Investing time to train up for haulers and freighters is not something people with pew-pew agendas want to do. That is why there will always be a need for haulers. As of this post, the public hauling business is dying. Mainly because there is a monopoly taking place by a couple of shipping corps.

So not only are public contracts getting fewer and fewer but what remains are the dregs of contracts asking the most collateral for the fewest pay over 20-30+ jumps.

A change is sorely needed.

I don't know why you want these things changed. They work as intented. Couriers have a healthy economy like nothing else in the game, let me explain why:

Currently the reward determines which public contracts will be picked up fast and which will have to wait longer. There exist very profittable public couriers, you just don't happen to see them often when you don't keep following them, because they are picked very fast. Those issuers paying a good reward are rewarded by an early delivery. Those not willing to pay, get their stuff very slowly or not at all delivered.

Players decide on their own, if they are willing to have something like a 1000 ISK/jump or a 1M ISK/jump rate, by taking or avoiding specific contracts. I don't see why there is the need to babysit everyone by defining what should be the status quo on couriers. What works for you, might not work for others.

A fixed rate is going to kill competition and it is going to kill the diversity of reasons that couriers are used. It is not going to make couriers to be more profitable, it is instead going to lower the amount of public couriers a lot, as it just won't be profitable anymore at all in many cases.

A fixed rate is going to make more rewarding couriers probably less rewarding, especially on long routes, because it dictates what something should be.

There is competition in the hauling business. Lack of more competition is only, because it takes a huge planning to create a hauling corp and keep it running with available pilots and competitive services. Many players are just not willing to do all that planning and keeping it up, no fixed rate will change that.

Eve is a Sandbox. Couriers are 100% sandbox. Players decide if something works or not. If they pick couriers with a 1000ISK up, those putting those rewards will keep doing it. Players have the power to change this on their own by not picking up couriers which rewards they consider ridiculous, even then not when they are going to do that route anyway.

In the time I have been working for Push Industries I have seen the necessity for a variety of rewards to exist, all being dictated by circumstances and individual situations. We have couriers ranging from 100K to 100M+ ISK. A fixed rate is just not going to allow this diversity to exist, that represents the needs and possibilities for everyone, from the new player to the veterans, from the occassional issuer to manufacturers and traders.

In Push the collateral is only in a limited way combined to the reward. We have a multiplier for high-value freight. This works actually great like that. Otherwise this is not combined in any way to the reward per jump or other extra services which we offer, like the rush service. Like someone else said, not the collateral dictates the price in the first place. To have it do, would be just wrong. To have a percentage do it, would make things even more wrong.

if a change would happen to couriers, the next thing to be asked for would be to set a fixed rate for manufacturers and their income (say set minimum prices for items on market)... there is a lot of stuff that is unprofitable to produce on the market (like there is a lot of couriers that are unprofittable to haul). The next thing after that would be... well you see my point?

What I like most in EVE compared to other MMOs is, that it does not tell you what something has to be. The players, the economy and other factors decide what it should be. We can think, experience and decide, we don't need babysitting rules, because some are not willing to make decisions on their own.

The current courier system absolutely represents EVE's "reward vs risk" principle too. Lowsec or Nullsec transports are generally done for a much higher rate, in public as also private couriers. A fixed rate again would not allow for this diversity as it would dictate, they should be the same as highsec couriers.

No matter if private contracts can be whatever they want to... they will not be, because public couriers are a competition to private contracts. Any fixed or minimum rates will have an effect on the private hauling business too.

We have customers, that use both. Private contracts with us and public contracts at the same time. Putting anything "should be like" is going to limit people's free decisions. I don't see the reason to do so.

You want higher rewards for taking public couriers? If so, keep watching the couriers to be able to pick up those really rewarding instead of the leftovers. Or start your own hauling corporation. Don't try though to be applied what YOU think will be the right thing to the sandbox, which won't be for others .

It already exists; that's what Red Frog is. Red Frog itself makes no money from its pilots. It's just a brand, a queue, and a bunch of independent haulers doing their own thing. We don't have requirements for X number of deliveries or Y number of days active or any of that. The directors are essentially long term volunteers to keep things going. Nobody's a boss.

Understood, but Atticus wanted to introduce more competition and is looking for a better pay-off. I'm offering him a suggestion already available within EVE Online. Now I'm just waiting for a response. Although, I should probably assume the silence means he's not interested.

I am looking for a hauling corp at the moment. I'm about 19 days away from being able to fully fly a Crane (With the appropriate skills trained to V) and it's about time I stopped hauling public contracts.

How does Red Frog divvy up the contracts allocated to them? First in first served?

You're done your homework well :) Pretty much everything is correct there.
Yes, we are pushing freight mostly ATK, since we focus on really fast deliveries.
Oldest contracts are generally priorized, but of course we're not asking people to run from Rens to Jita to take the oldest contract when the second oldest is from Hek to Rens :)

For more details, see our recruitment post:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=52000



As for the original discussion:
A fixed percentage of the collateral is just not going to work.
I think enough examples were given already (laughably low reward for long routes with low collateral; ridiculously high reward for short routes with high collateral).
And 7.5%? Now you're just trollin :)
Get an idea of the freight business in EVE and about the reward-per-hour in it, before posting suggestions like this. With 7.5% minimum reward, all haulers would be trillionaires in no time...

This sounds like a lot of whining from someone who should probably join a hauler corp. I've used PUSH Industries several times - they've done great work, and they're quick, as mentioned earlier. I'm willing to pay for that service.

Just because you're not happy with what you've been making, that doesn't entitle you to force others to pay more. If folks aren't willing to pay enough, no one will move their stuff. It's as simple as that. There is NO legitimate reason to force players to pay a certain amount to move their stuff.

Stop whining or stop playing.

If their contract is terrible then don't accept it. Nobody is forcing you to take bad contracts, so don't force them to pay you more than they are willing to.

If nobody accepts their contracts then they'll have to offer more money to get their stuff moved.

^^This^^

Former trucker here, so I can confirm that this time, what works IRL will work in EVE:

Tell people who give "cheap freight" as we call it, that they can go **** themselves.

The herd (IE the useful idiots whom, with pitiful eagerness, take cheap freight for peanuts and then whinge on the CB all day about how they're barely keeping their trucks running) will then be culled in due course.

The smart ones will survive and prosper. The dumb ones...will die dumb, and broke.