Tuesday's Two-for-one!

Welcome back! I have a treat for you today, a double helping of hard earned wisdom!


My first and only dive into contract scamming...

You have read in my last post that I had a run-in with the courier contract system and lost four ships because of a clerical error. Back when that had happened, it got me thinking. 'Surely I'm not the only dummy in this game, right?' Perhaps I could try to turn the tables on some other poor sod and hopefully make myself feel a little better (misery loves company). Well, if I wanted to do such a thing, what would I look for? You can't see what's being moved in the contract, so I would have to find a way to make an educated guess at what that shipment would be worth. I would have to determine a minimum volume / cost threshold that I could use to identify potential ... er victims...

A threshold, right, how would I determine that? For whatever reason, my mind immediately went to Tritanium as it is basically the one of the cheapest and most worthless items in the game (that people might want to move at least). Okay, so lets assume whatever I wanted to snipe would, at the worst, be a load full of tritanium. How much would that be worth? In my case used a very low price for the trit to calculate what a frieghter full of it might be worth. 1.75 (ISK per piece) x 90,000,000 (rounded amount of trit that you can fit in a frieghter) = 157.5M. Alright, so that means if I see a contract up where the collateral is set up to be a drastically lower ration of mass to ISK, I should potentially consider it. Anything is more valueable than Tritanium, right? So I should have no problem.

Great, so let's do this. I look through the availible contracts in search of something that exceeds my threshold. It takes a while, but I find one eventually. It's a good sign that there is only one, because if there were a bunch of them then I probably miscalculated something somewhere and should start over. In this case, it's a contract for over 900,000m3 with a collateral of 50M. That's about 3 times my threshold so I am very interested. Something else of note, this is the first time I've ever tried to accept a courier contract. All that I know about them, I've read online on evelopedia. From what I had gathered there, as long as I didn't take any of what was in the contract, I would keep my collateral. Also of note, there was mention of a marchariel in the description...

Now for the punchline. So I accept this contract and I crack open the crate to see what's inside. Whatever it is, I'm pretty much guarenteed to make money because even if it is a load of trit, I got it for a good price, right? Wrong. Oh Karma, you cruel bitch. Apparently, some jerk has invented something called a 'General Frieght Container' and I just bought 8 of those (which are valued at approx 200,000 ISK each), a noob ship, and a single piece if scordite... Estimated cost of items in the box = ~ 1.6M ISK. Bah, what the heck is up with that? Oh well, I'll just let the contract time out and since I didn't take any of this... crap, I'll get my 50M back and we can call it square. Nope. Apparently the collateral is tied to contract completion, not only to item theft, as I had believed. Que the QQ. I, apparently, have just been contract scammed (AGAIN) while trying to scam other peoples contracts... I really suck at this game.

Lets look at some of my mistakes and get some lessons learned:

*Lesson Learned: Don't accept a courier contract for 900,000m3 of goods is you can't even fly a freighter*

*Lesson Learned: Tritanium is, apparently, NOT the most worthless item by volume in the EVE universe*

*Lesson Learned: Don't make assumptions about what you know. You WILL be wrong especially if you put ISK on the line*

*Lesson Learned: If someone puts an enticing description on thier contract, do not take the bait. That's all it is, bait. Just like if you see a single drake 100km off of a wormhole, don't move out to engage it. Recognize bait for what it is and move on*

*Lesson Learned: If you are not a personal accountant, email spammer, lawyer, investment banker, insurance salesman, or other form of career criminal, don't bother with trying to run contract scams. There are already way too many people smarter than you that have been running this game far longer, doing a far better job of it than you will likely ever do*

*Lesson Learned: Stick to what you know*



Concussion bombs, great for enemies, not so great for friends...

Just a quick one to round out the posts for today. Myself and a few corp members were in another guy's wormhole attempting to hunt him down. We had a HIC on his high sec exit along with our covop that was attempting to combat scanner him down and one other ship. (Note: this is not normally how we handle this type of engagement, but this mark was acting very oddly. He, too, was in a covop and he was warping around uncloaked apparently ignoring us, and after about 20 minutes of watching this we decided to just probe him down and be done with it.) He had been sitting uncloaked at a safe spot away from his POS for a number of minutes. We had pretty much assumed him to be afk so we threw out combats to nail him. On our first pass, we had him at over 90% which is very good, but not good enough. We prepare for another pass when he apparently wakes up and warps off... apparently directly to the high sec we are camping (Yay). I warp to it as well hoping to land on him. He gets there first and cloaks when he hits the bubble. Now he can do one of two things: 1. Remain cloaked and try to make the exit wormhole to jump out, or 2. try to manually fly out of the bubble and warp off without getting uncloaked. As I land, I decide that he just might be dumb enough to try to do option one. As soon as I land I'm going to turn on my burner and head for the exit so that I can hopefully bump him and we can kill him before he gets to the exit. This is the plan at least.

The moment I land I go to click on my afterburner... and I mistakenly hit my bomb launcher...(CRAP!!) Everyone around me sees that i have just chucked a bomb directly between two of my corpmates near the wormhole. Now, if this bomb hits the wormhole and goes off, ALL of us are within the blast radius. The HIC and the BC will live, but the mark, my corpmate in the covops, and myself in the bomber might have a very bad day... lucky for us all, after the bomb had sailed between my corpmates it had also managed to miss the wormhole and exploded the full distance away. It was a very tense couple of seconds. Everyone froze, and when we finally realized that we weren't all dead we let out a long sigh of relief and changed our, now freshly soiled, underwear.

*Lesson Learned: You probably might want to move that bomb launcher button over a few slots so that you don't, you know, kill everyone next time*