| This chapter covers the courier mission system. It includes an introduction to the idea, some history, a description of the mechanics of these missions, and a number of practical tips for maximizing their utility in the game world.
Introduction
One of the most unique and compelling features of the EVE universe is its size. Long travel times between distant regions make proximity of paramount concern and force players to think in terms of territorial enclaves. There are obvious economical, logistical, and strategic ramifications of distance, but the most obvious effect is one experienced by each and every player of the game, from the green rookie pilot on his first spin in a Reaper to the commander of a battleship fleet or CEO of a megacorp. This effect is travel downtime. Nobody likes to travel 38 jumps unnecessarily to pick up a few units of ISOGEN and bring it back to base, no matter how fast their ship is equipped to travel.
Anatomy of a mission
The concept is quite simple. When you own an item - through a market purchase or any other means - the item shows up in your global assets list. In any station with the Missions service you are able to create a new courier mission for the transportation of any item(s) in your assets list. You may select where you want it delivered - the item will be dropped off in your personal hangar wherever you choose.
The item or items you select are combined together and merged into a single item called "plastic wrap." This item has a volume equal to the sum of the volumes of its contents. This has consequences for would-be couriers with small cargo space - if the package is too large, it cannot fit in the player's ship and therefore cannot be delivered. Fortunately, missions are listed with the volume of the package to be transported.
As compensation for the time and effort involved in the transportation, successful completion of a mission merits the reward payment set by the mission issuer (MI) at creation. Unlike the market system, courier missions are not limited by region boundaries and can be configured with pickup and drop-off locations in different regions altogether.
To minimize the threat of theft the mission taker (MT) must pay a collateral amount which is returned upon completion or given to the MI upon failure. This protects the MI by covering the monetary losses if the item is not delivered. The courier system ensures that both the reward (paid by the MI) and the collateral (paid by the MT) are handled by a third-party - the EVE Central Bank. This system is a necessary safeguard around which the entire courier concept revolves.
--Packages
The plastic wrap package is not an impregnable protective barrier. While it is not possible to remotely view the contents once items are "wrapped," a courier in possession of the package may right-click on it and chooses to "open" it. This pops up a window listing the contents in the usual iconic form. Opening a package does not compromise the package's integrity and items cannot be moved out nor placed inside. A better term for "open" in this sense would be "peek inside."
There is also an option to "break" the package - this pops up a warning dialog indicating that doing so will result in mission failure. Breaking a package does not automatically fail the mission but there is no way to complete it once the package has been compromised, even if the contents are delivered to the appropriate destination. The act of breaking a package destroys the plastic wrap and replaces it with the original goods, a process which is similar to refining stacks of ore.
Browsing available missions
To take on a mission, you must be in a station with the Missions service (most if not all stations appear to have this). Click on the Mission icon, and select courier missions. All missions available in the selected view range are displayed. Please note that depending on your location and the range selected this list may be empty. There are a number of options that can help find the right mission for you.
--Mission list filters: View ranges
The view ranges function very similar to the market interface. They govern which missions are listed based on your current location and the pick-up point. The options are to show all missions with pick-up location in current station, in current solar system, in current region, and all. For example, if there is a mission with pick-up in your current station, it will show up in the missions list regardless of the view range you select. If there is a mission in your current solar system (but at a different station), selecting in current station will not show it, whereas in current solar system and in current region will. The all range is self-explanatory - it is equivalent to eliminating range filters altogether. Ranges only apply to the MT when browsing the list; all missions are universally viewable when created, and there is no way to create a mission that is only visible to players within a certain range.
--Mission list filters: Optional filters
There are two other filters available which are additive to the view range selected. The first is to list only missions whose packages do not exceed the cargo volume of the currently active ship. This is useful especially for newer players with smaller cargo holds who would like to avoid wasting their time calculating routes and profits only to discover that the package would not fit anyway. On the other hand, leaving this option unchecked would allow a player who owns multiple ships (or can fit cargo expanders) the option of switching ships or loadout if necessary. The volume column's color code is useful in this respect - it indicates whether your currently active ship would be able to fit the package (assuming the hold were empty). Please note that you can accept any mission regardless of the package volume, but you should not do so if you have no means of moving it. You cannot split the package up into manageable pieces without breaking it and forfeiting the mission.
The second optional filter is to only show missions with "affordable" collateral. It is not clear exactly how the system determines affordability, but the formula is proportional to the active character's current ISK balance.
--List sorting
Once the filter options are selected, the list can be viewed and sorted in the usual manner. Each mission is listed on one line, with the reward, pick-up, drop-off, number of jumps in route, package volume, collateral amount, and deadline displayed as separate columns. The list can be sorted by clicking on any of these columns. The most important ones to look for are reward, jumps, collateral, and deliver in. The jumps column only indicates the number of jumps between the pick-up and drop-off, and does not factor in the distance between your current location and pick-up point. Volume is only pertinent when it shows up in red (indicating the package is too large for your ship). Please note that the deliver in is an absolute deadline based on when the mission was actually created - it is not based on when you accept the mission or when you pick up the package. Clicking once on a mission highlights it. This then creates three buttons in the upper right of the main mission pane.
Show route is especially useful for newer players in starter ships. This pops up the map with the route to the drop-off point highlighted. The courier should be sure to manipulate the map options to determine whether this route is acceptable or not. A 13-jump mission with a reasonable collateral and nice reward may seem very attractive, but it is important to check whether the route will take you through low-security space, where you may be attacked and killed by NPC or player pirates. This risk should be weighed carefully.
Please note: the show route button does not show the actual mission route (the route between the pick-up and drop-off locations). Instead, it plots the course between your current location and the mission endpoint. As such, it is not very helpful unless you are already in the station or solar system of the pick-up.
The close button is only available to the MI and only if nobody in the EVE world has yet accepted the mission.
Accepting a mission
There are two methods to accept a mission. You can click once on a listed mission, and then click the accept button in the upper right portion of the missions pane. Alternatively, you may right-click a mission and choose accept from the drop-down menu.
This function should be treated with extreme caution. Accepting a mission is like signing a binding contract, the terms of which are clearly laid out and not subject to interpretation. Once accepted, a mission cannot be gracefully cancelled by the MT (or the MI for that matter).
As soon as the MT accepts, two things happen simultaneously. The package is placed in his personal hangar at the pick-up station, and the collateral amount is immediately deducted from his cash account. This amount is placed into escrow and shows up in the wallet journal. It will appear as a debit to the cash section and a corresponding deposit to the escrow section. People not familiar with the concept of escrow should view it as a sort of third-party secure holding area for both collateral and mission rewards. The use of escrow services ensures that once a mission is accepted, the contract cannot be revoked by either party - i.e. the reward cannot be withheld by a scamming MI not willing to pay up on a successful delivery, nor can an unscrupulous MT take on a mission and then run off with the item without the collateral amount eventually being transferred to the MI. Escrow amounts are held safely by the EVE Central Bank to prevent such abuse. Items can still be "stolen" and traded to others, but there is no way to avoid the loss of the collateral since this amount is deducted from the MT before he acquires the package.
If you are not in the appropriate pick-up station when you accept the mission, you must obviously travel there to pick it up before heading off to the drop-off.
If the mission is completed on time, the collateral is instantly returned to the MT (it is released from escrow and put back into the MT's regular liquid cash pile). If a mission is not completed, the collateral is transferred out of escrow and into the MI's cash account. This only occurs when the mission timer runs out - there is no way to immediately fail a mission, even if the package is "broken" or otherwise lost or destroyed.
Prospective couriers should not take a mission unless they feel confident that they can deliver on time. Please note that server crashes, scheduled downtime, ISP outages, and many other factors can interfere with successful delivery. It is the responsibility of the MT to be aware of this risk and plan accordingly.
The Journal
You will notice that when you accept a mission, the Neocom's journal icon will begin to flash (it is shaped like a book). This indicates activity in the personal missions list. Those of you who have done agent missions will be familiar with this. Courier missions appear under the My Courier Missions tab. There are two sub-tabs: Issued and Accepted.
The latter is a list of all currently active (non-expired) missions. The delivery deadline is dynamically updated in this list to reflect the actual time remaining. The journal window also comes in handy once you have entered the destination solar system, because it shows the drop-off station.
Package delivery
One very important point to make here is that a mission is not automatically completed once you dock with the station and put the package in your personal hangar. The package must be delivered, which conceptually involves transferring the item from your hangar into the MI's hangar and hence back into his possession. The most intuitive way to do this would be through a right-click option on the package once placed in your hangar at the appropriate delivery station. Unfortunately, this is not possible. To complete the mission you must open up your journal, locate the mission in the Accepted tab, right-click on it and select Deliver Package. This option will only be available if you are at the drop-off point and only if the appropriate package is in your personal hangar there. Once you do this the mission will vanish from your journal and you will notice your wallet flashing to indicate that your collateral has been returned and you have been paid the reward as set out in the mission contract. You will not receive any mail confirmation of this as you would for mission expiry, so you will want to check your journal just to make sure everything went smoothly.
Creating new missions
This section describes both the interface for mission creation and some guidelines for making missions as attractive as possible to prospective couriers.
--Pre-creation
Creating a new mission is extremely straightforward. From the Missions station service, click on the Add Courier tab. This will set up a form interface with your current asset list in the left frame. You can select a pick-up location by clicking on any of the stations at which you own items, or you can click on a particular item in that station. Once you have chosen a starting station (by selecting the station itself or an item you have there), the mission creation form appears in the right frame.
At any time you can choose to add more items to the mission by control+clicking on them in the asset list frame. It is only possible to add items that are at the same station - you cannot create a single mission to transport two items located in different stations. You can also remove items (one-by-one) that have already been selected by right-clicking on them, or you can reset the mission creation form altogether by clicking the Reset Form button at the bottom right of the pane.
Every item you add will appear in a column-sortable list at the top of the right frame. Each has its volume listed (in m3) as well as quantity. Quantity is necessary due to the ability to store items in a stacked state. Minerals, for example, are almost always stacked. The mission creation interface (like the asset interface it inherits) treats items as single units with a quantity figure. Unfortunately there is no way to un-stack or split up stacks of items remotely. If you have 6 Micro EMP Smartbombs in a station and want a courier to bring only 2 of them to another station, you will not be able to do so given the limitations of the interface. This is especially unfortunate to those with a large store of minerals in a remote location. If the repository is large enough it can be impossible even for an industrial ship to transport any tritanium, for example, if the tritanium is stacked and the volume of the entire stack exceeds the ship's cargo capacity.
The total volume of the items you have selected is displayed under the item list. Below this is the form interface for the mission parameters.
The Reward field is self-explanatory. This is the amount of ISK that will be paid to a courier upon successful delivery. This amount must be available to the MI at the time of mission creation, since it will be immediately deducted from the wallet and placed into escrow.
Expire (in days) defaults to 1. Unless there is a very good reason to create a longer mission delivery window, this does not need to be changed. In fact it would be very useful in some cases to set this expiry timer to a value of less than a day (such as 6 hours, or even 1 hour). Unfortunately this is not possible with the current courier system, and limits the utility of missions somewhat.
Ship To indicates the destination station. You can type out the full name of the station if you match the spelling and format exactly, but it is much easier to type out the system name (or even a part of its name) and hit the Search button. This pops up a list of stations in that system, from which you can then click on the appropriate one.
The next field is a very handy feature of the new mission system. Restrict to a Pilot or Corporation Members allows the mission creator to create effectively "secret" or "underground" missions intended for a specific courier or group of couriers. The search function here operates exactly as it does in the People and Places window, sometimes requiring only a partial match for your intended courier. You can also type a corporation name in this box and the mission will only be available to members of that corporation. Please note that restricting a mission in this way prevents others not only from actually taking the mission but also from seeing it altogether.
After this field is a radio button to select whether or not the MI wishes the mission to be tracked. Tracking is a useful function but it costs 2,800 ISK in addition to the basic 850 ISK cost of a mission. For most people these amounts are negligible but if you create a lot of missions and do not necessarily need to be apprised of a mission's progress, you may not want to select this option.
Tracking does not actually allow the MI to detect where his package is once a mission has been accepted. Its only purpose is to send an in-game email to the MI both when a mission has been accepted by a courier and when a mission has been successfully completed, even though this information is available through the journal interface. This notification function would not be very useful except for one little feature that may make all the difference. When the notifications are sent, the sender of the email is the courier who has accepted the mission. Currently, this is the only way for an MI to discover the identity of the MT.
This may be an oversight or bug in the mission system, since it appears that this information was not meant to be available. The wallet journal entries and the journal interface itself do not indicate the "other side" of a mission transaction. This sets the courier missions apart from the market interface, since on the market whenever a transaction takes place the buyer or seller shows up in the logs. With courier missions, the MI and MT are effectively shielded from each other by the EVE Central Bank. This protection is arguably necessary to protect couriers from exploits involving collateral set much higher than the value of the package. Unfortunately, using the tracking option an unscrupulous MI can circumvent this identity safeguard, set mission collateral to 300K for a few hundred units of tritanium, note the name of the courier, and set up an ambush. With the package destroyed, the collateral would pass to him.
To minimize this risk, couriers should always peek inside their packages to see if the mission collateral amount was reasonable for the contents. If not, there may be reason to suspect some funny business and the courier should proceed with extreme caution. Unfortunately the mission cannot be cancelled at this point and the collateral would already have been placed into escrow.
The final field in the mission creation form is used to set the collateral amount. There is a Calc Baseprice button which can often help the MI decide the amount by giving a ballpark figure for the cumulative worth of all the items in the package. This button seems to calculate the base NPC price for the items - this has at least been the case with minerals and skills. The button should only be used as a guide. In most cases the MI will know exactly how much an item is worth to him and how much he wishes to "insure" the item through the collateral parameter. This amount is immediately placed into escrow once a courier accepts the mission, and it is guaranteed to be transferred to the MI if the mission expiry timer runs out before the package is delivered.
--Post-creation
When all the items have been chosen and the parameters have been correctly set, hitting the Add Mission button will place the mission into the pool of available courier jobs. The wallet icon will flash, indicating that the basic 850 ISK fee (or 3,650 ISK if the tracking option was selected) has been paid, and the reward amount has been placed into escrow. The journal icon will also flash, and the mission will show up in the My Courier Missions/Issued tab.
From here, an MI can right-click on an issued (but not yet accepted) mission to cancel it. This is necessary if for example the mission parameters were unpopular and nobody wanted to take the mission. Since there is no way to change the parameters, a new mission must be created to deliver that same item, and this can only be accomplished if the mission is cancelled and a new one set up in its place. The MI can also accept his own mission (there are some esoteric uses for this, but they will not be covered in this guide).
The right-click function on Issued Missions is particularly useful to detect whether a mission has been taken yet, if the tracking option was not chosen. If the mission is still in the available pool, right-clicking will give the option to cancel. If the mission has actually been taken, cancellation is not an option since the terms of the mission are binding to both the MI and MT, so right-clicking will have no effect. Determining whether an issued mission was completed is even easier - the mission will disappear from the journal altogether. If you do not receive an email indicating that the mission expired and the collateral amount has been transferred to you, you can safely assume the mission was successful. You can also check your assets list to verify that the item inside the package was actually delivered to its destination, since finishing a mission actually breaks the package open and places the item into the MI's hangar.
Helpful guidelines for making missions attractive
The mission system is utterly useless to the MI if he cannot post a mission that prospective couriers would want to take. Issuing a mission will place the desired items in plastic wrap, advertise the mission, and guarantee the safety of the perceived item value through the collateral system, but it all amounts to a waste of 850 ISK if the expiry timer runs out and nobody has taken on the mission. In this section some tips are provided for maximizing the utility of the mission system by making your missions attractive to couriers.
--Intended audience
To begin with, you should consider your intended courier pool. Do you expect the mission to be taken by new players in starter frigates? If so, you should make sure that the volume of your package is small enough and that the route between pick-up and drop-off is neither too long nor too dangerous.
If these parameters seem fine, you can think about the two ISK values for the mission. New player don't require very high reward levels. You can sometimes set 10-jump missions with reward payouts of under 10K and some new players will be happy to take them. The real constraint on this target pool is collateral. If you have a 300,000 ISK skill you want transported 7 jumps in new player-friendly empire space, there is no way to set up a low-reward mission for a new player to move it without risking financial loss yourself. New players do not have the funds to accept high-collateral missions. For this reason you should probably only create clean-up type missions - ferrying small, low-dollar items through relatively safe space is the type of job best suited for them.
The main target audience for the majority of missions seems to be the mid-range freelance pilot. Corporation members rarely spend time searching for courier missions to take and are unwilling to travel back and forth across the galaxy even for substantial rewards, since they almost always have very focused goals and tasks to perform while online. Freelance players, on the other hand, are often in search of things to do to pass the time and help make a modest living. These players are usually quite savvy and may have a decent amount of cash available to them for collateral purposes. It is therefore possible to set up missions for them to transport non-precious yet valuable items. The main concern in this case is the reward amount.
--Setting the reward
There are two very different approaches to setting an appropriate reward amount, neither of which can guarantee that the mission appears attractive. The first is to base the reward on the number of jumps the mission would take. This is very crude because the difficulty of a mission boils down to two factors: time and danger. The level of danger is dependent on the route path itself, not only the number of jumps, and the time factor depends on the skills and equipment of the courier. One courier's 20-jump mission may be less of an undertaking than another courier's 14-jump mission, if the former has a Microwarp Drive and the latter needs to load his ship with speed-reducing cargo expanders to carry it all. For this reason it is not advisable to think of the number of jumps as a multiplication factor on a base reward-per-jump amount. Mission difficulty is less tangible, and you do not really know how fast couriers can go or how averse they are to travel down-time. Maybe a 20-jump mission is something a courier would happily take on, if they intended to set up a "safe" autopilot route, go AFK to make dinner, and monitor the progress in the background. In this case the reward payout would not need to be as high as you might expect.
Another approach, in some ways more logical but still not foolproof, is to base the reward as a percentage of the collateral. In this philosophy the mission is seen as a trade run, with the collateral playing the part of "seed cash" and the reward in the role of "profit margin." This approach is especially necessary with high-collateral packages. With a high collateral amount, the courier is less likely to think about number of jumps; his primary concern will be whether the mission reward is high enough to risk losing the collateral. For this reason distance becomes less of a factor, and a 2-jump haul may require nearly as high a payout as a 20-jump haul. However, this does not mean distance becomes irrelevant, only that it is more a question of tuning the reward up or down from the base payout.
It is useful to continue the trade runs analogy. Many traders choose their runs using a complex procedure. To begin with, they might seek to eliminate all runs which would produce a profit below a certain amount. The percentage profit with respect to seed cash does not matter at all if the actual profit figures are too low. The player's time becomes the constraining factor here. Out of the remaining runs, some sort of risk vs. reward filter would be in effect. Two runs both netting approximately 1 million ISK are not equal if one requires 6 million in seed and the other 12 million. The trader would seek an acceptable profit percentage, further narrowing down the choices (and eliminating, for example, the 12 million ISK seed mission). The remaining options will have the following characteristics: they will all produce a certain minimum profit (below which the trader's time is wasted), and the profits all meet or exceed a certain minimum percentage return on investment. The final consideration would then be difficulty - usually number of jumps.
Instead of thinking about a base amount he expects to make per jump, the trader usually operates on a comparison basis. For example, one run satisfies both the absolute profit and the percentage profit criteria, and is eight jumps. Another run nets 200K more, but is twice the number of jumps. This is clearly not worth it if the base run would net one million, since the trader could be doubling back to make a second run (provided supply and demand hold up) in that same time. For a run that is twice as long to be worth it, the trader would probably want nearly twice the profit. This is in stark contrast to the "X amount per jump" philosophy.
Returning to courier missions, the considerations are slightly different, owing to the fact that a courier can only profit from a given mission once (i.e. "supply and demand" are only enough to support "one run"). Instead of multiplying some notion of acceptable reward by some abstract number of reasonable-mission-length units, it may be possible to strike a balance. Perhaps a base reward amount that satisfies the first two criteria (absolute profit, and percentage profit), with an additional bonus per jump beyond a certain set number. This bonus could be an arbitrary per-jump amount, or could be based on a percentage of the collateral as well, such as 1-2%.
For example, a 15% profit on a 1 million ISK collateral mission would be 150,000 ISK. 10 jumps would be reasonable for this type of mission, so those jumps would be "included" in the 150,000 ISK. The mission is actually 17 jumps, so a bonus would be given: 7 multiplied by the appropriate extra-jump fee, in this case 10,000 ISK (1%), yielding an additional 70,000. The total reward payout for the 17 jump mission would be 220,000 ISK.
One other point to consider is that the percentage profit required by a courier can be less than that expected by a trader. Traders are invariably equipped with industrial-class ships. There is simply very little profit to be made carrying frigate-sized holds full of trade goods. Courier missions are often a frigate pilot's only recourse for making money from simple travel time, since there is no viable trade alternative. As such, the profit percentage need not be anything above "reasonable" for the mission to appear attractive.
To recap then, there are two types of approach to determining the appropriate reward. The first, which approximates the time a mission would take, is better suited for the transportation of low to mid-value items that do not require hefty collateral. In this situation the mission is more likely to be taken by freelancers who dabble in delivery and are just browsing the mission list to find something to do. To this audience, the amount of time a delivery would take is directly related to the expected payout.
The second approach becomes paramount with higher collateral. The intended audience for this type of mission is the freelance courier focused on making a decent profit from his delivery efforts. The main focus should be an acceptable profit based on two criteria: absolute (because the courier's time is worth something), and percentage (which captures the risk vs. reward). The amount should be adjusted based on the number of jumps beyond some reasonable threshold the courier would have to travel. This threshold, the additional distance bonus, and the base profit percentage are all up to the MI to decide. He should play it by ear.
To make a mission attractive, it will be necessary in most cases to strike a balance between these two approaches. The best advice is to place you in the courier's shoes and divorce yourself from any selfish considerations. It won't matter to the courier whether you could buy 3 of the items in question for the price of transporting just the one over a large distance. It is up to you to decide whether moving an item is worth it. If it is, you will need to make it worth the courier's time. If this is not financially reasonable for you, then move the item yourself or accept the fact that it is destined to collect dust in one of your hangars in the far reaches of space.
A couple of things need to be said. The first is quite obvious - having couriers ferry items across the universe is a luxury for those who can afford it. It will always be cheaper to move your stuff yourself, though this can be extremely inconvenient and time consuming. You will have to decide how much your time is worth to you. Courier missions can save you time in two important ways: they allow you to do other things in the time it would have taken you to make the round-trip, and they can be carried out while you are not even online. If you play it smart, you can usually arrange to have things delivered while you sleep or while you are at work. The best time to create missions is before you log off for the day, or early in the morning before you head off to work or school. When you log on again, your item will often be waiting for you. For a lot of players, that convenience is worth the high rewards they have to pay to make the delivery happen.
--Setting the collateral
There is actually very little to say about choosing the collateral amount. The Calc Baseprice tool has already been mentioned as a starting point. However, it comes down to the worth of the package in your own estimation. Let us say you are looking for a module that is normally not very expensive (average price), yet it is very rare in your area of space. You see one on the market one day, 19 jumps out, and you buy it immediately, but cannot afford the time to take the side trip. You will want to set the collateral for a delivery mission to be higher than the average market value, because for you that item were a rare find - it does not matter that you can buy them for good prices in a region 50 jumps away.
Once you determine what the item is worth to you, you should add a certain percentage on top of that as a buffer. This serves two purposes. First, it compensates you for the loss in time if a mission is accepted by a courier and then failed. During that time another, better courier could have been doing the delivery, or you could have arranged to pick it up yourself. Second, it discourages item theft by lazy players. If you set the collateral to average market price on an item that is rare in the pick-up region, a courier may take a peek inside the package and be tempted to break the package and fail the mission to save himself the time to go to the source of item production. If the collateral is higher than a normal price for the item, couriers will be less inclined to steal just to save themselves the hassle.
--Transporting large volumes
If your package requires an industrial-class ship, special considerations apply. Here you will have to make the delivery extremely lucrative. Industrial pilots belonging to a corporation are usually very busy on mining operations or other corp assignments. Freelance industrials are less common, though they are far from rare. These haulers however have a high income potential in general and will probably be focused on trading and making very tidy profits; they will often not even check the mission boards unless they hear about a mission with a profit ratio that far outstrips that of a "good" trade run. In most cases it will not be worth the price an MI would have to pay to get an industrial to move the cargo.
On the other hand if the quantity of the goods is enough for several industrial trips, and the items are stacked in such a fashion as to allow multiple mission postings, it may be possible to set up a few missions, all with the same pick-up and drop-off. In such a case an industrial pilot could consider each of the missions as separate runs on a trade route. It might help also in this situation to stagger the expiry timers so that one mission is set to 1 day, the second to 2 days, and the third to 3 days, for example. This is necessary because the timers are activated as soon as the missions are posted.
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