Running Public Contracts In High Sec Is A Rich Player's Game

I have to admit I'm more active this year in EVE Online than I was last year. But the wallet UI really exaggerates the effect.

My wallet as of this morning

Just looking at the overview the UI would leave one to believe I brought in 5.8 billion ISK in the past 30 days. But that number is vastly inflated because of a side hobby I have in EVE: running public courier contracts.

Courier contract deposits paid

Over the past month I've submitted over 5.3 billion ISK in collateral to carry out 9 courier contracts. Of course, I didn't pay all those deposits at once. The most I had out at any one time was a little less than 1.96 billion ISK. So for what I transported I needed 2 billion ISK just to accept the contracts.

CCP explains what a courier contract is in a support article.

Courier contracts are created to formalize the moving of items between locations by other players. The items selected during contract creation will be packaged into a "Plastic Wrap" package, which will be given to the contractor to be delivered to the target location. To prevent the contractor from simply keeping the package for his own, a collateral should always be set on a courier contract, which has to be paid by the contractor upon accepting the contract and will be returned to the contractor upon successful delivery. It the contract fails for any reason, the creator of the courier contract will receive the collateral instead.

For example, yesterday I decided to complete a courier contract from the Minmatar trade hub of Hek to the Gallente trade hub of Dodixie, a trip of 8 jumps.

My first contract yesterday

As you can see, I put up 510 million ISK for the opportunity to gain 6 million. Not a great payout, right? But the trip was completely in high sec, although half the systems were 0.5 security systems. But I didn't use, say a regular industrial ship like a Mammoth to transport the package.

I used a deep space transport

Instead I used a Mastodon, the Minmatar tech 2 deep space transport. Not only is the ship harder to gank in high sec, but with a 62,500 m3 fleet hanger due to having all skills trained to level V, I can comfortably accept contracts up to 60,000 m3. Of course, the price of a Mastodon in Hek right now is 248 million ISK.

Now, I think some people are doing math right now. I put down a 510 million ISK deposit to perform a courier contract worth 6 million ISK in a ship who's hull alone costs 248 million ISK? Am I crazy? Or, looking at my wallet, does owning PLEX worth over 8 billion ISK make me not care about loss so much? Especially since CCP game me most of the PLEX when Aurum was removed from the game years ago.

Either way, the reason isn't all the ISK I brought in over the past 30 days. Of the 5.8 billion ISK, 5.3 billion ISK was the return of my deposits upon the completion of courier contracts. I kind of wish the developers would make the interface not count the return of deposits as income. I'm pretty sure they could match up a deposit with a return deposit and zero out the amount upon completing the contract. But considering running public contracts is probably a niche activity in a niche game, I'm not sure I could make the business case for applying the resources to make the change.