Custom Contracts

Good idea. This would be very useful indeed.

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I would love to see some prebuilt breach protection clauses you could add in which take effect automatically upon breach. Usually when a company breaks a contract without the other parties consent there are clauses written in the contract to penalize the party which failed to deliver.

In my opinion, the reputation hit does not dissuade breaching contracts and the only in-game option to interact with the party which wronged you is to blacklist them, which I feel isn’t always the right recourse in the event of a breach.

This would require balancing on the penalties as I don’t think a company should be completely wiped out if they have a bad week and mess up logistics but it should open up a nice avenue for p2p interaction I think.

I fill like the escrow and the automatic payments upon breach go against the spirit of the contracts in PrUn. In PrUn the constracts are about trust and risk. If one of the contractors wants to scam the other one, nothing should prevent him from this. The only thing the scammer loses is his reputation. By reputation I mean not only the in-game reliability rating, but also his standing among the other players. A scammer could break several contracts, but the player community will end up by knowing about him. With an escrow system and automatic payments upon breach the game itself would somehow represent a neutral third party that would ensure the safety of the contracts. Do we want third parties in PrUn contracts? Actually there could be triggered clauses “upon breach” and penalties for the one who breaks. But these should not be automatic payments. If one breaks a clause then one would have to pay additional penalties if one still wants the contract to be considered as fullfilled on his side. But if one doesn’t want to pay the penalties, the game should not force him.

Perhaps if a contract involves a third party ensuring the safety of the contract, then there should be additional fees paid by the two contractors. These contract safety fees could be substantial, and would be an additional currency sink.

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Oh as another one - the ability to create shipping contracts containing multiple items. Currently, if I want to send say, a week of consumables for my pioneers + settlers + technicians from the CX to a base, that’s a lot of contracts needing set up and it’s just simpler and easier for me to do the supply run myself. Being able to set up a custom contract to handle it all would be great.

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  • Contracts that don’t actually fulfill until both parties have fulfilled their orders/goods/paid.

  • On-going contracts.

  • Loan contracts that involve interest payments.

  • Contracts where you put up collateral against a shipment, or whatever. If you breach the contract the other person has the option of taking in order Liquid Currency > Inventory > Liquidating buildings (they get the building parts from a used building).

  • Protections in various forms.

  • Refueling Contracts, this is a bit of a feature unto itself, but setup a contract to fly directly to another ship and transfer fuel or possibly inventory.

  • A way to delete the contact between two people, if neither actually want to fill the conditions.

Just a few thoughts

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It would also like the possibility to exchange ships through contracts. See my post on this topic:

There should also be the possibility to cancel or amend an ongoing contract if both parties agree. Like change the duration, the amounts, add more clauses, etc.

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I guess this is an obvious one:

As well as sending contract to another player, if contracts could also be sent to a Corp, I suppose your own would be most likely, then anyone in that Corp could accept the contract.

Some great ideas in this thread. I like the escrow option, mutual abort, partial delivery/payment ideas, and multiple items.

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Someone else mentioned escrow, so I’ll mostly just say that all of the user scenarios covered by Eve Online’s contract system should be considered (by that, I mean, accepted/rejected explicitly). I’d consider custom contracts useless if it doesn’t support escrow or collateralized shipping contracts… similar for personal/corporate contracts.

Great and promising development log. Wait for the customs contracts with impatience.

Something that could also be useful is to have a longer maximal contract duration. As of now, it’s 20 days. In some situations, loans in particular, it makes sense to have longer durations, perhaps as long as 60 days.

Tie corporate contracts into another feature - Corporate warehouses.

  • Ability for corporations to build a corporate warehouse
  • Ability to create open/ongoing corporate contracts open to any shareholder
  • buy contracts to fill the corporate warehouse: buy item X at price Y; max inventory level Z
  • sell contracts to withdraw goods from corporate warehouse: sell item X at price Y; min inventory level Z
    Joining a corporation would then also mean picking those corporations that have corporate warehouses on planets where you have bases, and that stock items you are wanting.
    It also means you don’t have to find an immediate partner for your LM contract, as the corporate warehouse acts as the other party.

Interesting idea. But who will pay for the buy contracts? If a company sells something to a corpotate warehouse through a contract, where does the money come from? As far as I know, there is no corporate wallet implemented.

Awesome dev blog.

In addition to targeting a specific user/company and, hopefully, a Corp, with a custom contract, will there been a means to post a custom contract ad?

Have you guys decided how this feature will split across different game licences? I hope TRIAL/BASIC could at least be recipients and editors of custom contracts.

Do you think LM use may drop as a result? Maybe this is an opportunity to open LMs to TRIAL users? I’ve posted before about the need to keep player numbers up in order to have an interesting, functional economy - well imo ofc.

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TLDR Version: Shipping contracts should allow for multiple items to be shipped as one “shipping container” for transport. I expected the UI interface to be similar to moving items from storage to ships, or to a warehouse.

I’m a new player. One issue I noticed was that shipping contracts are limited to just one item per shipment. That was very disappointing when I encountered that limit. I purchased small amounts of a few items to be able to produce a couple of batches of a few different items at the BMP and PP1. My ship was out doing a delivering so I figured I’d have that small batch of stuff shipped down by contract. I was disappointed to learn I needed one contract to move my 4 COT, and separate contract to move 10 FE, and yet another to move 2 S, and yet another to move 2 SI, and so on…

It seems this would be easy to implement as it should use the same UI elements as used for other inventory items. I think it would be a good QoL improvement, speaking as a new player.

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On-going fulfilment contracts, for Corp or other, would be great. Being able to secure raw material supplies for delivery every x days, for y occurrences would be really useful.

I was wondering about a move into Construction and how to deal with raw material.

Besides recurring contracts, automated payment when the contractor delivered their parts would be a real lifesaver for shipping and sale ads.

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Would it be possible for a contract to be created for, say, 1000 H2O and be fulfillable by several independent companies?

I’m thinking of a situation where newbies can’t fulfil large order quantities required by vets, but could in aggregate.

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Tangential, but somewhat different to the ideas being discussed here. But there’s an idea for how to run governments on planets and how they acquire resources for upkeep.

There is a blend of LM\CX run by the government. They put out an RFQ (request for quote) for the items they are looking to acquire. This opens up an orderbook for that particular item with a countdown clock. Users can submit orders listing that item for sale, and once the auction runs out, the govt basically buys everything that’s listed (up to a limit price they have defined).

There can be several mechanisms and configuration functionality added to the governor’s auction control: what the limit price is, whether that limit price is visible publicly, visibility of other companies offers, how many times you can edit an offer per day\total, etc.

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  • Multi item shipping contracts
  • Reoccuring/multiple fulfillment contracts. I want to buy 100x H2O x10, a seller can fulfill 1-10 on a sliding scale. Cleans up some LM spam and means new players can participate without needing large amounts.
  • Contracts to transfer fund to other players
  • Production contracts. Player X will produce item A, player Y supplies inputs and production fee.
  • Multi LM contracts. Pay a larger fee to place a contract on multiple LMs. Maybe the buyer is looking for a harder to find item?
  • Classifieds/Messageboard. These probably don’t fit on the LM but it would be a good way to find players that don’t participate in external forms of community like Discord and in-game chat isn’t asynchronous enough.
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Multi item shipping => yes!

Maybe locking of funds (‘3rd party account’)? That the paying party has to pay, but the receiving party can only access those funds when delivering (or another ‘contract block’)
This ‘3rd party account’ could be a service the goverment needs to install and can charges for

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  • Advertising & Selling shipping space e.g.: I’ll fly to cx and have 150t/205m³ of space
  • using specific times instead of relative time difference
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