f13.net

I noticed that they have a corporate contracting skill. I thought that the corporate contract limit was increased to some large number for everyone, making the skill useless. Can anyone confirm?

I think this means that corporate contracting applies to public contracts made on the behalf of your corporation. Corp-only contracts have that really big limit.

Yah the corp-only contracts have a limit of 500. Without Contracts I can only do 1 or 2 "personal" non-corp contracts.

I think you mean 1 or 2 which are available to everyone (public) rather than available only to your corp.  Confrusing.

I mean, if I select 'as corp' (ie: issued by F13) I get 500. If I do not select that (ie: issued by Irek Dabry, even if its for the F13 corp only) I only get 1.

Do I have this straight:

Restricted: F13; Issued: F13 - 500
Restricted: Public; Issued: F13 - 500?
Restricted: Public: Issued: me - 1
Restricted: F13; Issued: me - 1

In other words, only the entity who owns the contract controls how many outstanding contracts there are. If you want to issue personal contracts, then you need skills. And I'm guessing that Contracting and Corporate Contracting affect Restricted: Public and Restricted: F13 respectively. Guess maybe I'll grab Contracting and just see.

Here's a dumb question: What, exactly, are contracts for? Who issues them and why?

They can be used for a few different things- auctions, courier jobs, etc. I have done a few courier jobs locally- not a bad way to make a bit of coin for a n00bler who can fly industrials.

Ah, so like "I want all this stuff to go from point A to point B, but don't want to make a zillion trips" kind of thing? I assume there's an escrow or something to avoid getting ripped off?

I'm making baby steps into the non-combat portion of the game -- I'm still playing with buy orders on T1 stuff.

Contracts replaced the old escrow system, if you ever used that. I use contracts primarily to buy BPCs to build ships. As you might guess, I have yet to issue any.

There's auctions, item exchanges, courier, loans, and freeform. There's also one that is pay me x isk and you get this item; I'm not sure if that falls under item exchange or is a separate category. I think loans and freeform are corp-only.

I generally enter what I'm searching for into the search box and hit enter, which causes it to pop up a box asking which thing I want specifically (e.g. I enter Tempest, it asks: Tempest, Tempest Blueprint, or Tempest Fleet Issue). Then I click the button and it shows me all the auctions or item exchanges for Tempest Blueprints in my region. Also good for expensive implants or faction gear.

For the courier trips the contract issuer can enter an optional collateral amount, so if someone chooses to rip you off you get to keep their money and they don't earn the reward.

Pretty sure Scenario 4 is 500.  Otherwise you'd have to have special rights to make a usable number of corp-only contracts.  Just start playing around with it, though.  You can see how many out of how many on the first dialog page.

I am using them to move materials that I don't want to "waste" time moving myself.  Making a courier contract sucks the item(s) into Contract Storage.  I set a destination, and optionally a reward and escrow, and let it go.  I have restricted mine to F13 only and thus have not bothered to place an escrow amount.

I'm a builder/trader.  I use them to sell various individual and bundled sets of BPC's, low end researched BPO's, faction modules, and COSMOS junk.

After doing a bit of plugging away at the interface myself, I found the answer to my question.

Available: F13 always has a limit of 500, no matter what.
Owner: F13 has a limit of 10.
Owner: Dwindlehop has a limit of 2.

Contracting bumps up Owner: Dwindlehop by 3 per level. Corporate Contracting raises Owner: F13 by 10 per level.