Contracts and reputation

What sorts of contract conditions would you like to see? How should the game detect when they're fulfilled?

The main problem with this sort of thing (and which prevents adding more than "craft this for me" sorts of things to the escrow system) is that there's often no reliable way to detect performance of the contract.

Eve Online is a really good study case as to how something like this gets implemented into the game naturally.

Eve Online players for many years had to work peer to peer on these issues (usually property law and fulfillment contracts.) Due to the make up of their active player base, actual players with law and financial backgrounds started laying the foundation for increased property ownership literacy among guild leaders and just generally players interacting in a space where those contracts had an impact.

There was a very active community that had many vested interests in working out what property rights and common contracts should look like to the point that people start using template contracts from the most respected specialists in the community on that topic. The community started to realize what tools were worth automating and what were not for CCP Games to work into the game itself. Eventually some tools did get implemented into the game to both formalize things and make the process easier.

Note the key take away points here:

1. The player base was educated by fellow members to understand their rights and the impact of otherwise unknown jargon and legal concepts. This meant that while people would get swindled, there was an active effort to lower the amount of skullduggery involved in taking advantage of people who had less understanding on a topic not typically needed for video games.
2. That player base collaborated actively to refine and exchange ideas as to what was best practice relative to the common situations that happened in their community. Contracts are something that needs to develop in context. Complex is not always better, but neither is simple.
3. The community identified what would help the community most for the least amount of interference from CCP Games. The developers of Eve were regularly educated and interacted with the community leaders who developed the standard contracts as well as those who used them regularly in gameplay.
4. CCP decided to respond after many many years to help with the things that benefited the community most. They were cautious in a prudent manner as implementing such a system without any of the other three points in this take away can cause massive community development problems.

Tl;dr: Yeah sure, this is fine. But I'd rather this be a conversation we have a year or two after launch. I don't trust this sort of system to be designed without a massive amount of community cultivation, investment, and reassurance of the general populace's legal literacy.

@JustVine , I agree completely.

This is one of the hardest parts of this sort of thing. While developers and programmers can implement technical models when they are well-specified, working out exactly what is needed is something that's basically wild mass guessing, even with direct feedback, until there is a solid shared community foundation and perspective. Without a community that has already developed and matured a set of customs and standards, no matter what a developer implements, it will always result in some form of chaos. This is absolutely the sort of thing that is useful to implement, but it is also the sort of thing that must be done as a reinforcement and streamlining of existing cultural/community norms within a game. No matter what you try to provide at launch, it won't work out well because your community isn't built around it yet.

This is how contract law is built in real life, too. Our legal systems have codified the style and form of agreements that were already in common use for centuries, and perhaps fine tuned or optimized pieces of them as appropriate. Without the tradition and experience behind it, even the modern systems wouldn't work smoothly, and in a game (such as Eve or perhaps Ashes) you need to build the tradition first, then add the mechanics, for anything more complex than the Escrow System will already cover.