Additional Bounty Hunting Mechanics for Hi-Sec

Council Of Stellar Management Assembly Hall
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Similar but not the same as Arya Yeshe’s thread

I have been having a discussion in the player features section and I would like some additional feedback from others, after refining it.

High sec needs more pvp opportunities other than ganking. Especially a boost to the almost non-existent, non-criminal pvp.

I’ve always felt bounty hunting would be a really interesting profession in game, but it tends to be fairly useless in high sec due to current criminal mechanics.

My idea involves combining kill rights and bounties.

This system can live side-by-side with the current bounty system and kill right system.

Bounty Kill Rights (placeholder name)

The bounty kill right acts like a kill right that is removed when fully paid out, not after a single ship kill.

The payout is 100% of the combined base value of the hull and destroyed contents, minus 110% of any insurance paid out.

This pays out more than the current system against the majority of insured ships and alot more against uninsured ships.

How they are gained
A bounty kill right is created by “handing in” a valid kill right into a Bounty Agent and paying the bounty value.

The bounty value could be capped to the destroyed value that caused the kill right, but this may not be neccesary.

The Kill Right is converted into a Bounty kill right.

Bounty Hunting
Bounty kill rights are only available from bounty agents. The higher your standing with bounty agents the higher value of available bounty kill rights you will be offered. You gain/lose standings by succeeding in/expiring the bounty kill right assigned.

The Bounty Kill Right will contain the system the original kill right was earned and a copy of any loss mail, as initial intelligence.

The bounty agent will randomly assign you bounty kill rights based on the time the original kill right was generated, to improve the odds the criminal is active at your play time.

How this helps high-sec pvp
They can only be placed on pilots that have actively engaged in criminal aggression on another pilot in the last thirty days, by virtue of the requirement to “hand in” a kill right to create it.
It cannot be (ab)used to target innocent pilots in HS.

The bounty kill rights are only available to those who actively run bounty hunting assignments, so it reduces the appeal to criminal alts.

The bounty kill rights are an improvement over standard kill rights, as they are not single use. They remain in place until they are paid out fully.

They don’t fully replace normal kill rights because you can not sell them personally, but they are more difficult to be abused by criminal alts.

They allow attacks on gankers etc. in high-sec who maintain their security status with tags, without having to wait for them to shoot first.

Additional info I forgot to add

Bounty Kill Rights don’t expire in 30 days.
The bounty assignments from agents do expire though.
Each bounty hunter gets a set amount of time to try and get the kill.

A target of a Bounty Kill Right may offer to pay restitution/“pay off the bounty” to the original kill right owner in order to have it removed.

This is at the discretion of the original victim.

A bounty assignment from an agent only entitles you to one kill, then the assignment is returned to the agent. The Bounty Kill Right still exists, but it is returned to the pool to be assigned to (most likely) another bounty hunter.

This prevents farming a Bounty Kill Right by repeatedly attacking the same pilot.

Thank you for your attention.

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My feelings regarding how this will improve the game.

More opportunities to solo/small gang PVP in high-security space.
Makes bounty hunting a more active venture, and not some incidental thing people do when they happen upon a wanted player.

  • This is in line with CCPs desire to promote active play styles.

Criminals in high-sec can largely move about with little danger in high-sec due to the use of security tags. This system will provide additional ways to counter gankers and griefers proactively.

The Kill Rights system was envisioned to provide a like for like scenario. Pilot A attacks Pilot B, possibly killing them. Pilot B can now reship and go and get retribution in killing Pilot A, or let someone else go kill him over the next 30 days (The patch was even named Retribution that overhauled bounties the first time and added the Crimewatch system).

But in HS (where kill rights would be most useful anyway) the above scenario doesn’t really attain like-for-like retribution. The scenario is more like this:
Ganker A kills Miner B causing him a 75mil loss (for example). Miner B, who is more proactive than most, reships/sells/asks someone to use his killright and kill him. Miner B’s executioner finds Ganker A and kills the “scum bag”. Ganker A loses their cheap ganking ship that they tend to fly.

And apparently justice has been served so the kill right is expended.

The Bounty Kill Right system would allow Ganker A to be killed multiple times until the bounty was paid out, ensuring “justice” has been served.

Many of the complaints from High-Sec pilots who are ganked are based around them being in PVE-fit ships against PVP-fit ships. And there is little point in reshipping afterwards just for a 4mil catalyst kill.

Kill rights fall a bit flat too when selling them because you always risk just selling them to the alt of the ganker, so you need to price them high… which means legitimate buyers won’t bother with them.
It’s a vicious circle.

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ftfy
Prepare to do your dance of ecstatic joy…suicide ganking in hisec has reduced itself markedly due to a number of factors. So your idea is a bit obsolete already, ever so sorry. Rejoice, you are getting what you want without even having to go through the bothersome annoyance of considering how the proposals one plops out might affect other parts of the game much less the game as a whole! \o/

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Before you start foaming at the mouth, you may be amazed to know that not every person who advocates for changes is a carebear.
I am not a miner/hauler. I don’t live in high sec. I’m in FW low sec.
I sometimes go flashy myself. People currently have kill rights on me.
So this has nothing to do with me being annoyed at gankers. I think gankers are fine, they are useful for increasing risk in high sec.
I have recently been discussing the same issue on a forum thread with pve players who want pvp to be removed from highsec.
I tell them to do exactly what you’re saying. But I see room for improvement.

I am advocating for there to be more pvp opportunities in high sec.
Currently there is very little available active mitigation a gank target can take.
The best advice people get is “be less juicy, they get concorded anyway.”
It would be an improvement to the game if we could advise that they can take some ships and go and fight back.

I believe ganking should be in eve. I also believe gankers should have active counter-play.
If they want no risk, sitting in highsec, non-flashy then I think they have the same pampered attitude to the highsec whiners.

What other areas of eve are you saying will be destroyed by these bounty kill rights?

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Imho if a feature is crap since literally at least a decade it needs removal and not yet another fix. This is by no means intended against your thought out suggestions but ccp’s way of “fixing” things. I am genuinenly surprised how interesting concepts such as walking in stations and dust 514 get scrapped in a heartbeat but obselete “features” such as the bounty “system” sticks around forever in a bad state and every attempt at making it feasable makes it worse or changes nothing going full circle, wasting already scarce dev ressources.

Just. Let. It. Die.

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But nobody ever whines about bounties and killrights. I have had fun with them (check my bio and you’ll see why). They did affect my gameplay. As an idiot that doesn’t use any alts, they lead to some emergent content I wouldn’t have had without. The feature is fine, but it does need some iteration. That is all OP is suggesting. And I’m not hating those suggestions.

What needs to change IMO is the concept of “killright farming” as it causes the majority of KR’s to be bad deals to take. The whole idea of having to pay ISK to be allowed agression is on one hand what you’d expect from Concord, but also invites this kind of abuse. I wouldn’t mind if CCP reiterated on the rules.

Yet as it stands anyone doing “bad stuff” can make the choice to never undock in anything worthwhile to kill, or even be a somebodies alt. That’s the reason why the current system feels like a waste most of the time. The best deals you can make are still player interactions…

(I’m perfectly aware I’ll start talking about bounties now instead of KR’s)

“I’ll pay you 100mil if you kill that guys Cynabal”.

Those deals come down to getting ISK for something you’d want to do anyway, instead of giving you a small incentive to engage in PVP. Part of such a deal is player trust, and perhaps CCP could program something that would set a deal like that in stone (like a bounty contract).

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Yeah, this seems to be the concensus. The problem with this though is there will be no replacement.
New players will keep complaining to CCP about gankers and there will be not alot they can say to new players about counter play, and then CCP will bring yet more changes that artificially nerf ganking.

At least with a player centric approach, content is added to counter ganking, rather than content removed.

These two points are just linked to resources. Eve players want spaceship content most of all.

And because it’s a question of resources it helps if we can reuse current systems.
Killrights and agents exists already. It would take less effort to iterate on content then start from scratch.

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So if I read that right, the Bounty Hunter pays nothing to obtain a bounty “mission” from an agent, and then get’s to kill a target multiple times and collect ISK up to the bounty value.

Seems kind of all sugar and no acid.

Surely a Bounty Hunter should have to pay a percentage of the available bounty to get the killright, so they are risking something if they don’t ever get the kill?

Just seems way to favourable at the moment.

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Could be a tax upon completion. That way the bounty hunter still pays his share.

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And if he/she never get’s a kill at all, the victim essentially loses the bounty they paid with no outcome.

Still no risk at all for the bounty hunter.

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I considered a bounty deposit that would be lost if the bounty failed, but felt that finding the randomly assigned active bounty targets would be hard enough and you might be getting lots of expired assignments, making it not worth it to bounty hunt.

They would be risking their own ship at every encounter for one. And the ganker could simply upship and fight properly.
This is the usual low sec/null sec position.
Also this money isn’t coming from nowhere. It’s funded by a bounty after a kill. The ganker is likely up on isk already.

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Hardly. People won’t engage unless they are going to win (and rightly so, nothing about pvp has to be fair).

So does the Bounty Hunter have to pay back to the victim for failing their assignment? Do they lose standing with the agent and can no longer obtain killright/bounty missions from them?

What’s at stake for the Bounty Hunter. Seems like nothing at the moment.

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Agreed, but we can say the same for a ganker. They only engage what they know will turn a profit after tags etc. (usually).

Regarding your point though,
We must consider opportunity cost. This is an active hunt, not like the current system which enables you to shoot any bounty you see.

You are assigned a target, and then you need to spend the time to find them. This is time you could be spending making isk elsewhere, which is lost opportunity cost.

Secondly, the bounty assignment can simply expire on the first kill. The bounty kill right returns to the agent and you have to chase someone else. The original bounty kill right will be continued by another hunter.

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Isn’t this thread about bounty hunting?

The gankers also have guaranteed loss from their activity. What does the bounty hunter risk in this proposal?

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A well calculated catalyst loss is no risk. Stop playing the victim and trying to derail.

Your playstyles involves not much more risk than running lvl4 missions as much as you would like to pretend being a “PVPer”

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They do, but it is low cost, and risk.

The bounty hunter risks a waste of time for little to no return. Like I said opportunity cost.
If the bounty assignment expires before they get a kill they’ve wasted the whole hunt.

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I didn’t say it was a risk. It’s a guaranteed cost of doing business.

Not playing a victim. Just pointing out that the current proposal is all sweet for the Bounty Hunter. There is no cost to them, no impact if they don’t actually carry out the mission, no negative effect whatsoever.

In this proposal there are 3 parties:

Party Negative Positive
Victim Lost ship, possibly lost pod, pays bounty on top of that Sweet revenge?
Criminal Lost ship Loot
Bounty Hunter All fun and no accountability. Multiple kill opportunities and collects bounty

There’s just no downside. For this proposal to work, victims would need to be prevented from just making the killright public (like we could before) otherwise why would you bother paying when you can just make it free. So the victim has to wear additional cost, just so someone else can go play Bounty Hunter with no downside.

So instead of going to the insults, just look at the proposal and see how it is unbalanced in the current form.

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So the only Gankers that repair their sec status are the Tornado station campers. Others just don’t bother, and are freely engageable without going to a bounty agent.

A ganknado is ~$80-120 million ISK.

That’s not a low cost, but the cost for the ganker is irrelevant. This is a proposal I thought, about Bounty Hunting.

What’s the potential downside of this proposal for people wanting to play bounty hunter?

There’s no completely free lunch in EVE, yet in this proposal it currently looks like that.

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I get what you’re saying. I’m just using ganking as an example. This has a cost for the ganker, but also a lot higher reward. They get 50% of loot (on average) which they can scan prior to shooting.
So, they may decide to shoot for 50mil+ profit. And sometimes significantly more.

A bounty hunter only gets base destroyed value from the kill. And loot is probably cheap modules. So seems fairly balanced to me.

One of the biggest arguments against bounty hunting over the years is that it’s pointless due to low payouts.
I don’t see this being too much of a swing in the opposite direction.

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A couple of questions that arise when I read your suggestion:

Why is this new bounty system restricted to gank victims only?

Why can I as a market tycoon or industrialist not put a bounty on one of my competitors? Or to stay within the gank environment: why can I not put a bounty on the scout or looter of the gankers?

Your proposed bounty hunter system is just another layer of complexity on top of the already existing kill right system against gankers.

This makes your bounty system too restrictive and unnecessarily complex.

Again, just because someone didn’t gank doesn’t mean they’re not innocent. The current bounty system allows putting a bounty on anyone. The current kill right system deals with gankers.

Why does the bounty system need to be changed to something that alreasy exists: a second system to deal with gankers?

What if players use this to pay out 100% of destroyed contents, for items that are overvalued by the game and wort a lot less on the market? Whether this happens through price manipulation or by accident, people can turn their worthless items into ISK this way.

Will this bounty kill right expire in 30 days like a normal kill right?
If not, don’t you think this causes issues when people can be killed in high sec for something that happened 10 years ago? For players themselves, who visit high sec once a year, or when selling a character requires ‘no active kill rights’, which means you can now wait 30 days to get rid of them. In your system this could last indefinitively.
If they do expire: why do they expire? Someone paid for that bounty! Seems like a terrible deal to me to pay for bounties if they expire.

I feel like your idea is really lacking, sorry. It’s missing purpose, simplicity and clarity. And it can be abused.