Bounty hunting. That profession that never happened in Eve. It’s time we revisit the idea with some new (ish) mechanics and how they can be used to make Eve grudges much more interesting.
Bounties. Stop piling bounties onto characters like they’re a high score. It clearly does nothing to motivate would-be hunters. Instead, make bounties work more like contracts. Allow players to post a bounty contract complete with an isk balance and a percentage payout. Also specify a minimum kill value. Want to SRP someone ganking that hulk? Put out a bounty of 50 million on a minimum kill of 200 million or more. People can browse the contracts and find suitable targets.
Killrights. In a similar fashion, allow people to browse killrights available to them so they can identify viable targets and hunt them.
Locators. Back when the watch list existed and citadels didn’t, locators were incredibly useful. Today, not so much. You have no way of knowing if a target is online without going to whatever system a locator says they are in to see if they are in local. And even if they are, they could be docked in a citadel, as locators don’t know the difference between being in space or being in citadel. So I propose two additions to locators:
A) Have locator agents inform you if a character is online.
B) Add a check for whether a character is docked in a citadel and tell you they are “docked in a private structure”
Put all this together and you get viable ways for people to identify and hunt targetsby any profitable means, from warfare to ganking to kill right activation.
What makes you think this will be any different than the current system we have now?
You can already do this if you look in your Character sheet.
I don’t see how this makes bounty hunting “viable”. You just replaced a bad system with another bad system and didn’t bother to explain why your new bad system will be better.
Under the current system, when you kill a player with a bounty on them, you get an ISK reward of 10% of the kill value (I think? I haven’t checked lately), assuming the bounty is high enough to cover that amount. With your system, and assuming your example, if you got a kill of under 200mil or over 500mil you’d make less than you would currently. This seems counterproductive.
You can browse killrights that were generated directly against you already. Being able to browse killrights that were made public would be nice.
I fully support your changes A) and B) regarding locator agents.
Bounty Hunting will never be a viable, fully automatic profession like mission running. Any time it becomes profitable, it becomes exploitable with alts. If you want to make money hunting other players, you have to do it through third parties. It’s emergent gameplay.
What makes you think this will be any different than the current system we have now?
It creates a system where a payout can be high enough that creative solutions like ganking become viable. The current bounty system doesn’t do that undermost circumstances.
You can already do this if you look in your Character sheet.
No, you can’t. Public killrights and corp-available killrights aren’t visible. You have to be on grid with a potential target to know they have an accessible killright.
You just replaced a bad system with another bad system and didn’t bother to explain why your new bad system will be better.
It makes bounties and killrights searchable, profitable, and fixes locator agents so that a hunter can actually find targets in a reasonable way. Why wouldn’t it be better?
How exactly would you profit from paying yourself with an alt? The only way to game the system is to attract bounties and manipulate the market enough to trigger overpriced bounty payouts…which to me is an acceptable side effect, as not many people will be able to make such a thing work well enough to consistently profit from it.
I believe the percentage is 20% of the value as calculated by the game. But it’s not particularly important. So the reason I laid it out the way I did was a few things:
To prevent bounty scraping with cheap ships. By being able to set a minimum kill value, you can force them to lose a single expensive ship by setting this as a term of the contract. But that created a small problem, so I needed to further tweak it…
You might want to see a multi-billion isk hauler or mission ship ganked. So if you set a minimum kill value of 2 billion, for example, you might want a billion isk bounty to be paid out for that single kill. Thus, giving you the ability to set a payout percentage. I’d set the minimum at 20% and the maximum at 80%, but if CCP actually ran with this idea they might have considerations beyond what I’ve thought about.
Guess we shouldn’t try to improve anything ever because hey, someone will find a way to abuse it with alts.
Actually, as someone who has abused lots of systems, I’ve given this a fair bit of though and no…you won’t be able to abuse this with alts in a meaningful way. If you think I’m wrong, explain how.
That’s right, everyone is against you and nothing should ever change…
Or your idea is just idea #5643093756039754 on bounties.
Taking away the people who put bounties on themselves, the Vanity Wanted, do you have any clue how much hassle it is to hunt someone who really deserves to be “Wanted” down? Do you think they will be flying solo and there will be a nice fair honorable fight?
Try to at least be realistic, to make it worth it the payout has to be really high and if the payout is really high, it will be exploited.
You clearly don’t understand why a setup that you propose can be so easily abused.
You set a bounty on me. I accept it with an alt. I kill myself and net the bounty.
Wow.
Why should they be?
If they were made public, you’ll see them when you select the individual.
It wouldn’t make sense to have just a huge list of everyone in the game with an active Killright on them, especially since people come and go, stop playing, stay docked, etc. It would just be a cluttered mess.
Searchable, how? By character name? Are we going to give even more free intel by letting you search for people in a particular system with bounties?
I’ve already addressed the “profitable” part, so I’m going to ignore that.
I don’t see what the issue with Locator agents are right now. You don’t need to know granular detail such as “Is in a citadel or not”.
Beyond all the problem here, you fail to understand why the bounty system fundamentally doesn’t work in a video game like EVE Online where people can respawn with zero consequences.
Ah, ok. I do listen to that but not religiously. I’ll check that episode out. So in light of info I retract my “welcome back” and simply nod in greeting.
I set a bounty on you with a 50% payout. You accept it with an alt, kill yourself, and get…50% of your lossmail at most. That plus insurance MIGHT net a marginal profit with the right T1 ship, but it’s hardly an economic boon. There’s a reason I specified the adjustable percentage. I thought this through.
Understand that I’m someone who has been semi-famous for having been involved in multiple mechanical abuses in this game. I’ve given this a fair bit of consideration on how to structure it in a way that it is hard for people to simply pocket their own bounties.
Which is problematic, in that YOU HAVE TO BE ON GRID WITH SOMEONE to know they have a killright. The idea is to make hunting specific players a more viable activity. Give us the ability to get a list of accessible kill rights and more ships blow up, more people pay consequences for their actions, and Eve is more dynamic. I don’t really see a downside here.
Killrights last 30 days. That’s about the only response this needs.
Searchable by “show me a list of killrights with x value”. Let me then do the intel beyond that (which is why I propose the improvements to locator agents).
Then you don’t use them nearly as often as I do. I have a dedicated locator character that uses 27 agents. I have a number of people I regularly run locate and scout services for (my corp refers to it as my “concierge locator service”) and deal with dozens of locates on a daily basis. They’re not nearly as useful as they once were, and the ability to tell if a potential target is online AND in space would do a lot to get people interested in them again.
Do I have any clue how much hassle it is to hunt someone? I’ve been known to run scouts 30+ jumps to put eyes on a wartarget mining in a solo barge, then show up and kill them once I confirmed they were in space. Hunting is what I love to do in Eve. I will stake out targets for days waiting for opportunities to hit them. Zkill is down right now, but look up a corp called GARSA to see what I did to them over the course of a few weeks of ganking and wardecs.
That’s part of the fun of hunting. What good would it be if there weren’t risk? And who’s to say the hunter has to be alone?
It depends on the target, what they fly, et cetera. One thing I’m particularly thinking of is ways to deal with the locust fleets that are hitting some Athanor belts in highsec. They show up with a bunch of not-war-eligible miners and mine out the belt someone else invested a few billion isk to produce. The only recourse CCP gives you to deal with such behavior is ganking. I’ve taken commissions to gank some of these people before. Being able to set bounties on each character in such a way that a gank fleet is effectively SRPed would be a great motivator for hitting those targets.
A system like this would create more tangible consequences for behavior. The idea is to build new ways to prompt action.
