Does anybody take the bounty system seriously? I know it was changed a few years ago to reduce exploiting (ie… popping your ship with an alt and collecting reward) but there has to be a way to make it better. Some re-work ideas:
All bounties become ‘personal’ that only specific pilots or corporations are authorized to perform. 1 day, 3 day, 1 week durations. It requires collecting and turning in the corpse of the pilot for the payout to transfer. The bounty issuer can specify additional payouts for speed of kill, estimated market value of the kill within a certain threshold, and amount of kills/corpses collected within the set duration. ‘Bounty hunting’ status tab is added to info panel on characters and corporations so others can see how successful your bounty hunting career is along with how much you’ve claimed.
Add structure bounties. Successfully kill this structure within 1 month (or some duration) and receive a payout. The bounty issuer can put out a public request and corporations will bid on the highest price they require to complete it. The bounty issuer can choose who gets the bounty contract at the end of the bidding process.
If a player has an active bounty on him and you’re not involved in collecting that bounty, you can see via the info tab who is hunting him and for how much. If involved you will see the current stats of the bounty collection in the info tab.
Maybe even add “bounty hunting” as a skill so a player can get 1-5 (and maybe advanced bountyhunting for even more simultanous bounty contracts). Maybe link it with killrights? …
I am going to have to strongly disagree here. The issue with bounties is that you get a % of the bounty so people don’t take it seriously.
What needs to happen is like any IRL “bounty hunting” if you catch the suspect and hand him over, you get paid. I would say that if you can “pod” someone with a bounty, get his corpse and hand it in to a concord station, you should be paid the full bounty on his head.
I agree but in a game like this, it is very hard to design a system in which the bounty area can be defined by positive action against players with bounties.
In a game where people are effectively immortal and have alts, the whole concept of a bounty is inherently flawed.
Any system, no matter how complicated you make it, where it is possible to profit off a bounty means it’s possible for someone to profit off a bounty placed on himself by having his own alt shoot him. This leaves you with two options:
Bounties are useless
Bounties are an ISK donation to the person bountied
The idea with personal bounties is to reduce the alt-killing exploit instead of global bounties that can go on for many months until the bountee decides to have his alt pop him and claim billions. So if a guy issues a bounty against his alt, he could kill it but there wouldn’t be any real reward other than fake-boosting his bounty stats since the money transferred to his alt would be out of his own wallet anyways.
The only real way to scam it is to convince others to place bounties on that alt too within the short contract period. So a jita scammer or ganker might be able to rack up some okay bounties within a 1 week period but nothing like the payouts that build over a long period of time like the current system.
In other words you want a killright for ISK? Like all the other bounty rework suggestions? Well, tough luck. Because that means you have to limit bounties to people who have committed a crime (gone criminal flagged or have a security status below -5) according to gameplay mechanics, which in turn puts severe limits on who you can bounty. If you do not do that, you would open up a can of worms to bounty and give those people a killright on their head for no reason whatsoever in terms of game mechanics, which is just terrible.
The current system means that in order to earn the full bounty, the target must lose 10x the value of the bounty. So yes, you can remove the bounty with an alt, but it will cost you 10x the bounty so you’re doing it at a loss. That’s an effective safeguard against the target essentially stealing the bounty from the issuer as happened before.
Paying the full bounty over a free clone in a free capsule isn’t exactly a sensible thing to do (and it took just 6 years for CCP to figure this out).
The bottom line is the system is floored, there is no way a system like this can work without players abusing it, if the Eve Online players did not find ways to abuse each new mechanic, CCP would have a much easier time of it. You have only yourselves to blame
And what restriction are you putting in place to stop someone just placing a bounty on any random person they want so people can kill them?
Because without a killright this system doesn’t work anyway as you have no way of killing them, if placing the bounty grants a killright then it will be exploited and abused, so either way your idea has already failed
Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that bounties, like FW is just one of those aspects of Eve that is never going to work well or feel good. There is no way To come at it to eliminate all the loopholes without making it pointless.
I can’t think of any ideas where bounties would not become exploitable, outside of the current system that is essentially worthless other than seeing how hated (or loved) somebody is.
