you’re free to think that
profit does not always = fun
especially in EVE where people have been in huge battles and lost but had fun because of the people they fly with.
no system maybe perfect, but i am confident with enough constructive feed back of people voicing their opinions and ideas and actively building towards a workable idea something can be achieved.
if you never get off the couch to get a soda, you’ll never actually get a soda.
A bounty system where any one player can put a bounty on any other player to encourage bounty hunters to kill the target would be nice.
Sadly it’s hard to come up with a system that is rewarding enough for bounty hunters to hunt, while at the same time not abusable with friends or alts taking the bounty.
i agree none the less i have attempted to suggest above
like i said before by tweeking the current system
the idea which i was working with for the inital conception was along the lines of anyone can place a bounty on anyone else,
Bounty Hunters can then request the kill rights against the people with bounties on their heads
putting in place certain elements or factors
such as standings requirements and cool down timers.
this would help reduce the amount of alt spamming which is currently involved in bounty hunting.
with alt spamming reduced it allows for players with genuine interest in this activity to get involved in bounty hunting.
I agree, however with my suggestions, it would reduce the level a person could abuse the system.
out of corp haulers won’t make for good bounty hunters, and it would restrict in corp alts / corp mates / alliance mates from claiming the bounty on you, because that would be a conflict of interest. if you were to leave a corp or alliance to help clear said bounty,
i would recommend some kind of system in the back ground where anyone who was blue or green to you within the last 30 days would still suffer a time factor upon requesting kill rights, which would be the same as if you were still flying with them, this time factor can then be further reduced as time goes on. which means if you have a spy who steals some stuff, it is then worth putting a bounty on their heads or getting in touch with bounty hunters, because they wouldn’t even be safe hiding in NPC corporations
because with requestable kill rights, you can single out individual targets no matter where they are.
on the subject of bounty payouts.
and I do believe in having better payouts as i mentioned above
but with the right approach towards kill rights.
being able to request kill rights and having a finacial cap implemented for activating kill rights. solves some big problems already.
with better pay outs, if someone has a large bounty on their head they’ll try and fly smaller ships but with a different approach towards payout calculations, it could still be worth killing a player even in a shuttle or an ibis. it then comes down to who is elidgible for it.
if you have an alt, you still need to wait a minimum of 24 hours
if you put in place other aspects such as bounty hunters needing a set security status, or standings with perhaps a specific bounty agent, then this makes it more difficult for people to achieve untill they create a bounty hunting alt, but at which point you have in fact solidified bounty hunting as an active profession within the game. at least more so than it currently is.
with all this in mind, i know that this may not be a perfect solution, but i do feel that it does genuinely take things more towards the right direction of having bounty hunting exisit with the game.
Thank you, and to address your concern regarding the standings proposal and existing corpses, they could retroactively remove existing corpses or bar corpses prior to the implementation of the system from being redeemable (expired, like boosters).
The major reason for implementing the standing system for scaling rewards is to ensure that people following this professionally remain spread out, rather than sticking to trade hubs or popular systems. This is designed PRIMARILY to discourage camping of specific players, but also would help ensure that bounty hunting remains a primarily nomadic profession.
Part of the issue that other player-focused professions in the game have is that their income or activity is static; whether that’s because the anoms or agents they farm or in a specific area, or they like camping or defending a particular pipe. Having a truly nomadic profession would mean that their income isn’t bound to a location, and that their legwork is rewarded in the same way that market diligence rewards traders, or mastering target priority rewards abyssal runners. Everything about it is focused on rewarding actual player activity, both to discourage alt farming and to promote active engagement in hunting other players.
wouldn’t this only go to upset and cause out cry from the existing corpse collectors of the game?
people take great pride in their collections after all, if you collected baseball cards and had a substancial set which might not be worth anything of specific value but has value to you, then someone came along and burnt them and thus made them pop out of existance, i think players would feel strongly against this.
however baring all corpses before a specific date would probably work the best for this.
my idea is that you get a bounty pay out only though a limited timer engagement, so even if you were in null sec you’d have to activate a kill right.
Destroy the ship → get a nice payout.
Destroy The Pod → get a bonus based off your inital pay out
I can see perhaps “Destroy The Corpse → better pay out”
when it comes to dealing with the corpses for bounty targets. i do think there is merit to the idea of using them, it would simply just come down to what would be the best way to do something with it.
an alternate example instead of destroying the corpse, you could collect it and turn it in to the bounty office once you have docked in a station. perhaps regardless of the system status or the targets standings a flat fee could be paid to the hunter.
an interesting point.
Given the nature of bounty hunting wouldn’t it be better to use the system security status instead of it being in terms of a targets specific personal standings.
If bounty pay outs to be more profitable depending on system security, this way 1.0 systems and primary trade hubs would then pay LESS and would theoretically have less bounty hunters because of the pay out factor.
this style of approach could fit in quite nicely with some of the current ratting or bounty changes being made in game at the moment, i forget how those mechanics work off the top of my head to further accurately comment on them, but having perhaps a payout done on a system security basis it then will naturally push bounty hunters towards, low, null, J-space & T-space.
again there is merit to this but if your target has a good standing with one group over another, you then have to spend time or money moving a body for a better pay out.
I did truly like the bounty office because it was always available to you, even in space. i think there is something worth exploring regarding your ideas to find that ideal middle ground for bounty hunters.
part of my goal was to make it so that the more effective you are as a bounty hunter, the better you’re paid.
well with the ore changes and the ratting changes which exisit in the game, having more active players for professions i believe is ultimately changing anyway, making all professions nomadic by default, following on from the concept of using a system security status vs pay outs for bounty hunters, i feel this would nicely push them towards being more nomadic.
i do sincerely agree that bounty hunters should be nomadic, it is within the very nature of the profession to go outside of a normal juristiction to retrieve goods or fugatives. but it does add more flavour to the “lets go get our target” approach to the style of game play and if it fits the nature of what bounty hunting is, then i am all for it.
And none of this stops abusing it with an alt. And bounties once again become giving money to the ganker. Like they used to be.
Good job…
I made a clear case for why it stops alt abuse; if people are willing to put in the time and effort to grind sec and take the hit to their wallet, then they’re going to be taking a huge hit to their returns compared to hunting normally. Can you elaborate on what in particular you’re confused about?
Multiple issues with your idea.
Why is your bounty system only allowing people with positive security standing and are you excluding part of the playerbase?
How will the game calculate a maximum value based on ‘personally lost value’ when the lost value is, say, opportunity cost of unsold items undercut by your competitor on the market? Or any other grievances that you may have with the bounty target that are not expressable by lost value?
How does ‘maintain a positive standing’ stop your alts from killing you for the bounty in situations where there is no standing loss to killing the bounty target? (Such as any kill outside high sec ganks)
I can sell corpses of myself to bounty hunters so they get more reward that they can split with me? Nice.
(Blah bla more corpses and standings.)
Your idea will be very restrictive to users, yet easily abused. People will be restricted by security status, standings and specific amounts lost before they can put a bounty on targets restricted by more rules. After that abusing the bounty payout with alts, as well as working together with the bounty hunter for extra payout is as easy as ever.
Please go back to the drawing board and keep it simple, accessible and be more creative when you think of ways your idea could be abused.
I agree, removing player agency may be the way to create a functional bounty system.
I think you are removing the player agency at the wrong spot in the chain though - placing bounties on anyone is the base of this system, without that, what is the point? Concord already exists to punish people according to NPC rules, as well ad the faction police for standings.
Bounties should be free for the players to choose. That means we need to remove player agency elsewhere: I believe that one way to stop alt abuse is to make bounty target selection random.
My proposed bounty system - random target selection:
*Bounty hunting should destroy value, not create value or people will inevitably abuse it. The maximum value of the reward is therefore limited by the value of the destroyed items minus insurance. This is why I propose that insurance companies do not pay out to players losing ships to bounties, similar to deaths to Concord - to increase the potential bounty payout.
Currently the payout is a fraction of this, because it is easy to claim bounties and insurances exist. With randomized appointed targets and no insurance, I think the rewards could be increased a lot - without extra possibilities for abuse - to make bounty hunting worthwile.
The targets are appointed to hunters, so that they actually get a target to hunt. Currently most of my bounty payouts were from random people who just happened to have a bounty on them… so much for bounty hunting! Assign bounty hunters a target that they can stalk, and we’ll see actual hunting! 
The targets are randomized, with new selections over time or for a fee. Randomization will make it less likely that people get their alt or friend as target, which by itself doesn’t stop alt abuse, but makes it very inconvenient. This, in addition to keeping the rewards limited to destroyed value means it’s hard to make this consistently profitable for targets who work together with hunters.
Because of randomization, there will be no reliable way to get rid of an unwanted bounty. As it will now be hard to get rid of a bounty intentionally, I would like to see an NPC service to do that, for a steep price of multiple times the bounty value. Safety comes at a price! Also ISK sink.
I intentionally did not add any kill rights or other extra complications: if you as bounty hunter want to kill a high sec hauler, you better be prepared for a suicide gank, or select another target!
Example:
Welcome to the bounty agency, what can I do for you?
A. I would like to hunt.
B. I would like to discuss this bounty on my head.
C. I would like an update on the whereabouts of my targets.
You currently have 0 targets. We have the following targets available for you:
1. 1000000000 bounty, Gallente Male with sec status 5, last seen in null sec.
2. 2000000 bounty, Amarr Female with sec status 2-3, last seen in high sec.
3. 323500000 bounty, Amarr Male with sec status -2- 0, last seen unknown.
4. 999999999 bounty, Caldari Male, sec satus <-4, last seen in high sec.
-(a couple more entries)-
You have selected 1. Your target is Gerard Amatin, currently residing in GE-8JV, Catch.
You currently have 1 target, would you like to select an additional target from this list for XXXX ISK?
Yes
No
Or would you like to see another selection for XXXXXXX ISK?
Yes
No
Good luck, and if you need another update of their location, I can supply those for a discount!
Welcome back to the bounty agency, what can I do for you?
A. I would like to hunt.
B. I would like to discuss this bounty on my head.
C. I would like an update on the whereabouts of my targets.
Your current bounty is 100.000.000, we do have connections that may be able to make that bounty disappear… for a small fee.
1. Pay 1.000.000.000 ISK (10x bounty)
2. Do not pay.
Your current bounty is 0 ISK. Pleasure doing business!
Nothing you’ve listed stops any alt abuse or is any kind of hardship.
A 4.0 sec status is trivial to have, and isn’t going to be any kind of hit to their returns.
Doesn’t work. There is no meaningful way to reliably hunt a random target. And the system is game-able multiple ways.
That’s a short answer, I’d like to hear more.
There are multiple ways to hunt a randomly assigned target and mind you, you can choose from a selection of random targets so you can skip the ones that you dislike (for example - high sec positive security status target may require a suicide gank, wormhole space target will require some other skills).
And yes, I can imagine that even if the system only assigns players that are currently online and undocked, you aren’t guaranteed a fight. They may log off before you reach them, have a defense fleet, be docked up all day or cloaked, etc.
About gaming the system: any system can be gamed. We just need to make sure that the incentive to game it is low and that the optimal way to make money is the way you intended the feature to be used.
I do see how people can ‘game’ my system by creating a chat for bounty targets and randomly assigned hunters to circumvent part of the inconvenience caused by the randomisation, but inconvenience is not the only way I try to reduce gaming the system.
I also see how people can turn ships they no longer need into ISK through this system, but that again requires a bounty target to find a randomly assigned hunter, which means extra effort due to the randomisation. Maybe in some niche cases that’s an easier option to turn a ship to ISK rather than sell it.
Also, if there are any items with a much higher in-game price than their actual market worth, this system would allow people to turn those items into more cash than selling the items. I admit this is a weakness of this bounty system (or any bounty system based on destroyed value), but can partially be solved by monitoring the payout % for destroyed items. If certain items are new and/or very unreliable with their price versus market worth, put those items in a category that pays out significantly less or nothing at all.
I’m sure there may be more ways to game my proposed system to a certain extent, but I’d like to hear from you if there is one that I missed that makes my bounty system easily game-able?
Not if their timezone doesn’t match yours.
And if timezone matching is implemented, leave your alt from below logged in while you are at work.
And I mean, I’m pretty sure all my chars have a bounty on them for random reasons like being in a particular system at the wrong time.
Also you can flood the system with thousands of bounties that never log in so you can never get a real target.
Or just use your market alts to flood the system if there is a log in limit added…
So the odds of finding a viable target that suits you is basically zero.
Edit; And if you have to have the bounty from the system to get any payout, then it makes it pretty much pointless to place bounties as they’ll never get claimed opportunistically like they do currently.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough.
You don’t get assigned a completely random bounty target, you get assigned an active bounty target.
Define active, and it’s now gameable.
Like I said, anything is gameable, but as long as there is no big incentive to do so, those systems do not get gamed.
Let’s say you get assigned someone from a pool of people who have some or multiple of the following characteristics:
You could then indeed start gaming the system as bounty target by doing your high risk hauling at a time of the day that you usually are not online, to reduce the risk that a bounty hunter is assigned to you right now. You could also do that haul right after you’ve logged in, to reduce the risk that a bounty hunter has been assigned to you after you logged in because you were active.
But do I care about that part of ‘gaming the system’? No, I would love to see people be smart about outplaying the bounty hunter agency. And eventually you’ll get caught by a bounty hunter who logged off yesterday who still has you assigned and notices you fly with an expensive haul right after you log in, because their bounty hunter agency told them you are online and in space right now.
I’d love for this system to be gamed and that the smart bounty targets survive longer.
Of course, you could also mean a more boring version of gaming this system, where you just keep a bounty target logged in and docked all day to mess with people’s target lists. No profit for either party, yay, you earned so much by gaming the system! /s
unfortunately the thing with the OP, is that if you can place a bounty of anyone for any reason and with his system Hunters can engage targets freely without Concord consequence…then whelp, bye bye Freighter Pilots and the like…its abusable and gameable…without removing the ability of players to place bounties on each other.
so a lot has been said on this post all of which is very interesting and indecently things i have made an active attempt to cover with my suggested changes above, so I’m going to go through the posts and respond to things as best as i can for this. so i will use the @ feature to address people and try to quote as best as i can to make sure my post is applicable as possible.
@Catherine_Laartii unfortunately I do have to agree with the response here on the thread, about how there would be easier exploits and such, however as mentioned i do think there could be something merit worthy within the ideas you have if approached in a different way.
@All
with that being said, within the thread when people have spoken about the system and removing player agency but taking it away at a different point, i do genuinely believe that a bounty hunting system is in fact 100% do-able if approached in the right way.
and as i have said before (and if not then i apologies for not being clear) my suggestions are to take the system which is already in place in the game and tweak it to create something more solid for a small demographic in the game, the current system 100% didn’t work, but if we can get something to at least a 75% functionality, then we have something more solid to work with, this then eliminated the amount of problems and makes fixing things easier, its my suggestion that we first get to that 75% and then fix the left over issues.
I agree with increasing the pay out
I agree with there being some kind of bounty agent or agency (my thinking was to just use the bounty office for this and have a contact through that window)
you have actually contradicted yourself within your posts to some small level, i mention this not as a way of berating you on this threat (as i do welcome your input and thoughts) but i would further ask for some clarification, i will quote the specific sections in question which may not include the whole sentence, so this is just for my own personal clarification.
my thinking on this is that if a player should choose their bounties / targets why would it be randomised.
I do appreciate the fact that actually it is meant to reduce the chances of getting one of your alts which may have a bounty for example and reading your posts you do state you can cycle through the ones you don’t want. but the two ideas seem to conflict. by this logic also couldn’t you just keep cycling through until you get an alt?
however with that being said I do disagree with random targets even if they are active. (i will circle back to this shortly)
Bounty pay out only happens to bounty hunters with the destroyed target on their bounty list - split among them
this is something i tried to make clear in my initial post, my thinking was that you need to have a target on a target list and you also have to use the limited engagement timer.
@All
as it stands in terms of the server stress load, the game mechanics operate under the fact anything which generates a kill mail gives you a bounty pay out, this is sometimes turned off during big fleet battles.
although i like the ideas of your randomisation sadly i feel this wouldn’t work, you have mentioned about a random active target, but this then means massive data mining and storage from CCP which is then put back into the game, through numbers and statistics for random chance. ultimately @Nevyn_Auscent is right. because this system doesn’t actually solve any of the existing problems, it really just sort of adds more to the burning pile of issues this profession currently has.
@all / @Gerard_Amatin
so circling back to my point of randomisation being a bad idea, this is why i came up with not only the target list but the kill right requests. in my system (and I again apologies if I’ve not made this clear in my previous posts) a bounty hunter can fly around, BH finds a person with a nice bounty on them, they open the bounty office and request the target (This takes 24 hours to happen)
the bounty hunter then needs to also request kill rights on their target This Also Takes a Further 24 Hours
Kill rights are granted and thus available under the existing rules and system in game.
the Bounty Hunter then after having to patiently waited, finally can track and get this target.
they activate the kill rights, get a limited engagement timer, BH wins the fight and gets paid (and paid a better amount then currently in place)
The Bounty Hunter if they choose too, can then request a kill right on this target again. this again takes 24 hours to occur
this grants the bounty hunter the ability to track their own targets or pick people who are in space who happen to randomly be flying by or in a system.
(however this does not always have to be the case, a further timer could be added onto of say +3 hours each time you make a request for as long as the target is on your list. this is just an after thought however but the idea here would be to give the player, who has been victim of bounty hunting a chance to recoup losses, move location or do something else to evade the bounty hunter.)
the target can be removed from your list manually and also equally will be removed from your target list once their bounty has been reduced to 0
your thoughts on randomisation have been interesting to read and have made me further re-think my “conflict of interest idea” initially the idea was that it would simply just take longer to request the target / kill rights on said target, this was to prevent people from just killing corp or alliance mates and getting the payout to fund their war efforts but to also give the sense of a bounty hunter could turn up and get their target. so instead of their being a further delayed timer.
I am now thinking that anyone who is blue to you should be immediately black listed from your target list, making it so you cannot request kill rights from friendly s at all, this then means if you’re going to pew a blue, you’re just an awoxing asshole, because that all awoxing is, being an asshole.
i still feel that players or corps who leave corporations and alliances respectfully should in fact be given some kind of breathing period before a bounty hunter from that corp / alliance can engage them.
my thoughts on this would be maybe some kind of cool down period, as a bounty hunter you could perhaps request the target (providing there is a bounty on their heads), but not request the kill right.
this would not apply for to people who are kicked, they would by default be subject to the same bounty hunting rules as everyone else.
you could also make it so people on the blacklist you equally cannot put a bounty on this would stop people internally putting bounties on each other. meaning both the source of the income and the bounty hunter are going to be from two separate sources.
@Max_Deveron / @all
people have consistently said that my suggestions allow people to engage targets freely without concord consequence
to an extent this is correct, however it cannot be a consistent, repeated or instantaneous effect, as i have mentioned above, the concept i am trying to get across is that there should be a timer implemented for target requests and also kill right requests, once a kill right is used, you then need to spend 24 hours waiting for another one. the idea behind this was to help with the idea of that bounty hunters are Nomadic in their nature and would move on to the next target, this is also so people don’t get hell camped into stations afraid to go outside because “there is a bounty hunter right there who’s after me”
and take away from player enjoyment of the game, it also grants the ability that anyone could be a bounty hunter
If you have a bounty on your head its probably because you’ve pissed someone off or done something to deserve it.
honestly the fastest solution to this would be to simply exempt all freighters from being engaged under these rules within high sec.
This could be because simply, freighters do not have any means to defend themselves, but the same could be argued for many non combat ships and like I said before, if you make a rule for one you need to make a rule for all.
this does then mean that unfortunately within the whole bounty hunting demographic of viable targets, aka people with bounties on their heads, that freighter pilots would be the worse off. that thin layer of protection from concord which shields freighter pilots in high sec, really does make all the difference.
the only thing i can truly think of would be the integration of a bounty hunting agent as previously mentioned, the idea would be that you have to gain standings to operate in different security status’s of space, this does take away some of the intention of what it means to be a bounty hunter as the very nature of it, is to go outside of the normal jurisdiction a group or agency might have.
but with this in mind, this means you could freely hunt in null and low sec to begin with, you then accumulate standings by hunting down active targets till you gain a 10.0 standings meaning you can hunt in 1.0 systems.
working the same way as the triglavian standings with the introduction of pochven
this would by default immediately protect freighter pilots in high sec and cause a delay from when the changes are implemented in game to when a pilot can hunt in high sec.
however i do feel this would take away the very nature of the type of role you’re trying to provide to that player base.
as i mentioned before the veil of protection being concord or nothing is actually very thin and basically makes all the difference.
It might be possible that with the introduction of the new phoenix modules in the game
(bare in mind i am not 100% familiar with how they work)
these modules could be introduced for Freighters
(perhaps as rigs? again i don’t know how they actually work in game)
or Freighters could under go a redesign in game where such a module would become part of the ships very construction. with this in mind the scenario of a bounty hunter showing up, engage the freighter and blow it up, getting paid and leaving and then the freighter would reform with 100% of its cargo. you could then have in place a rule saying if the ship has used a phoenix module, it cannot be engaged a second time by the same pilot for an additional 24 hours on top of the standard 24 hour kill right request (making it now 48 hours)
again I do stress I don’t actually know how these phoenix modules work however this would help not only aid in freighter pilots lower their bounties by being blown up, but it further would mitigate the risk to some extent, but if you have a high enough bounty, its likely there are many hunters coming after you, in such a scenario unfortunately the loss of assets is inevitable.
I have also entertained the idea of being able to pay off your bounty, this would give you a chance at the very least to reduce it. if you could not 100% clear it, this again be available through the bounty office.
my thoughts when designing this were to not only encapsulate the intended feel and style of game play which was advertised by CCP for bounty hunting from their trailers.
(which i spam watched till i was dreaming i was watching them)
but to keep true to the nature of bounty hunting and additionally take the system which is already in place, then make tweaks to it, rather than having the developers coding a whole new system. in the aspects of game development its easier to make corrective tweaks to something already in place in the game, then it is to rip it out and start over from scratch.
I admit there are some extras within my suggestions but they are intended for the purpose of solidifying the demographic of that game play style which there is a demand for.
not everyone likes the idea of bounty hunting in the game and for this people naturally just call for its removal, people are very cynical and critical and only complain about how things don’t work and yet offer no ideas of their own to make it a viable play style for people in the game. I feel the idea’s i’ve put forward are all things considered pretty good, as i mentioned in the initial post, I’ve had some good feed back from people and spoken to a member of CCP then waited some time to post.
with the current state of the game, assuming these suggestions are the new ground work. perhaps its not the system which needs to change, like i said i know its not flawless, but it is at least much more workable then what existed before.
with freighter pilots being at such a huge risk for as long as a bounty is on their head, they’re likely to experience having a bounty or no bounty at all depending on total amount of assets lost, this would mean perpetual grinding for replacing a ship.
ideas to fix this are like i said above, perhaps freighters could have mandatory phoenix modules installed on them or granted a phoenix ability. perhaps you keep the ship but still loose items at 50% drop rate as per the game norm, this would mean a failed contract but you could still take a new one on and your bounty would be cleared or several reduced.
perhaps a new game feature such as “phoenix insurance” instead of a specific ship feature could exist where anyone could have their ship insured and without any module installed on thier ship, have it reform in space after its blown up, then you just have it so you cannot engage this person again during the same limited timer engagement.
or simply you can pay a higher insurance premium to mitigate the cost of your loss.
all of which could be available through the insurance window.
perhaps some kind of over shield module which runs off of strontium for example or fuel blocks. similar to the PANIC module for Rorquals this way if you’re flying from gate to gate and a bounty hunter tries to stop you, you could at least allow the bounty hunter to run out of ammo and allow you to jump through the next gate, allowing you some time to escape.
perhaps these modules or systems could have in place some kind of recoverable ISK limit, when it falls below the value amount of your ship, you then loose your ship.
again i stress i don’t truthfully know how these modules even work, so that’s just a spit ball idea there, but rather than trying to further tweak the ideas to make them 100% flawless, because everything has an exploit in it somewhere. we could just put in place certain things to help those in the most heavily effected demographics.
this would allow bounty hunters to pew, get paid and people to keep their ship. and entertains the approach of “this is good but because of this one overlap the whole thing needs to be thrown out”
how about we entertain the idea of “what could further be implemented to support players who would suffer the most”
instead of making something work, it allows for a creation of a mitigated risk factor.
additionally the idea of “Phoenix Insurance” would be a great idea for bounty hunters who would have to travel long ways to get certain targets and thus are putting their own assets at risk.
the technology to an extent does already exist in game, so it would just come down to finding a workable way of making it a reality, I’m sure there would be something exploitable in this too however, but again it does take us towards an approach of “instead of fixing this idea, lets look at how we elevate the problem from other pilots”
because every time you undock in eve you are already at risk.
I understand how that may have caused confusion!
I mean that players are free to choose who they put a bounty on, or the value of that bounty (just like now), not that they are free to choose who to kill for a bounty. Players will get randomly assigned a selection of bounty targets to hunt.
I really don’t think it is a good idea to be able to get a kill right on anyone this way.
That’s silly, no matter the time delay. Anyone showing an expensive ship in high sec will have 15 ‘bounty hunters’ after them 24h later, every day, until they move out of high sec or quit.
hey dude, thanks for clarifying, i do like what you’ve said but the concept of random is unfortunately like i said before not very practical, you would have to spam talking to the agent to get a target, this also requires a lot of constant database building based off data in the game from the developers, its easier to just allow a player to pick a target.
this is where conflict of interest would play in to it, you cannot select a target or get kill rights for people you personally have put bounties on, this unfortunately doesn’t stop it from happening with people and alts. the alt sets the bounty, you then get the target and kill right.
the only thing i can think of is to remove the aspect of it being repeatable, so you’d get the target, then the kill right, get one kill, then honestly, i think have a 30 day cool down on that target, this prevents the problem of it being game-able, it would allow other bounty hunters to have a go also, instead of 24 hour rinse and repeat, as a bounty hunter to prevent it from being abused or game able or exploited or whatever you want to call it, a rule of thumb is that bounty hunters can not engage the same pilot within 30 days and receive a bounty payment. this would mean you could take bounties again corps and alliances and once you get one pilot, you move onto the next within that same group.
so to sum up regarding your points.
Pro: it means a 3rd party has to come and deal with that pilot for that sweet sweet ISK
Con: nothing stopping you using an alt.
Pro: actively prevents people exploiting what i’ve suggested by using alts to get bounty payment
Con: none come to mind.
why should you be concorded for doing your job?
if we’re going to entertain bounty hunting as a profession / sub profession in this game it has to be viable in all regions of space, just like combat, mining, scanning, salvaging and everything else.
you don’t get concorded for mining or salvaging do you?
granted this allows it but in a limited sense. perhaps once per 24 hours, given the natural influx of bounty hunters which would occur might not be long enough, so 30 days could become a factor as i suggested above, this way you would have to hunt bigger and better game such as whole corps in lower security space.
Pro: allows bounty hunters to operate in high sec and limits spam killing of players or using alts
Cons: going to hurt some players more than others.
however like i said in my post above, there is nothing stopping other game play factors from being put into the game to help mitigate some of that frustration of grief, such as defensive low slot modules or rigs for freighters or perhaps some kind of phoenix insurance to allow your ship to reform in space after some combat. this would take that thin veil of protection and allow players in freighters to have on some level a bit more than wafer thin concord only defence against bounty hunters.