Bounty Hunting 2.0

How many alts does Kusion have again? And they only have to use them one or two at a time now, not 30 at a time. There is no realistic way this can be balanced.

It’s indeed easier to allow players to pick a target, but I intebtionally made it ‘choose from random list’ to make it more inconvenient for people who want to choose their friend or alt.

Most, if not all players have alts. This does not work.

this is only one extreme case not everyone is packing alts like that.

well they’d have to repeatedly log in and out, honestly they only reason why people like Kusion have so many alts is to make players like you cry

not unless CCP start limiting how many alts a person can have logged in at once.

if its easier for people to just select their own targets then do it that way.

regarding alts it easily reduces the level it would be exploited. honestly this is more of a problem on CCP’s part for allowing people to have alt accounts like that kuison, when resources were bountiful people wanted second accounts to help mine and do industry or rat and salvage to maximise isk per hout, the problem is, this became the social norm for the game when it really shouldn’t of been. the idea of corporations and alliances coming together is to achieve things greater than the sum of its parts, the fact people got to a point where they could happily, easily and comfortably mine and build capitals by running 5 accounts honestly is just a joke, training toons for specific roles other than having multiple people work together, which is why i personally like the ecosystem changes to the game, because it makes it not cost effective for people to run that many toons for such little reward. bolstering solo players with cross trained skills, which was i believe the inital conception for the game anyway.

when you consider the fact that when CCP did a study on what caused people to stay in the game, the feed back was they found social player environments.

so when you have a corp of several multiboxers who aren’t working together and just doing their own thing under the same flag it defeats the very point of the game

so on the factor of alts, other than having long target lists and such vast player vs player cool downs, if you really want to be that petty where you keep making alts just to do this one thing, then honestly you’re not really playing the game you’re just grinding like you have OCD, if this one factor truly becomes such a soley determined aspect of your game play where you make accounts constantly and wait 2 days just to get your own bounty, then i really think that says something more about the caliber and quality of player which play the game rather than the capabilities of the game developers. or those contributing to having a play style which is in demand established into the game.

unless some kind of limit is put in place on how many clients you can run at a time. there isn’t anything which can truly be done about it, regarding all aspects of the game, alts are used to exploit every factor anyway, so if we have achieved a final point now of the only issue with this is the same issue as any other profession in the game of “people use alts” because ya know, people use alts for mining, ratting, salvaging, have research alts, refining alts, foreman alts.
well… i don’t really see the problem because its a problem which already effects every other aspect of the game.
the best way to deal with this would be to have the blacklist option, because people do have their alts in the same corporations, under the blacklist (conflict of interest) idea above would be to move your alts out.

which origonally I had thought 30 days for
so your alt gets a bounty, you quit the corp, wait 30 days, wait 2 more days, kill the alt and have to wait 30 + days again and rinse and repeat and the whole time you’re going to be denying content for yourself because your alt won’t be in the same corp or you’re hogging your own bounty.

honestly if thats how YOU choose to play the game, thats on YOU.
you would in turn would not be playing the game. because honestly if you’re that focused on clearing your own bounty yourself. all you’re doing is content denying for bounty hunters and people with genuine interest in that demographic.

which in my opinion go right ahead and do that.

the demographic of the game would be
total number of toons
% of those toons have bounties
% of those bounties are inactive
% of the remaining group are pewing each other with alts
leaving a final % genuine targets including big game targets such as corps and alliances.

so if you want to run around chase your own tail. feel free.

They don’t need to be logged in at once. Set a bounty and log off.
Every account has 3 characters and it’s free to make new accounts. Even though I rarely play with most, I have over 10 characters, in some cases just because I enjoyed making a new portrait, or for some very niche uses like when I needed a high sec bashing character right after the abandoned structures update.

Setting a bounty on another player restricted per character would be such a niche use and there is nothing stopping players from creating extra characters to do so.

A limit of ‘once per character’ is worth nothing in this context.

exactly, its not really then an issue within the realm of how bounty hunting mechanics interact on a player to player basis in game, its more a case of how the players interact with the game, if players are going to spam make accounts to claim bounties on their own toons, then let them chase their tails, their eve life is going to be rather unproductive and not very interesting.

Not even that would work.
Day 1, place all the bounties, request killrights on all alts.
Day 2, Alt 1, kill everyone on the list
Day 3, Alt 2, kill everyone on the list
Etc
etc

None of this requires more than 1 character logged in at a time for any of this to work. So even limiting EVE to a single character at a time wouldn’t stop this.
And if your idea requires utterly changing EVE by stopping alts being logged in at the same time to even start to limit the abuse… then that is a sign of a very very bad idea.

2 Likes

No, when you create new functionality you need to know how the game works.

You are trying to set a limit of ‘once per player’ by setting a limit at ‘once per character’, forgetting that every player account already has 3 characters and players can easily make more.

It means your limit is worthless and that you need to look for an alternative method instead of this non-existent limit.

Mind, I’m not saying that your idea is bad, just that this particular part doesn’t work the way you want it to.

would be further delays with my recommendations

true

i agree

which it does not.

as i have said the difference is the working mechanics within the game vs how the players are choosing to interact with the game

good thing my idea doesn’t hinder on revamping the whole game and limiting accounts logged in, but more limits frequency of bounty pay outs and repeated engagements.

if you have one account but 3 toons, you cannot log in a second toon from the same account can you? if you can this is news to me. further more you would need a secondary pilot plex to train those skills to make it viable.

by having buffers on timers does make it viable, because if its worthless then why not just allow insta-ganking and people can be hell camped, one clearly has more merit then the other.

if you’re going to make 10 accounts each account with 3 toons, and skill train all of them up and request a target and kill right on a target, then spam kill the same target over and over baring in mind all this will be diminishing returns. making it not worth so much exaggerated effort on behalf of a single person. but it does just simply demonstrate the level of of pettiness people will go to exploit a mechanic on principle, where are yes even though people do have alts in this game, it takes a kind of asshole to make it their sole mission in the game to spam kill one target repeatedly and yes i do know there will be the type of people out there who will do such a thing, but again these are extreme cases, if these ideas were taking on board and realising that such extreme cases we in fact not the norm or people narcassisicly cycle through accounts to grief on one player, then that does cause for developer intervention in my opinion because again. its not a case of how the mechanics work internally within the game, its a case of the player interacting with the game. thats like trying to change a motherboard in a computer because your monitor’s got crack in it.

even then the idea behind the timers between engaging the same target are designed for targets not to be eliminated by the same hunters and prevent repeated and consistent spam killing.

if you’re going to make a large group of alts, just so you can go and spam kill bounty targets, then i’m sorry alts are not the problem, that player is and more so needs some serious therapy.

perhaps bounty hunting can be an omega feature only, so good luck plexing 30 accounts, if you’re paying cash, i’m sure CCP will be happy, if you’re paying ISK then thats less out of circulation. happy hunting!

I can put up the bounty with an alt, right? Then I can log off and go get the kill right with my main.

I have 96

nothing i can do about alts dude other than limiting frequency between engagements, I keep saying this and its more valid than allowing for people to insta engage people with bounties on their heads.

people use alts for everything else in the game as i have said before, having some level of overlap with bounty hunting by default is natural, if there are no other problems with it, then actually in terms of an in game experience this would constitute a functional aspect of game play.

again the difference is not the inter character aspect of interaction within the game, its how players aproach the game.

and most players worth their salt approach the game with an attitude to min/max by taking all advatages possible, IE meaning to break the mechanics in their favor without breaking the EULA/ToS.

with this in mind and reading more of your posts, your Idea should die in a fire…you cant fix it without adding a bunch of hoops and ladders and restrictions that…that well make it not worth Dev time.

Despite the harsh wording, I agree with Max here.

If you don’t design the system with all forms of abuse in mind, your idea is bad.

sounds like goonswarm mentality, no one likes goonswarm

all ideas on this board end up in a fire at some point i’m sure.

however
if it creates a desired demographic play style within the game for players who want to experience it then it is totally worth the dev time.

with the problems which were existed in the game the ideas i’ve put forward i feel will help steer it into something into a more viable game play it may not be a perfect solution but its more viable than what was previously in place. and if that is achieveable, which it is, then there is something to entertain there.

if you disagree, thats fine. ultimately it is not down to you or I its down to the developers, if they want to attract a new type of player or to expand on the existing demand for a demographic, which will need to happen at some point to keep the game fresh and interesting. hopefully these points will help put them more towards the right path even if its not these ideas specifically which are the final ones used.

Getting Bouty hunting to work is a case of going from A → X it can’t be done directly, it’ll have to go from A → B → C → D etc.

its not impervious to the useage of alts but that can be limited, if CCP can do more or perhaps find something more viable with their paid staff working that problem or other people have better ideas, then feel free to voice them to make this more viable.

I’ve voiced my idea earlier in this thread.

I have also not yet seen an example of how people could walk over the edge of abuse in my suggestion as blatantly as in the other suggestions in this thread, so I’m still waiting for someone to point out how my suggestion can be abused for unfair profit.

(Unfair profit like being able to put a kill right on anyone by jumping some hoops, or by repeatedly killing your alt for profit, or working together with bounty hunter and target for more value, or any other abuse you may think of.)

If you find something, let me know so I can change or discard the suggestion.

I do think there are flaws in your idea but this would be from a developer stand point and depending on not only the critera of the randomisation in game and assigning in game. because effectively there will have to be a searched through a constantly changing database of online players which would be a lot of processing power and require construction of a whole new system, new coding, which due to players and intentionally looking for exploits people will figure out this critera and effect the areas they can to get the targets they want or at least able to reduce the number of randomisations needed to get their desired mark.

so again the issue would be with that, should that be implemented. is how players interact with it rather than how it works internally. during actual game play. if your search critera could be refined to only people online and whatever else might be within the mix though it would eventually be figured out by the player base. its easier to pick the targets and let people use their alts, as i said if there is no other issue than this, how does it differ from using an alt in any other aspect of the game?

you don’t replace a mother board because the screen is cracked
you don’t cut off a whole arm because the pinkie is broken.
not unless you’re a savage or Armie Hammer.

I agree that randomisation of bounty targets would require significant additions to the game and may not be worth the effort.

I do think that if we want to have a functional yet rewarding bounty system, we will need significant changes.

My suggestion may require more work, but at least it does not allow players to kill anyone in high sec without Concord intervention.

then is it not better off fixing the system in place to the best of our abilities.
it might be a case of due to various factors in the game we can only do so much, then we might need to make changes to the other game play aspects before going back to bounty hunting, this is also something i have said.

i agree, but we can’t just jump straight to it, we have to go from A → B → C etc untill we finally get there. like i said before.

becase bounty hunting within the the game is a lawful profession. Its not ganking/suicide ganking which is a criminal act.
if you’ve been ganked by code, you know its not fun getting killed for playing a certain aspect of the game.
this was the way things were before for bounty hunters who used to gank for bounty, due to lack of available kill rights. and alts hiding in NPC corps and extortionate kill right costs it has been completely counter productive.

bounty hunting should be just as viable in all areas of space as any other chosen career in the game. however the amount of engagement should be limited, to avoid excessive spamming killing of players from a single character.

alternative to this
everyone goes to low sec
no one can do any other profession unless selling at a trade hub in a 0.8 system or below.

I have entertained ideas that perhaps targets higher security status systems perhaps pay out less, this could be some kind of concord tax. i have also entertained the ideas of alternate modules or insurance types to help mitigate various loss factors to specific types of pilots.

I have even talked about the use of standings with the bounty office to hunt in systems which are above 0.8 effectively causing a safe zone of 1.0 → 0.8 security system, this does take away from the idea of doing it anywhere but you could argue that standings are needed for special permissions.

We have very different ideas about bounty hunting.
For me there is nothing lawful about it: anyone should be able to put up a bounty on their enemy or competitor and anyone should be able to claim the bounty. If that requires a suicide gank in high sec, then the bounty hunter better be prepared to call in the hrlp of some suicide gankers.

If your reaction to 'it is bad when any target in high sec can get killed without Concord intervention’ is that ‘bounty hunting is supposed to be lawful’, I’m done here.

It’s a huge flaw in your idea that it allows people to circumvent Concord and you refuse to recognise or acknowledge it.

But you can’t limit engagements by different pilots, or I can simply kill myself with an alt, or if you want to magically limit that, then I get my friend to kill me while I kill them, while in a corvette/pod, and now I am immune to all the other bounty hunters.
Which means that every single ganker can kill me regularly as soon as their bounty alt puts a bounty on me. And there is no way around that.