Bounty Hunting 2.0

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
61

unfortunately you have falling into the same mindset as Nevyn about what constitutes a bounty hunter, this discussion is above, please scroll up and read, if you think all bounty hunters are assassins then you are clearly wrong chap. as i said before i have looked into the origions of bounty hunting and thief-takers from England. currently in the world bounty hunting in the sense of tracking down fugatives is legally recognised in two countries, the USA and the Phillipines.

Thief-Takers don’t exisit anymore today not by any decent standing of tracking down stolen goods, this is more along the lines of work put in by the police, who by all rights don’t even care. the closest thing to compare them too would be Repo agents for people who have defaulted on their debts, which is a global profession. and in fact the United Nations actually has a bounty hunting office they also additionally do have a most wanted list and the people on there are worth millions if you can bring them in, which also additionally in information you can find online, they have openly stated the world as a whole could do with a global recognising of bounty hunting as a legal profession due to the fact militaries and police forces are down sizing around the world.

I have been working with the idea that bounty hunting is a legal profession the whole time and have stated as such, discussing the criminality, legality and morality of it in this thread. stating that bounty hunting doesn’t always involve killing a target especially by today’s standards and is different from putting a hit on someone or the use of a contract killer or assassin.

i know

what would be the point in giving you immunity to all bounty hunters?

ganking is different from bounty hunting and not the same thing.
under the suggestion i have made gankers and awoxers don’t recieve any kind of pay outs. the only way to get a pay out from the set up I have suggested would be to use a limited engagement timer.

in a game of immortal spaceship captains you cannot actually kill any other player, because your mind is transported in to a new body, now, I understand this maybe a shock to you but because of that, you don’t actually ever suffer any form of assassination or death.

with the way bounty hunting works in the game previously I have been working off of the modern bondsman form of bounty hunting found in the United States because they earn a percentage of the bonds value, which is the basis for the model for the pay out system we experience in game. incidently it is a completely a legal profession.

this suggests to me that bounty hunting with the EVE universe is suppose to be a completely legal profession. if this was not the case on behalf of CCP then that is equally fine i can re-work these points and the suggestions I’ve posted to make something not only more viable but more accurate. contract killers or assassins will usually recieve 100% of agreed upon amount in return for someone’s death, but death in eve isn’t permenant. not unless the book “EVE The Empyrean Age” written by Tony Gonzales is considered canon because in that book, capsuleers can in fact die if all their clone vats are destroyed. or in the case of the assassin in question literally prevents the needle injecting into the back of the neck / base of the skull to allow the transfer of consciousness at the point of death.

62

Lot of text, does not address main concern:

It is bad when player can attack any other player in high sec without Concord.

When I see an out of corp freighter pilot in high sec who does not have a low security status and has done nothing illegal and has no suspect or criminal timer, I should not be able to attack him without Concord killing me afterwards.

Your suggestion allows players to get kill rights on anyone they would like to kill. And it would allow me to kill that freighter pilot without a suicide gank.

That is a terrible flaw.

63

quite a valid section of text too considering your previous points.

if a target with a high bounty who you cannot have requestable kill rights on stays in high sec and a NPC corporation, which they do, you will never get your target with this in mind, you cannot play favourites if you’re flying something you cannot immediately afford to replace or have replacements to hand in eve, you should not be flying it, its rule number 1 of the game.

perhaps the time it takes for the bounty to register takes a week and then its a further 48 hours for the target request and an additional 48 hours for the kill right. this way it takes 11 days.

for a single account this would be a substancial amount of time, if you had alts, can you then request specific targets and rights, sure but you’re going to be waiting 11 days with this current model.

it has been mentioned the idea of using timers is a silly or worthless idea. but the problem that is being presented is players using excessive numbers of alts to militantly and almost religiously with intent, targeting innocents and then mass spam requesting target and kill rights against a certain pilot who happens to be flying a freighter and nothing else. soley for the purpose of of excessive griefing them.

other than effecting the interaction between the two pilots in game and implementing cool downs between engagements which would be a viable option. it may not be a great option but its workable.

the problem people have is the use of alts and clearly the excessive use of alts.

again this speaks more to the problem of how players choose to aproach this singular aspect of the game just do to damage to an innocent pilot by needlessly exploiting a small aspect of it, through owning an obcenely obcessive amount of accounts. which again would only see diminishing financial returns for the Bounty Hunters, when the reward is gone so are the kill rights, they’re only available for people to collect the bounty.

without abandoning the proposed ideas or keeping in place the previous system which didn’t function or entertaining randomisation of targets

present a viable change would you make which isn’t requestable kill rights but would allow you to hunt down and get a specific target instead of just arguing the point.

64

None. No change.

You can kill anyone in EVE and no place is safe. A bounty on someone’s head has one function: to encourage other players to kill that player.

How you kill them is up to you, within the current environment of the game.

Suspect bait them, declare war on them, get them to duel you, hunt them in lawless space, face them in abyssal proving grounds or do a suicide gank; it all exists and bounty hunters just need to make use of the existing features of the game to claim that bounty.

That part of bounties is easy, simple and as clear as it can be.

There is no need to add convoluted and abusable kill rights on demand to that part of bounty hunting - keep it simple!

The main issues for any bounty hunting system arise when you need to think of a way to pay bounty hunters well, without encouraging abuse of the system.

(Hint: that last part is nearly impossible and is the reason why I tried introducing randomized targets.)

65

hmmm an interesting idea however in my origonal post i mentioned without keeping in place the previous system

the reason for this, which is something i have already posted.
this means freighter alts can hide in NPC corporations and wrack up massive bounties and unless you can get the freighter pilot to provke you, you won’t be able to claim the bounty on them. so keeping it as it is would then deny content to bounty hunters.
this is then clearly exploitable and thus by your own standards is a bad idea and a terrible flaw.

with my idea it means you can single out such targets, and is mainly only exploitable through people militantly and almost religiously using and obcessively excessive amount of alts, the fewer the alts applied the.

no one has seemed to say anything regarding idea of bounty hunting should be an omega only feature. this would stop a huge amount of alts being created to abuse the system, but mean people could switch between toons on a single account meaning you only have one toon logged in at once, unless you’re funding several accounts but even then this reduces that level of militant griefing.

I can envison this effecting alpha accounts by being able to put bounties on people, but not being able to take up the hunt themselves. there is already a factor in game of certian skills being limited by being alpha.

if you were paying for 30 accounts and I’m assuming training 2 pilots per account for maximum skills training because “exploiting to the max” then theres nothing which can be done about it because given you’re paying for the game and thus well within your right. however if you are doing this just to grief one specific pilot or one specific demographic of player, then you really need some kind of therapy.

66

How about if the bounty hunters worked for the Emperien?
Player x is with minmatar as a bounty hunter and player B with Galente, or another faction.
Player B only flies missions but has a status at Minmatar. Player x can see at minmatar which player has the most standing and go on the hunt. Player D is also a bounty hunter, but with the same faction as player B, can protect him and actively attack player x.

All of this has to be refined, of course, and I still see the problems with the alts that use this mechanism again.

67

While I would like to see the NPC factions get more of a role in the game, I don’t think it suits the bounty hunter system without making bounty hunting too restrictive.

As a Gallentean I’d like to be able to put a bounty on anyone, not just Caldari, for example. And when I hunt for bounties I don’t care about the faction of the target, just the reward.

68

But there you sit between the chairs.

A bounty hunter doesn’t give a reward - he just drives them in.
Another person or faction can forgive them and you get them by handing over the corpse.

69

I would love bounty hunting to be an actual profession. The following suggestion would mainly apply to high-sec, as a source of PVP income.

To address some of the concerns listed, I propose:
Bounty Kill Rights (Placeholder name).

A wronged party, that has a kill right against another character can turn the kill right in to a bounty agent. The player may pay up to the value of the ship/assets lost in the course of receiving the kill right. Or even higher, as I can’t think of a reason for this to be gamed… any reasons why not?

The kill right is converted to a bounty kill right. A bounty kill right cannot be sold.

Bounty hunters may purchase bounty kill rights from the bounty agents. They are assigned a random bounty kill right from a certain time zone.

Bounty kill rights act similarly to normal Kill rights. You may attack the player anywhere in space without concord intervention.

Destroying a ship in the course of an activated bounty kill right, reduces the value of the bounty kill right by 100% of the ship value, and 50% of the ship/assets value is paid to the bounty hunter. The bounty hunter is expected to receive 50% on average in loot drops.

If there is still value in the bounty kill right pool, then the bounty kill right is returned to the bounty agent for someone else to purchase.

These cannot be assigned to “non-criminals”, such as haulers as they are generated from kill rights, which are generated from criminal activity. Unless haulers are criminals, they are protected from griefing/strategic bounty placing.

Bounty kill rights cannot be sold directly, so there is still a market for sales of normal kill rights for those that still want to use the old system.

To prevent people from accessing their own bounty kill rights on alts, I suggest these mitigations:
Deposits on bounty kill rights:

You pay a deposit to reserve a kill right for 14 (or some other amount of days). The deposit is a percentage of the total value of the bounty kill right.

You lose your deposit if you don’t kill the player before it expires/you cancel it.
It would be prohibitively expensive to buy tons of them, just to remove a bounty kill right.
You should, in practice, need to pay more in bounty deposits than your own bounty is worth in order to finally buy your own (alt’s) bounty.

You need positive Bounty Agent standings.

Bounty Agent standings are gained by successfully performing bounty kills.
Low Bounty Agent standings provide low value bounty kill rights.
The better you are at it - and in reality this means, actively using the system over a period of time - the higher the value bounties you can purchase.

Turning down/expiring bounty kill rights will reduce your Bounty Agent standings and prevent you from eventually buying your own kill rights, unless they are insignificantly small, and therefore what’s the point in going through the ordeal to try and buy them anyway?

Bounty rewards are significantly better, as the ability to game the system is significantly reduced.
The benefit of bounty kill rights over “normal” kill rights, is bounty kill rights are not single use. They persist until the bounty has been paid out fully. They also do not expire in 30 days like “normal” kill rights do.
It could be possible for a player to revoke a bounty kill right by paying some kind of restitution to the injured party.
The downside of them over “normal” kill rights are that they cannot be sold.

70

My system would also allow “non-pvp” players to fight back against highsec gankers and griefers.

They would use kill rights and bounties as a way to pay other players to attack their enemies, but it would keep the cost down for them, as they don’t need to hire mercenaries that are cost prohibitive.

The bounty hunting profession would have many active players using it, including cheap ones for newer players.

It allows meaningful high-sec pvp to also include “the good guys” policing, not only piracy and warfare.
That may attract high sec pve players and newer players/alphas to pvp, which can only be good for the game. Maybe drawing them into low/null after they have had a taste of it.

I would even get involved in this system as a faction warfare pilot to expand my pvp into friendly highsec.

71

Oh look, another person making the same suggestion as every bounty thread, without even bothering to read the discussion that has already addressed most of the issues with this.

72

Granted I did skim read some of the 71 replies in this thread, I definitely did counteract the main points.

For clarity, my system is not the same as the current bounty system. And is an additional bounty system for use with standard kill rights alone.

Did you read my suggestions before commenting?

I read each of your own posts above, and the only one that I didn’t directly address is regarding the difficulty of finding bounty targets when they are randomised. So I will address it now.

As the bounty kill rights are generated from a standard kill right this means the targets have been active in space in the last 30 days in order to perform the criminal action. This means station alts will never be a part of this system anyway.

Bounty agents can assume that the kill right was obtained at the time the criminal was active. So they would use this time as the basis for providing random targets in your time zone.

The bounty kill right could include the system that the act took place (the may involve adding this data to the original kill right). This would be available to the bounty hunter when they are assigned so they have a starting point to search for the player.

What exploits do you see with this system?

73
  1. The pay out makes it worth insurance scamming the system, as you get more value than is lost between bounty pay out and insurance. And no insurance should not be forcibly removed from them for this.
  2. The fact you lose standings when you fail and you have to pay isk to even try means that bounty hunters are going to be constantly losing isk & standings, because they will constantly fail just because their targets are not available when they are.

In short, you haven’t actually addressed any of the problems, pretty much identical systems to yours have been suggested in the past and don’t solve the issues.

74

Ok so for your first point. Insurance scams only work if you can claim a bounty on it. With this system you will only claim the bounty if you have purchased the person’s bounty kill right. Which has been mitigated by randomisation, standings requirements and deposits.

With the above points, how would an insurance scam work?

On to your second point.
Bounty hunters constantly failing is up for debate. The ability to effectively locate your target by locator agents, kill right location and time zone specific assignment may well make it quite easy to find your targets.
Like I said before, if someone has a kill right for a player, that player must have been actively engaged in criminal activity in space at most 30 days ago.
So the bounty kill right would display their last seen location and the time it was created.
The system could be fine tuned after deployment to allow bounty hunters good odds at finding their targets before they expire.
The randomisation could be weighted to players that were in space over the last 7 days for example.
This would give scope for a large pool for randomisation and preclude older “dead” bounty kill rights.
Regarding timezone, you could do something similar to reinforcement timers, you choose a 4 (or 6) hour window in which the kill right was earned, so there’s a higher likelihood of targets being in space.

As a person with a kill right, you don’t know when and if a kill right was sold for you. The only time you know is when someone activates it and begins to attack you.
This will work in the same way. You know you are a viable target for bounty hunters, and it’s not going to expire. so you either never undock again, pay restitution, or you get on with your life and keep looking over your shoulder… that’s the criminal life!

75

“Hi, I’m bob the ganker, I have a bounty alt and get my random targets, and just buy the deaths from the rest of the gankers and we all make a profit at the expense of carebears”
Under your system the most successful bounty hunters will be gankers alts who clear bounties.
Actual bounty hunters will instead have an incredibly hard time.

You haven’t solved a single one of the common exploits here.

76

You keep saying things, like not solving “a single one” or addressing “any of the problems”, yet only show one specific form that I haven’t addressed yet. It’s exaggerated nonsense.

Let’s talk through your scenario seriously then:
Ganker A has a bounty kill right available worth 500mil. (A nice large one for the first example)

Bounty Alt has bought hundreds of millions of ISK worth of bounty kill rights, They contact Ganker A and say, I have the 500mil bounty kill right for you. If you undock a freighter, then I can kill you and you can get the insurance, then we will split the bounty kill right value.

So Ganker A buys a Charon for around 1.8 bil from the market (he got a good deal). The platinum insurance turns out to be around 80%, so will return 1.44 bil (sometimes insurance works out at more like 75% anyway), the insurance costs around 30% of the payout at 432mil.

So Ganker A has spent 2.232 bil on his Charon and on it’s destruction he will get back, 1.44 bil. This gives a loss of 792 mil. The Bounty Alt gets the full 500mil bounty, due to 50% of the value of the freighter being above 500mil. Tech 1 salvage sucks, so maybe give the duo 50mil if he goes back to salvage it.

This still gives a loss of 242 mil for the pair. There is no profit here.

If you have an example where the insurance payout + bounty could actually turn a profit can you point me to it please?

The above method to remove a bounty could be mitigated again further:

  1. Only a finite number of Bounty Hunters can have Bounty Kill Rights purchased for the same person. For example 10.
    This means Bounty Alt would have to very quickly buy his way through a long list of other bounties he has to buy first and hope he buys Ganker A’s bounty before a legitimate Bounty Hunter does.

  2. A Bounty Hunter can only have a finite number of Bounty Kill Rights at one time.
    For example 10.
    This means the gankers would have to roll lots of alts, and grind up bounty standings on all of them.
    And keep grinding standings on them because they keep getting offered bounties on players who aren’t interested in going through the rigmarole of an insurance scam that still causes them to lose over half the value of the bounty anyway when it’s executed.

  3. A much simpler option to remove your bounty would be to pay restitution to the injured party to revoke the bounty kill right. Why buy ships, blow them up, have to maintain bounty alts, still lose money (it does not seem to be profitable at all), when you can just pay the guy.

77

Ganker A knows exactly how valuable a ship they need to maximise bounty return, so doesn’t use a Charon because they aren’t an idiot. They would use the Charon if they had a 1.1 Billion bounty at which point… Oh look, now they aren’t taking a loss, but instead a 60 million profit for a few minutes work.

No, Bounty Alt just takes the first bounty and goes to whichever ganker it is, you have the mythical idea that Gankers don’t know each other, it’s not a large community who are committing criminal actions.

You mean the one that you don’t know exists right?

So you mean the bounty hunters are going to be stuck with no viable targets to hunt regularly making it even more pointless as a regular profession, only an alt income stream for gankers.

You are also utterly ignoring the fact that there are many more reasons to bounty someone than a criminal action.

78

Another possible mitigation:

The injured party who creates the Bounty Kill Right can allow/disallow certain groups to buy it, just like they can when selling a Kill Right now.

They could disallow NPC corps, enemy corps, known alt corps. They might choose to only make them available to specific well known and trusted bounty hunting corps.

If insurance scams are a slight problem (the numbers still don’t seem to add up to a problem though), then this give players have the power to prevent this.

If bounty hunting is a viable profession, and in this incarnation it very well could be, then there will almost certainly be groups popping up that become well known and trusted legitimate bounty hunting service providers.

79

That 60mil profit for “a few minutes work” would actually involve losing ISK on expiring/cancelled bounties, as well as maintaining standings for those alts, plus lost opportunity cost for that alt.
This is the same as saying “ore is free because I mined it”, or “I make 200bil in 2 seconds” when I station trade.

You are assuming every bounty kill right (or at least the majority) in the game will be willing to let you kill them. Even if the majority would, my other mitigations reduce this further.
It would make more sense for the Bounty Alt to just play as a legitimate bounty hunter. They can then keep the full bounty for themselves. Why share it for a measly pay out? The bounty alt doesn’t make much sense for a ganker as they can’t target their own or their friends bounties.
So just bounty hunt rival gankers, it’s better value and doesn’t involve insurance scams that have measly payouts for your efforts.

What are you talking about? I said you know you have a bounty kill right on your head. You know who had the kill right and set the bounty on you. You pay the one who sets the bounty, not the one who purchases the bounty kill right…

They would hunt the 10 (or 20, or however many is reasonable) that they have. These are bounties on players active in your time zone, that have been in space over the last 7 days. The amount would be adjusted over time.

I’m not ignoring it, it’s just a different system. You can still use the current bounty system, or mercenaries or wardecs. But kill rights will be amalgamated into the bounty hunting profession too.

80

If there is any profit in it, the bounty hunters will together create a chat channel to couple bounty hunters to their ‘victims’ so they can easily share the profits.

People will work together if there is value in it.

Alts are a thing. Also, working together with enemies when there’s shared profit in it is also very likely.

Any time a bounty hunting system generates value instead of destroys value, people will start abusing the system by working together to make bounty hunting more profitable. The only way you can stop insurance scams from happening, is if the value the bounty hunter gains is less than the value destroyed for the victim.

Good luck trying to do another attempt, but I haven’t seen any good bounty hunting suggestions yet.