Bounty Hunting: let's get complicated!

[Lukett_MyDabb]

So here we go again with another bounty hunting thread, woot woot!

So everyone wants to make it a legit system and there’s peaople saying that it can’t be and i’ll touch on their arguements in a moment, for now, I’m gonna start with the basic layout, then as the title says, try to hash out the super complicated inner workings that will go behind making the system balance.

The foundation for the system is gonna be based on Chance Ravinne’s car vlog about how he thinks the system should be revamped. gonna link to the bottom since it’ll take up space.

PLACING A BOUNTY:
were gonna start by raising the minimum bounty placement at 10-50 mil. no one needs to start out in eve placing a bounty on someone, and it can make, at least for certain players, think twice before just placing bounties on everyone in sight.

AS A BOUNTY HUNTER:
So I roll up to my nearest NPC station and when i open the bounty office and request a set of targets you will receive five eve players, each with a dossier that i’ll talk about later. you will have however as much time to look for this person using the dossier and after one week of searching or staying far away from this person as possible, the target automatically goes away. if you complete a target before the week is out, you’ll still have to finish the week, but you’ll receive a free pass to re-roll another target before their week is out. in order to crank the lucrativeness through the roof, and to avoid having a person qued again and again, you get the full bounty payout when you successfully get your target.

RNG AND OTHER BACKGROUND FUNCTIONS:
In order to ensure maximum avoidance of sustained bounty griefing of a player, getting randomly selected is going to actually be determined by a couple factors:

• sec status
• Standings
• K/D ratio
• activity level

In regards to sec status and standings, this is mostly aimed at FW players in that say, I enter a bounty office in Gallente space I’m more likely to receive Caldari facwar pilots and Serpentis mission runners for targets. activity levels and KD are to reduce the likelihood of market alts and carebears targeted by bounty attempts, as another way to not make the system concord sanctioned ganking. unfortunately that’s gonna require a whole lot of math that i just can’t find the time to do. a further reduction should come in a cooldown in the time a bounty office will throw you back to the wolves.

DOSSIERS AND THE HUNTED’S ADVANTAGE

Here’s another spot where sec status can again play a factor. The dossier, like one you get when your assigned a target, will be accessible to the hunter when he receives the target. dossiers will come in tiers based on the sec status. things that will come in the dossier will be the following, assuming the target meats the FULL CRITERIA for a complete open dossier:

• A link to the target’s info page
• Last reported system- this will update either on a time or action interval that will be determined by the sec status. Locator agents will be unable to help you via CONCORD orders to keep this balanced, also considering if your target is that hated on the sec status it could update everytime he moves system.
• Ship being flown- can also show ship name to help finding them in-space, if that advantage is also unlocked

The hunted’s advantage is the reverse of dossier entries. these include the following, again with a FULL CRITERIA SUCCEEDED.

• a notification that you are in fact being hunted
• the hunter’s location- updates like the hunted’s location.
• the name of the hunter

I think I covered all the non-value specific traits, so let the comment forth, see if i missed anything.

[Rivr_Luzade]

Stop this rubbish. Killrights for ISK are the worst and abusable beyond imagination.

Plus, you are several months late with that. There were at least 3 people before you who tried to use his clueless video to make bounty hunting “better”. And just as his video is, they all made it worse because either

it could be abused with alts and just a bit of ISK to generate lots of killrights on people who have never done anything to deserve one in terms gameplay mechanics.
or it made bounty hunting useless because it was too limited because only criminals or pirates could be bountied.

The beaten dead horse. bounty hunting

okay folks. before you dismiss this topis as “oh this has been discussed a thousand times” think of it as “oh crap this just keeps coming up maybe something should be finally done so we can stop beating this poor dead horse” Alot of players have made their thoughts clear on the subject giving a plethora of ideas, and the system is as broken as it was when it was reworked and no one does it. its a meaningless mechanic right now and i think its time to change that. some tweeks, minor reworks, and…

Bounty overhaul and warrant idea!

So i got into a conversation on the help channel about the current state of bounties…Namely that they are pretty much useless. So i thought what if we go old west on this problem, namely a WARRANT system that would allow players to bounty hunt in hi sec, low sec, and null sec…Ok i know what you are thinking hold on here. Let me explain the warrant system FIRST. Warrants are contracts for a specific players head or in this case, cloned meatsicle. It gives the player authorization to track, hunt…

Bounties are useless

The mechanic of Bounties make them not worth even worring about. The current way Bounties are setup make it confusing on what you will actually get if you kill them. Ways to make this a more useful tool: Make it so that when you kill someone with a bounty you actually get the whole bounty minus the CCP taxes. Make a NPC bounty hunting corp that only responds to attack you depending on how high your bounty is. Introduce bounty tiers, T1 NPC response time very low,T5 NPC response time wi…

[Lukett_MyDabb]

That’s why i have the system include the hunted advantage and dossier, because say I’m some carebear who had the minimum bounty placed on me by code, the sec status i have effects the readouts recieved. the hunter only gets my face and a week to find me. the locator agent will say “Your actively targetting this person and CONCORD tells me to say go away” and so now I’m stuck looking for a random guy that could be anywhere, or go chase someone else.

on the other side, I get a notification that this guy who’s across New Eden at this point is actively searching for me and either i choose to keep doing what I’m doing and be mindful of my local for when they show up or just park for the week, my cooldown won’t hand another hunter my face for another week or more and I also have RNGeesus to be my final say if i get chased again. rinse repeat.

yes, if the perfect storm of being assigned an afk miner in the system I’m applying for targets shows up, that’s risk. it should theoretically be slim. but that’s how both RNG and Murphy’s law work.

[Lukett_MyDabb]

@Rivr_Luzade

There were at least 3 people before you who tried to use his clueless video to make bounty hunting “better”. And just as his video is, they all made it worse

@Chance_Ravinne

[Rivr_Luzade]

They are not anywhere. They are where your locator agent tells you they are. And if I freighter around in my freighter and suddenly a kill right pops up after you stalked me for a couple of systems, I also cannot “just go away”.

Killrights for ISK are utter waste. Simple as that. Unless killrights via bounties are restricted to criminals and pirates, which limits their usefulness too much.

[mkint]

The key problem with any bounty system is that it’s not a money maker. Even if your ideas were good, there’s no reason to expect it to have significant player uptake. How many people actually want to spend their game time as a bounty hunter? How many people would try it once, fail, and then never touch the system again? How many people would put expensive bounties, never see them collected, decide it wasn’t worth it, and never bounty anyone again? Even in a best case scenario, it’s not worth the dev cost, plus because of the high risk something is likely to go wrong and the subsequent dev time doing nerfs would add to the cost, and then when it’s left in a condition where nobody’s happy with it but nobody’s complaining about it it gets abandoned and becomes another expensive embarrassment on CCP’s resume.

The real problem with the bounty system as it exists right now is that people know it exists. Make it less conspicuous and people will stop making unhappy noises about it.

There are mucho problems with your idea, but those problems would only matter if they ever had a chance of implementation.

[Lukett_MyDabb]

you missed the dossier feature, most likely if your a frieghter alt you aren’t going to be found right away. you also shouldn’t become a bounty target the exact same time a ganker tags you. you also missed me saying that for the system to work properly locator agents have to be barred from helping a bounty hunter stalk a target, for sake of balance.

[JUSTIFIED_ARROGANCE]

All your idea does is slow down the cycle time to find a friendly, go shoot him, get full payout and split it with him. You havent solved the problem just made it more cumbersome.

Just a tip: if you think that you have a good idea about bounty hunting, you don’t; likewise, if you think you have a good idea about mining, again you don’t.

[Rivr_Luzade]

Have you heard of the concept of alts? No? Let me explain: An alt of the bounty hunter on a different account uses the locator agent on characters that the bounty hunter targets.
And I don’t become a target right away when they activate the bounty on me? You mean your one week period? So, just by paying a bit of ISK you can keep another character that has done nothing wrong to deserve the killright from playing how they like to play?
According to the dossiers, you don’t even need a locator agent to figure out where targets are, their locations are provided free of charge.

Again: Killrights for ISK are an utter waste because they can be abused without any limitations. You don’t want to see it, Chance doesn’t want to see it either.

[Daichi_Yamato]

As always, immortality and alts (and insurance) means bounty hunting will never be the glamarous profession you want it to be.

Giving people kill rights on the ‘innocent’ is a non-starter. And if you tell people they are being hunted many will log off like with wardecs.

You can however put bounties you’re willing to pay for in your bio and ask bounty hunters to show kill mails that you yourself can check validity for before paying.

[JonahVark]

Why not just have the bounty player controlled?

For example I put a 200million isk bounty of Player A.
Player B kills Player A in a 50mil isk ship and I then choose what I will pay for this kill from the pool of isk. I get to set a minimum payout and a minimum kill mail value and can choose not to payout if it involves some market douche baggery to increase KM value.

The pool of isk is locked in and players can submit kills that happen after the bounty date. That way if you see someone placing lots of bounties and kills being generated and them not paying out you know they’re not good to hunt for.

Putting control of payouts in the players hands will help alleviate a lot of issues.

Anyway just a brief idea, could use some work.