Hi All I posted Bounty Hunting 2.0 quite a while ago and instead of posting V3 as intended I attempted to have it developed 3rd party and after 5 failed attempts a the personal loss of a couple of grand over the last few years, I come here simply to post my proposal and hope for the best.
this is going to be a small wall of text but I’ve done my best to provide context for everything to help answer any questions or address issues along the way.
my idea is simple, to bring back the old bounty office with some changes to make it more applicable.
it is important to understand two key factors going into this
- what bounty hunting is and how it works in the real world
- Developing the Bounty Hunting Eco System within EVE Online
First of all, quick definition for the benefit of all: Bounty Hunting and how it works in the real world functions in the area of civil law and not criminal law.
a quick run down is when someone is arrested and their court date down the line, someone can post bail, this is a sum of money to be returned to the person posting bail when the person has their day in court, companies which post bail for people who cannot afford it are then liable and when someone misses their scheduled court date, will send out Bounty Hunters or “bondsman” as they’re now called to bring you in. this is because when the person or entity posting bail make a civil agreement with the courts and if you don’t show up they could actually end up serving your prison sentence for you. this is my understanding of how it works from all the research I’ve done.
flipping the old system:
in the old system everyone was a target, I propose inverting the process, everyone is now a possible client
but before I can continue I’ll need to explain to you some definitions I’ve made and how they work.
to begin with you need to divide players into 3 catagories for the bounty hunting eco system
- Clients
- Bounty Hunters
- Targets
with this everyone will become a possible client and NOT a possible target.
to become a client, you must have BEEN killed by someone within the last 30 days OUTSIDE of dueling and wardecs.
to become a target someone you have killed (outside of dueling and wardecs) must place a bounty on you
to become a Bounty Hunter you will likely need standings with a bounty agent and probably a bounty connections skill
to make this work the bounty office will need to be bought back and reworked however you open the bounty office and see a list of people who have killed you, you can then select them and place a bounty on them, their corps or alliances as applicable,
placing a bounty with this method will have to naturally exclude NPC corporations otherwise it ultimately means new players into the game are confronted immdediately but not only a high level of complication but an even higher level of aggression.
by following the ideas below I have created a system which would mean players hiding within NPC corporations them are no longer protected. (but more on that later)
with this method, it will create a natural symmetry effectively mirroring the games natural Eco system, so if you’re a miner, hauler, JF pilot or many of the other roles, if someone tries to fight you outside of a wardec or duel, even if you fight back and loose a ship, you’ll be able to place a bounty on someone.
this is not designed to protect anyone play style but simply follows a more realistic approach towards bartles taxonomy and helping cultivate a healthy eco system within the game.
by following this system it is my hope to
this will prevent offline accounts and people within the MMO Ecosystem who do not wish to engage in pvp from being exposed to harassment and those who are harassed now have a means to fight back, where as real world technology or financial issues preventing them from being able to fight back against certain entities within the game.
simply, people who do not PVP shouldn’t be forced into it. it also means the state of warfare between large groups also becomes sizably more important to the games political landscape, pirate groups who don’t or won’t use the war dec system then become viable targets which actually creates content for people who enjoy combat as well as the bounty hunter playstyle demographic.
bounty placement scale
1 bil minimum for players
500mil for corps
250mil for alliances
considering that a singular player is much harder to find the bounty placement should be higher.
having a high ISK placement is meant to encourage bounty hunters to track targets down.
you then want to pay bounty hunters from the player → corp → alliance pools in that order.
all bounty hunter payouts should be 100% of the destroyed isk value on killmails before any minus from corporation taxes.
Bounty Hunters and Targets can still use the bounty system if they’re ship is lost. because everyone is now a potential client (rather than everyone being a potential target) providing it does not conflict with the war dec or duelling rulings above.
to create further balance to prevent abuse you’d have to create a “black list” system
simply put no payouts for killing:
- structures
- corp mates
- alliance mates
- fleet members
- anyone with blue standings with your corporation or alliance (aka coalition buddies)
- other bounty hunters
if you have placed bounties on people before or after becoming a bounty hunter and you kill them, you receive no payout for killing them
I would argue that perhaps destroying and equal amount of ISK of what you placed BEFORE becoming eligible for receiving pay-outs would be something to consider, but this SHOULD only be applicable to corporations and alliances rather than players to prevent excessive harassment. this way if you put a bounty on a player, you immediately become blacklisted permanently from receiving a pay-out from that player, ever.
MISC things for game mechanic purposes
this next part is mainly for any CCP devs reading this post
one thing to avoid is over saturation of this ecosystem in the game, if done right it’s going to explode in a highly productive and awesomely fun way, however, you don’t want everyone becoming a bounty hunter, much like the old system over saturation of bounty hunters caused excessive draining of funds from active players which left almost no content available and left 100mil upwards of bounties on offline accounts which were ultimately driven out of the game due to their bounty amounts.
Killrights: for bounty hunters needing killrights, lets just be honest here and forget them entirely, engaging with a target will automatically enable a duel between those two pilots as if the bounty hunter had already activated it.
this prevents denial of content tactics from players posting kill rights for excessively high amounts of isk to the point its not worth it, if you have a target on your back, its only a matter of time and will also allow bounty hunters to operate freely in highsec without concord interference.
it also means that the victim of bounty hunting cannot place a bounty on the hunters head, causing massive inflation on long term hunters and as per the combat rules anyone engaging or assisting in such a fight also becomes subject to the duel rules as well, if a hunter looses this battle due to overwhelming numbers for example they’re subject to the same rules, cannot place a bounty on them, at that point its simply a potential payday or a potential loss, once its done, its done, no further action comes of it, someone will walk away licking their wounds and that’s that.
this would mean that kill rights would actually be much more useable for players who are looking to play within a mindset more akin to assassins or someone who wants to settle a personal vendetta themselves. (because in EVE Revenge is only the beginning)
Targets should be clearly displayed on over view and in local as appropriate due to WH and black out mechanics
other thoughts:
Bounty Payout could be controlled by “Bounty Connections” and maybe “Advanced Bounty Connections” allowing for 10% per level with the base starting at 0 with no skill.
I personally think bounty hunting should be omega only however I’m not opposed to it being available to alphas in some limited capacity
maxing out both these skills grants the desired 100% bounty payout as mentioned earlier if you wanted to scale it for players.
introduction of a bounty agent and performing standings grinding to register i’m sure will likely be essential.
in my humble opinion this bounty agent should be available as a remote locator agent for bounty hunters only and can only search for targets.
a further thought is to observe all targets and have them separated into two different states.
“Active” and “Inactive”
when a bounty is placed the target is active, if that target does not make any active kills within 30 days they’re considered “inactive”
you cannot search for “inactive targets” via the bounty locator.
as a result it provides access to information of targets only, anyone who isn’t a target should not be subject to this search, so if you want to find an enemy FC but they’re not a target or an Active target, no dice. this search doesn’t work, for that you’ll have to use a locator agent or a spy within enemy ranks.
(extra stuff, very high end, doubtful it will be done but stuff i think would be awesome for BH’s)
if you want to get real fancy, allow for a “regional detection” button for your new bounty agent.
it will scan the entire region for any kills from targets within the last 5 minutes and if it discovers one it will automatically set desto for you.
further more if this is done in a fleet by an FC (or whoever is boss or whatever best mechanic is for this) it will push the information directly to other bounty hunters within the fleet and skip any non bounty hunters.
if target is online, check region, filter out any targets not within same region, find closest target, push desto to BH.
but that’s much more high end, within CCP’s capability, as a games company they’re able to know if a bounty is online, what ship they’re in and where and making a regional detection a possible option could work, by simply searching through a database.
Thank you all for reading.
fly safe o7