I have come up with a way for player bounties to be re-introduced into the game without giving an advantage to multiboxers and to only reward players participating in legitimate bounty hunting.
Whenever an individual has a bounty pool that can be claimed, only an amount that is EQUIVALENT of the loss mail should provided to the killer, MINUS the insurance payout that the victim receives. (so in a way, you can use insurance to protect your bounty pool at the cost of reducing your own payout to compensate if you are intending on killing yourself to collect so you will still be left at roughly 0 isk profit). This will also incentivize people to remember to use the insurance feature which a lot of players rarely use, if at all.
This means that for someone to claim their bounty, they would have to blow up enough ships of equal value which would leave them at approximately a net 0 gain, while non-related attackers would gain the lossmail in value as an isk reward (minus the insurance payout that the victim receives) and incentivize people to prioritize people with big bounties if they are using big ships, while not being worth suiciding if they are in small ships.
Is there any reason not to add these back in this fashion? Please reply if you can think of a way to exploit a bounty system like this so CCP can have enough insight on how to re-implement this feature that was removed.
Thank you all,
o7
An interesting addendum:
A good idea popped up in this thread that I fully support. That is the ability to pay off your current outstanding bounty with isk at a CONCORD station, kind of like how you clear your bounty in red dead redemption. This way the individual with the bounty can simply just pay the concord officers instead of blowing up their own ships if they just wanted to have their name cleared, and nobody involved makes any money except CONCORD.
That looks solid on a first thought. I don’t think that the ability to remove pool from your character by blowing yourself with an alt is a counterargument if you cannot net any gain.
Maybe also substract value of the modules and loot that dropped? But if someone would want to cheat this, would he fit the ship with anything worthy? Probably not…
That to be said, if they do reintroduce bounties, which I support as it is small buff to ganking (or rather reverting the nerf to ganking which the removal of this was). I think it should involve CONCORD stations and new agents/UI. Putting bounty on anyone from space just by single button was cheap.
I agree. Perhaps something from the new AIR Career interface could be used to set up a sort of bounty board that can only be accessed in CONCORD owned stations to formally post a bounty with the authorities.
And to your point on the modules, i’d assume that would be included with the lossmail like a standard kill report. The loot dropped would still total up to a loss because around 50% is destroyed on average, still leaving the bounty “bum” with less money than what they started with.
Hopefully with the new UI that they have been making for the AIR career program, as well as the infrastructure changes to the core game for optimization, that they may be able to create a stable interface for bounties that would not cause so much strain on the server infrastructure.
They changed it? Because back in 2018 it didn’t work like this at all. I know it because I had 100mil+ bounty on several my chars and I also collected some bounties suicide ganking ppls in highsec (which is irony isn’t it?).
The way it worked back then is that 10% of the kill value on a loss mail (which already uses prices from 2010) was substracted from victim bounty pool and added to killer. If multiple killers were involved this 10% was divided amongst them all. Insurance wasn’t involved in the calculation at all.
OP suggestion, and I still can’t see any hole in it, is huge buff to this old mechanic while it makes impossible to profit on it by killing yourself with alts or friends.
That is very good though, and it might partially work, however these must be a way to find out about this bounty. So lets say it would involve CONCORD agents and asking them in their stations - now anyone would have chance to find out they have bounty on their head and then proceeds and collect it themselves with alt.
It is however very unlikely that someone would actually care that much to have dedicated alt in these stations and log him every day to see if he finally eaned a bounty or not. This itself might be enough detterent to bounty abuse indeed.
And I like it, and I would also allow to come into this station and pay the bounty to CONCORD to get rid of it, who would then redistributed it to all the players who participated on it.
It was 20%, which was close to the limit at which it would be possible to exploit the system (I calculated it to be as low as, I think, 28% in some cases). CCP used a flat percentage for all kills, but the system effectively functioned the same way compared to the OP’s proposal.
The target of the bounty would have to be checking often…whilst the larger number of people seeking bounties to hunt would ensure that someone saw there was a bounty and went after it. Plus I’m not clear why, in the first place, one would realistically notify anyone there was a bounty on them…it is rather counter-intuitive.
No, if I read the OP correctly then this is not the same at all. At the very first glance you can think “wait, we had that” but it plays differently.
Under previous system, and I really think it was 10% but okay lets believe it was 20%, it was meaningless activity as you just couldn’t make even decent profit on it. Even if you killed 100mil fit on zkill, CCP calcualted it to cost 60 from which you got 6, okay lets believe you, then 12 mils.
That really wasn’t worthwhile to this be an actual activity and content mainly because you couldn’t kill the target legally as there were no mechanics to give limited engagement. Additionally, the bountied player could not get rid of this 100mil bounty unless he lost 500 mil worth of ships in CCP cost calculation which often meant 1b. The full bounty was nearly impossible to claim.
Now, the OP proposal the bounty hunters receive up to full loss mail depends on whether the bountied player insured his ship or only basic insurance was given.
This system makes it suddenly worthwhile to hunt players with bounty (it won’t be that good, but it will be much better than it used to be) and the full bounty can be claimed in one go easily. That is because previous system did not take insurance into an equation at all and new one does hence the payout can be much bigger as you cannot cheat it that well (you could put expensive modules into your ship, but you still lose 50% of them so it shouldn’t be worth doing).
Well maybe I am wrong because I am using a real cost shown on killboard, but when I look at some kills of mine it seems like the CCP’s cost of a ship is almost identical as the platinum insurance payout (without price to insure it). So that would probably have to change first for this to be worthwhile.
Still, even with current costs, if the killed player didn’t insured with platinum, this new proposal will payout killer much more than original system.
It would be abused just like the old bounty system was. I used to place 100 million ISK bounties on new players just for asking ridiculously stupid questions in Rookie Help, or those that admitted to skipping the tutorial. Under your proposed system, I could place such a high bounty on a player that they would never be able to pay it off…
My first question when I saw the bounty system was why I couldn’t get 100% of the bounty when I podded the guy.
It would be reasonable many people also thought this when they are new to EVE. It was sad how bounties were used as a badge of honor/skill over the negative connotations it brings.
I don’t know how they may be introduced back into EVE IF EVER… Perhaps CCP will come up with something clever. They have before. But I have tons of doubt if I have learned anything over the years.
How is it an abuse? But even that can be solved with a limit that you cannot place bounty on a chars under 30 days old.
Still, it is not a problem at all.
First of all, with what was suggested here, player won’t know he has bounty on his head.
Second, even if he know, paying it off himself is a choice not requirement. We all lived with bounties on our heads previously just fine why would it be suddenly an issue?
I don’t see that abuse.
Yeah I remember it was suggested on forums to CCP, might have been me even not sure, but we discussed it.
Ok, in that case, I would wait until that player is 30 days old and place a 10 billion ISK bounty on them. They would either have to come up with 10 billion ISK on a month old toon, or be hunted for months on end. Either way, the player would more than likely quit or have to roll a new toon. Like I said, it would be abused just like the previous bounty system…
Okay, so you spend 10 bilions for some random newcomer who you dislike? And even if you would, how is this any different to ganking? I ganked few new players recently in the event - they weren’t my primary, but collateral damage, still they died some even lost their pod.
You can say it is griefing, but then what isn’t griefing in this game, this game is full of assholes scamming new players, ganking new players, hunting new players if they ever step into lowsec and wardeccing new players (though that is mostly gone now).
Remember, with wardecs essentially gone, and this bounty system not allowing limited engagement, you still must wait for this player to get suspect or enter lowsec/null/wh. Of course you can suicide gank him, but would that be really that profitable then? I don’t think so.
Having bounty on your head, even if the actual payback will be slightly higher than is now, doesn’t translate to “being hunted till he quits”. And even if it that would be the case, if you were specifically targetting new players and playing bilions of bounties on their head, isn’t this something that ISD should look into? They certainly steps in when ppls are dueling or suspect baiting ppls in “school” sector or career agents sector, why wouldn’t they step here?