Ideas for Bounty Hunting Profession

Communications Center General Discussion
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I have no idea whether any of this has been proposed before or not, but they are my own ideas.

TRACKING

Turn bounty hunting into an actual profession, with skills. A set of tracking skills could be one example, which somehow allows the bounty hunter to know where the target is within some margin of error (at level 5, perhaps 0% error). Perhaps many actions a player does should leave an electronic trace. In our own modern world, any time you use a credit card, withdraw money from an ATM, use a mobile (or other) phone, send an email, do a google search, etc. your actions are being monitored and traced, and you can be tracked by law enforcement. Banks track you this way in order to repossess cars or planes or boats, and bail bondsmen track their marks this way. So why not have a set of skills mirroring this? Every time a bounty is paid to a player, there is a trace. Every time he buys or sells a ship/module/whatever, or executes a contract, there is a trace. Every time he docks at a station or jumps through a gate, there is a trace. Every time a clone jump is performed, there is a trace. Every time a clone is left somewhere, there is a trace. Every time a line is typed into a chat window somewhere, there is a trace left. And with appropriate skills in these areas (gate tracking, ISK tracking, clone tracking, electronic communications tracking, etc), the guy can be hunted and tracked.

LICENSE TO KILL

Perhaps a license to kill could be issued by CONCORD to the bounty hunter. Either it could be a specific license to kill a specific character, or a general one (of course there would need to be protection from abuses).

MITIGATING EXPLOITS

The current bounty system is weak in that its consequences are easily avoided by the hunted. For instance, the bounty hunter is only paid some percentage of the value of the ship of the hunted, so the hunted can easily fly cheap ships, or even no ship at all - just a naked pod with no implants. So, the bounty hunter must be given other tools to extract payment from his target. For instance, if the mark only flies around in a naked pod, perhaps ISK could be deducted from his account every time he is podded, and given over to the bounty hunter. Or perhaps we could introduce yet another skill for bounty hunters - bank account hacking or whatever - which would let them somehow electronically steal from the target. Perhaps there could be skills for finding and destroying (or ‘repossessing’) ships owned by the target which are docked ‘safely’ somewhere, destroying clones lying right in their clone vats, etc. Sky could be the limit here.

Now, it is possible the hunted could still evade repercussions, by for instance transferring assets to an alt. There are a number of ways this could be dealt with. Perhaps there is a skill the bounty hunter could learn - ‘freeze assets’ - which would stop the hunted from transferring assets anywhere, for a period of time. Or, perhaps allow asset transfer to other characters, but then THEY THEMSELVES could be legally bounty-hunted (they could receive a warning message before they decide to accept asset transfer).

SHIPS/MODULES

Perhaps special ships/modules could be used to carry out ‘skip tracing,’ tracking, destruction or ‘repossession’ of assets, etc.

Just some ideas off the top of my head. Discuss.

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The player you are bounty hunting would have to be picked at random by Concord. If not, I would grief some players until the end of time by placing a 20 Billion ISK bounty on them…

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Good point. These are the kinds of exploits we would need to figure out, and defend against.

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Only players that commit crimes too. Otherwise some innocent pve guy is going to get hammered for the crime of existing.

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Keep the ideas coming.

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Now bounty is joke because “bountied” sit in shuttle and his friend “kill” him and pick up revard.

Lets make it matter, lets say bountiy is 75% of value of destroyed ship!! And you can pick up bounty several times, any time you destroy ship on chacacter have bounty on his head.

Value of the ship is calculated based on daily Jita prices.

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But what if the guy just flies around in a shuttle or pod?

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Difficult mechanic to apply in the alt world of Eve, but sure, keep the ideas rolling, you never know !

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9

The bounty system is fundementally broken at the core level of gameplay. The fact that you can add a bounty to anyone, for any amount, is why this system is broken.

But at the same time, this is how it needs to be, because you should be able to place a bounty on someone that merely pissed you off in local chat.

All of your suggestions fail, because of the core mechanic of bounties, fails. Without a fix to this central aspect of bounties, no suggestion would work.

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Please no. None of this is good. Also there is a subsection of this forum just for bad ideas.

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I say we turn “bounty hunting” into this - convert or create level 4 mission agents that, once per day, exclusively give the burner missions. Remove burners from the existing level 4 mission pool, so now bounty hunting is the burner missions. Adjust rewards to taste.

Because let’s be real here, there is no way to create a bounty hunting system on players that doesn’t utterly break the game in other ways. I’m fine with keeping the whole bounty on players thing, it’s innocuous on it’s own.

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Yup, and if more than 1 person read it per day, I would have posted there.

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13

If eve didn’t allow alts bounty hunting could be made to work but as it is may aswel remove it

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yea number one idea in my mind came was

PAY THE PILOT WHO KILLS THE BAD GUY in full … thank you.

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But if the bounty hunter kills the target in a naked pod, he (the target) loses nothing. So why should the bounty hunter be paid in full for causing no damage to the target? That rips off the guy who issued the contract.

Or, the target notices the huge bounty on himself, puts himself into a pod or shuttle, takes his alt, and kills his main, getting full bounty.

These are the kinds of problems that need to be solved.

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16

is it that difficult to code restrictions into the system?

if self blows self up, = no pay.

if corp blows self up, = no pay

if random player blows up target, = pay…

i maybe a little soo simplistic here but i fail to see a problem here.

you can have a scale of value to determine the payout of bounty. perhaps n payout on pods… or may be payout on JUST pods but ONLY after their ship was destroyed… ?

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But they are problems that cannot, ever, be solved. The mechanics of EVE do not allow these things to be “solved”. Much akin to “too many people in system, TIDI sucks, limit entry”. Some problems are just inherit to the system and will never go away.

We must accept that these are things outside our control. Bounty hunting is a nice idea, but it can’t work as a PvP system within EVE. It’s better to just let this go.

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This would be easy in a specific case (self = alt on same account as main), hard in the general case (alt is completely separate character on different account).

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If this can be demonstrated with examples you give, I will agree with you. If it cannot be demonstrated, I won’t. So, agreement or disagreement should be easy here.

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true, with the way ccp has account management setup atm. if you were only allowed to use one email for all your accounts, then perhaps this could be easy to solve. but being I can use a fake name, prepaid debit card, and amazon plex to fund my account with a different email, there would be no way for ccp to know if I owned said accounts… hmm… there is a solution. i just need to finish this joint and drink my tea and it will come to me.