Except yes. Between insurance, loot and salvage, that bounty number is where it needs to be already. Any more is actually exploitable.
Nah, I disagree. You should try reading OP, you obviously didn’t.
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I actually agree. Having a small bounty was a badge of honour. Now it’s just another isk sink…
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Hi OP,
Back when the suspect system and all of its associated features were being put into the game during the infamous “Crimewatch” updates, we (as in the high-sec ganker/wardec community) argued in favor of a system very similar to the one you’re proposing. In fact I had an 80-page thread with a write-up that was very popular.
It makes absolutely no sense that you would pay someone to take revenge against someone else on their behalf. We wanted a kill right system in which kill rights were assigned to mercenaries, who would in turn be rewarded for securing a kill, with a partial payout just the way you described, in order to prevent exploitation. We wanted to have an in-game interface for hiring mercenaries/bounty-hunters with public kill records, etc. Different levels of crime would create different levels of kill right intensity, and could have even had features in which a perp who gets caught by bounty-hunters and loses the fight could have his ship “frozen” after hitting structure, and given the opportunity to make a payment to the original kill right owner, who might prefer to get a payment of some percentage of the perp’s ship value instead of having it be blown up. All of this could have been automated through the interface.
But that was a time of CCP Soundwave and CCP Greyscale, who were notoriously anti-grief in their mentality. So instead, we got a system of “do thing get suspect flag for everyone make shoot on bad dude, lollerz!”
Twenty years and a game about space scumbags still doesn’t have anything resembling a working bounty/mercenary board system.
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I have a 12b bounty on my bump alt and a 10b bounty on my “other main”. I just want to know if I can extract that for my own personal gain. I mean why not? Shouldn’t I be entitled to it as it’s my badge of honor?
I have always thought that Eve Online was lacking without a real method to be a bounty hunter / gun for hire. Would be nice to see a real purpose for bounties to be in the game, otherwise CCP ought to just remove bounties entirely.
Would be doubly sweet to get some form of revamped locator agents:
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Locator agents that were able to distinguish between players in space and players in a citadel (it’s currently broken!)
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Locator agents that tell you if the target is online currently
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Locator agents could be apart of some new Society of Secret Bounty Hunters! In order to go from level 1 a level 4 locator access you have to turn in bounty chips or tokens that you get from successfully hunting targets.
Of course you’d need to make sure it wasn’t easy to cheese and open up a den for RMT, which is the current issue with CCP working on a proper bounty system. I just wanna be Bobba Fett in Eve Online @CCP_Aurora
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Honestly, they should just do away with the entire system and make locating players a function of a set of new skills and items.
You know how the Empire sends out probe droids in Star Wars? Well imagine that you could do the same thing in EVE, and send out probe droids across various regions. How many droids you can send out and how quickly they travel could be controlled by skills. Once a droid finds the target (and they always would, as long as it’s k-space), it could give you a live feed of the local chat or something.
We wouldn’t even need physical entities in space for this, as all of it could be controlled via a new interface and an algorithm.
The closest we ever came to that was the player-run “merc contracts” channel (where my corporation was listed). But that’s dead now. I was actually searching for an outfit to hire for some mercenary work today, and I seriously couldn’t anything or anyone remotely resembling a service. Yes, there are some big outfits still doing it, but there’s nothing resembling a community anymore.
Sad, really.
And sad that CCP is so out of tune with this very relevant aspect of EVE gameplay.
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This probably isn’t a bad idea, but it does remove a purpose of standings and actually would remove a player profession, since players have made a living selling locator agents.
I’d love to see some data on how often locator agents were used before the watchlist nerf and how often they are used now. Locates r us is a thing of the past. If the activity in that channel is any kind of example of how often locator agents are used / desired then we have our answer the the above…
■■■■ I even sold my standings character that I used for locates years ago. No need for that ■■■■ now especially if it’s busted and won’t tell me if someone is either in space or in a citadel.
Eh, probably right.
I’m all for locator agents showing online/offline data being introduced for a couple of months before we bother pulling that data though. And for fixing the Citadel bug.
Then we are comparing similar use cases, as I fully agree that the current agents locates are not good enough.
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It’s a terrible game mechanic. It’s not like it’s difficult to achieve, either; you just have to grind out a few missions with a corporation to get 3.8 standings with the connections skill at 5. That takes less time to do for a few corporations than hypothetical skills could take to train (or not).
I sit in that locator channel, and I barely see any activity. Not a big loss if the profession goes away, although with my idea it can be made even better - instead of having to wait for someone to go to an applicable agent to start the search, and then relocate to another one, you could have players sit inside ships dedicated to the task (with a special launcher or whatever) to be able to provide the service on the fly. They could even make it so you’re immobile, just like when popping a cyno, when you’re doing this, to ensure that the task is outsourced to players performing it as a profession (or alts, as is already common with locators today).
five characters
So bounty hunters have to sit immobile? I mean I get what you are trying to achieve but it seems very counter intuitive and seems to just promote alt use. If we want it to feel like bounty hunting it needs to be the hunter doing the locating.
If we want it to be actually hunting yourself, it would need to be “they are in this region, unlocked and online” then once you get to region you get constellation etc.
And presumably there is some kind of not crazy Dscan spamming rsi inducing counterplay here.
Like I said. it’s not a terrible idea. But it has missed some areas so far and needs fleshing out without overcomplicating it.
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I’m only putting it out there as an idea if CCP or the players insist that locating needs to be a dedicated profession. Being immobilized might be an acceptable trade-off in that regard, as today, you need to spend time getting to an agent, running the search, and then, unless you know the general area where the target is located, waiting for the initial result, and then going to another agent to run another search right after for a pinpoint location. So you’re already kind of immobilized today, as it were.
Of course. I never said that this was a complete idea. It’s just a collection of potential game mechanics that would push the profession in the right direction. If CCP would be serious about doing something like this, I’m sure we could figure out the math behind it all in a more comprehensive manner. But last time they didn’t, and ended up locking threads that asked for Crimewatch’s mechanics to be reconsidered due to bad press for their flagship feature.
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