My idea for a return of the bounty system

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

TL;DR: Put bounties on specific ships, not players.

In my new bounty system idea, the player would select a player, choose a ship they want the player destroyed in, and place the bounty. They would be able to choose how much money they want to put on the ship’s destruction. If they choose more than the ship is worth (causing the player to blow up their own ship for the money) that is their fault, but if they put, say, a 300M bounty on a Golem, it would never make sense to do that. Choosing the specific ship allows the player to pick the ship they want destroyed without getting information about what ships the player has, and it also makes it impossible to simply sell and rebuy the ship to remove the bounty.

If the pilot ever flies the selected ship and has it killed by a player, it will pay out the bounty. Bounties are paid out just like they were before they were removed. The killmail would also say how much the bounty was.

This prevents the issue of claiming bounties with alts, and also makes them pay in full when the right conditions are met, rather than a small fraction.

2

I have unlimited small ships I can build myself. What would be the point again?

Edit; It would be fun to sell a ship with a bounty already on it!

3

the problem with the bounty system being implemented is fundamentally an issue with how CCP runs the game as a company, there will ultimately be a hole in it which can be exploited and it would likely take several teams working months, negating other areas of the game to complete the project. I came up with a well thought out detailed plan on how to bring it back and was told by a former CCP employee several teams attempted it but couldn’t agree on how to implement it as a result it was scrapped.

i have even made efforts to make it as a 3rd party tool, but i’ve only been scammed and lost a few thousand £ in trying to create it myself.

the truth is the bounty system for the most part worked fine with the previous iterations, however i would argue the price for placing bounties needed to be inverted (solo pilots are MUCH harder to hit and due to the fact the game is still alt heavy someone may simply have a griefing alt)

you could place bounties on corps, players and alliances.

the issues were determining where people were, which accounts were active.
the fleet payment system is also what made the old bounty system pretty cool too.

honestly just bring back the old bounty system but do this

  1. blacklisting database - if you place a bounty on someone, other players in your corp or alliance should be black listed from claiming said bounty, people leaving said group should have to wait 30 days before being eligible again, additionally players within the same groups should not be able to claim bounties on their corp mates (you don’t get paid for awox)

  2. bounty hunting registration: instead of “everyone is a bounty hunter” make it applicable to people with level 4 agent access.

Bounty Hunting is to do with civil matters and not criminal matters, you wouldn’t ask your chums to handle a problem for you when you could hire a professional to act on your behalf.

now with that said, heres what you do.

  1. non bounty hunters can simply see the top 10 players, corps and alliances, good job done, everyones happy

  2. for bounty hunters, you don’t have a tracking agent, but allow for a change in the bounty office display window.

this will show you players, corps and alliances who are online only within your specific region and which systems they’re currently most active in, there should be a button with a “set destination” option for your intended target, allowing players to gear up and quickly head out to specific solar systems. (obviously solo hunters are unlikely to go to a system with large number of corp or alliance players unless they know they’re that good or even have a fleet)

if they move outside of that region / log out, they vanish from the list and the next one arrives.
ideally this list should be done by proximity based off your navigation settings for stargate jumps (avoided systems and such)

this list should also only display the top 5 of each group. so even if you were to artificially inflate someones bounty to gather information, the chances are this will only lure other bounty hunters to deflate the price, especially if you pay them 100% (minus tax) of the bounty price, like most bounty hunters want, further more you would likely be run out of regions where known FC’s or capital pilots are hiding such as sov null or pirate groups.

if you implemented a bounty agent you could in theory have this system progressive being from system, constellation to more constellations to a whole region at level 5 making it a hefty grind.

this ultimately will solve the problems of “how do i stop my friends or alts getting my bounty” as well as the bounty hunter problem of “how do i find my target / find out who’s on line / so far away”

this ultimately priorities a list of who is online and the most valuable at the time allowing for an optimal game play within the same region.

to further prevent exploits you could even remove bountys on players because they are simply too difficult to get as it is and ultimately mean if you have a griefier in your corp and someone places a bounty on that corp, the whole corp is guilty by association, driving corps to have more singular aspects of play style towards the game, playing and growing numbers as they like and when achieving certain sizes potentially forming or grouping into alliances which also MIGHT help NPR.

honestly, this is the best and most efficient way to do it.

TLDR: bring back old system, add black list options, remove bounties on players, allow bounty hunters to see top 5 currently active bounties in their region.

(this turned into a wall of text, sorry about that folks)

1 Like
4

Many of us would like the player (or ship) bounty back. However, to my understanding and observation it’s very likely to be a hardware related problem, not CCP’s willingness to have the system available to us (even with a slight chance of abuse, but which is essentially an “already existing ISK” transfer between characters, so no real harm done as in “creating new ISK”).

Anyone who was part of a fleet moving from nullsec to lowsec (or highsec) has noticed it doesn’t take that many pilots to create time dilation. A hundred will do, which is not even what we call a sizeable fleet these days. Moving such fleets within nullsec doesn’t create TiDi. The reason is that within lowsec (and hisec) the server must verifiy criminal status, concord, standings, etc, which takes a lot of data transfer and calculating. If it’s noticeable just for crossing into and moving within empire space, imagine what an extra “burden” the bounty system would create, especially with fleet sizes these days.

When we’re talking about the fleet engagements in nullsec, which can achieve 3k pilots occasionally, batting eyelashes already creates TiDi. We fly with our outstanding calls window open as part of potato mode, to name one thing, just to be aware that calls can literally take minutes to go through (e.g. command to fire, anchoring, warping, changing ammo, targeting etc). Add bounty verification to the server load and it will do what it used to do: crash during large engagements. Taking out the bounty system has noticeably improved the stability of the game in this case. So CCP made the right decision by taking the bounty system out.

One way to bring it back in my opinion would perhaps be to dedicate new (extra) hardware for a bounty system, which would not calculate during the fights for obvious reasons (don’t add stuff to an already stressed data transfer) but rather do the work during downtime, and send the ISK to those involved after shard restart.

The question of course is, is it worth investing in a bounty system which does not interfere with a maximally loaded node ? Only CCP can answer that one, only they know how many people would benefit to what amount in their gaming experience and if it would make sense to invest in it. They have more than likely gone over this, and figured out technical ways to implement a viable bounty system, and then calculated the needed investment. All factors combined likely made for a very poor business case.

My 2 cents.

5

the real truth of the matter is that to bring this back, CCP needs to minimize exploits while maximising content, but no matter how they present it, somewhere, some how someone will find an exploit and even if someone walks up to them with very specific details on how to construct it ideally utilizing the previously existing system, they most likely won’t Bounty Hunting will have to be entirely done as player created content or developed by a 3rd party.

sadly with the game set up the way it is (speaking from the view point of how players interact with it.)
creating such a system without exploits will hinder players and their play styles, all systems in eve have some small niche exploit in some capacity, to their credit, CCP has been working to reduce this, no matter how small the exploit is.

if it effects a single player to their benefit, its fine.
but when that single player has access to information which works as an advantage over the victim, it becomes a problem.

because of this, bounty hunting needs to be carefully an meticulously crafted.