Player Bounties

Communications Center General Discussion
122

It’s not that it can be abused and exploited so much as it wouldn’t be effective because it doesn’t really incentivize bounty hunting. All it does is provide an additional payout to people who will be getting kills anyway.

This is why I think it’s an impossible task, because anything that offers a good enough incentive to hunt will be able to be abused, anything where the payout is proportional so it reduces abuse won’t offer much of an incentive.

I honestly think it would be better if CCP just didn’t implement any player bounties. Even killrights are pretty trashy. most of the time it’s just used as bait or trying to be used to profit by trying to get yourself podded then making someone buy off their own killright. At most it forces people to stick to small ships or switch to an alt for the duration.

123

Yeah but that is a nice thing, not? Because it’s another little piece of rewarding active PvP? I mean, someone who just blaps NPCs in his Marauder for an hour in almost completely safe HighSec gets rewarded with some hundred million ISK. Why should it be bad if someone joins a fleet and is lucky enough to score the final shot on a target with bounty and get a nice 10, 50 or 100 Million payout (depending on the ship destroyed)? So even if it does not really motivate someone to be full-time-bounty-hunter, its a nice little reward here and then for active PvPers.

124

I disagree. The problem with a lot of CCP’s design issues is they tend to think of one-off, single-facet approaches. It’s better to design 6-10 changes that all work together and achieve several goals at once, than to try to address every concern with a single solution.

Bounties alone shouldn’t be the one single reward for bounty hunting. You referred to the “core mechanic” as poorly implemented, which it is (IMO) for citadels. For high-DPS/low-EHP ships (eg. gankers, for one) it makes a lot more sense.

Pirate hunting isn’t a career because it doesn’t pay well in rewards, in time spent effectively, or in player satisfaction (in general). It’s also imbalanced because gank-fit ships can create 100-to-1 ratios in the value destroyed vs. the value of the destroyers. Plus, the gankers are always the ones prepared and in place to scoop up any drops, even their own wrecks.

A ship power core forces them to have more skin in the game, and provides a little more incentive to hunt and a little more satisfaction when they drop. Bounties were a terrible “incentive” at 20% of hull value, they have much more effect if set at 50% of “total destroyed value” (assuming a semi-accurate value estimator that’s not easily manipulated).

Finally, add in something like hit contracts (“Entity X offers a payout of 30% of destroyed value against Entity Y for 10 days”) and you’ve now got an actual shot at a bounty-hunting career, with the added satisfaction that pirates and gankers are losing more than a 3 million gank-fit Catalyst or Thrasher.

Yes, exactly. You reward active PvP, you make it rewarding enough to do but not pin it all on one exploitable mechanic.

There were other uses for bounties as well - I could put them on a foe, and have a nice record of where and when they get nuked in my notifications list. I could put them on a friend or corp-mate, and have similar notifications delivered to me showing me where and when they’re getting in trouble.

The worst thing you can do in a sandbox game is keep taking player tools and ‘sand’ away. CCP has far too little left in theirs to keep throwing things out.

125

You really ought to cut back on this shrinking-violet, “OMG you disagreed with me so your post is nothing but vehement angry personal attacks!”.

Here’s some snippets from the post where you’re replying to a fellow who said sec status should have some effect:

So for you to imply repeatedly the fellow you’re responding to is insane, Stockholm’d, stupid, needs to rub some brain cells together… that’s all cool. (Pro tip: these are what actual personal attacks look like.)

But when I say:

You’ll note that other than the implied substance-abuse, these are all references to your remarks or arguments and not “personal attacks”.

It’s no difference at all to me if you over-react to disagreement. But I’d suggest that strengthening your arguments is a better response than crying foul and pretending you received

Especially since you’re y’know, always telling people to harden up and embrace the dark side of EVE.

1 Like
126

i agree
i only look people i killed or killed me
after it happens
and insta forget

intel is overrated

edit:
im so alienated that some times i see a blue leaving amarr or jita (that i probably added as blue at one time or another ) and have no idea the ■■■■ it is

and them that awkward feeling , should i say hi? … pretend that i remember…
naaaaa im not good at acting … and shy …

127

You decided to triple or quadruple down on your inflammatory remarks – and still quote them without even a remote sense of self-awareness – at this point across two separate threads (where’s those quotes of yours about my “Type 1 & 2 & 3 Fun”? Were those too personal and attacky for you to quote here?). Fine. Contrarily, I own my words and say I should have been less blase with how I was approaching a subject I feel quite strongly about, and if I were inclined to rewrite my own arguments with more tact I’d choose a different tone that would indeed be less insulting. I apologize to the OG guy that suggested bounties should be tied to sec status. I have nothing against him. I still think the idea is completely nonsensically bonkers.

I don’t get that sense of empathy at all from you. I will just have to live with the consequence that this is the last conversation we get to have.

128
129

You miss the point. If I put a 500m bounty on someone and their alt then claims the kill…the target is laughing all the way to the bank. I’d certainly accept 500m for one killboard loss. A bargain ! I don’t think anyone is so killboard obsessed that they would not trade a loss for a hefty amount. The whole thing is really no different to people who get their alts to eliminate kill rights on them.

130

Aren’t you precious.

Mr Epeen :sunglasses:

131

I will happily pay you 100 million ISK for every single personal attack you can quote here from my reply to your Type 1/2/3 fun post.

Of course you have the option to make this the last convo, no skin off my back. For myself, I’m just going to assume you’re having a bad day, and leave it at that.

132

Hey…give me 500m in advance and you can come blap me in my 42m Moa. Aiko might want 1bn for the same, but I’m cheap :slight_smile:

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133

this forum is really funny
just want to say
love you guys :heart:

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134

You probably weren’t there when bounties were a thing.

Making a profit from bounties was basically impossible. Some claims it was possible and was happening, but I never saw any such case and the method to do that consisted of several months long “trading scam” to make the game think certain module which very few players have and nobody wants, has a price of billions.

Aside from this method and I say that is pure theory, there was no way to make money on your own bounty because only 10% of the loss value - and that is loss value calculated by game itself (which is often like half, sometimes even less of the real worth seen on Zkill) was granted to the killer.

So you had to lose something worth of 5bil to get rid of 500mil bounty.

Even trying to clear your bounty just for the sake of it, took a lot of a time and resources due to this fact.

135

That’s why I said and will repeat: the Alts make money for CCP but it’s bad for the game and it’s glaringly obvious with the bounty system plus it’s not good for the PvP and can be abused to rob corporations and harass others, even on the forum.

136

Oh, I have a fun bounty story for you people! It’s of course a “made-up anecdote” like everything else I’ve ever said on these forums, with a lot of “bias” and “twisted facts,” but it’s still very funny.

Many years ago, during one of my little high-sec wars, I was sitting in a high-sec mining corporation with my spy. Pretty average targets, but a few of them were your stereotypical ■■■■-talkers. One guy was particularly bad, constantly harassing me in local when I was trying to kill him, calling me his “baby girl” and telling me how he’d treat me like “daddy” and such. Even in corp chat and on TS he was being super-creepy, talking about how he’d “bomb my pussy” until I “couldn’t walk anymore,” calling me a “poor whore” because he was “making so much more ISK mining” than I was chasing them, etc. But he never actually tried to attack me when I showed up in some dinky little meme ship like a Battle-Badger, even when his other corporation members did. He always waited for me to go offline on Destiny before he hit the belts with his two exhumers (and of course cried a lot when he couldn’t).

This guy wasn’t exactly a new player. He played for close to two years at that point, though it seems he’s never done anything aside from mining in high-sec. That didn’t stop him from talking to the rookies about the game like he was an expert, though, giving them lots of bad carebear advice about how to make the most money (“split up your mining lasers on multiple rocks so you miss less cycles”) and giving them valuable PvP advice (“you want artillery on the Rifter because it has a higher DPS multiplier”) and other stuff like that.

So I got the very bright and original idea of putting a bounty on him. When that first hundred million hit, and I informed everyone in local of the price on his head for “griefing” me, he went absolutely ballistic. In local he was saying how I shouldn’t have done that because I spent my only ISK on it and wouldn’t even be able to afford a frigate now, but on comms he was ranting and raving about how he “wouldn’t be able to mine anymore” because he had a price on his head. On my spy alt I was fueling the fire by trying to console him, saying how “it’s not a lot of money, maybe just a few mining barges’ worth” and such. And every time he started coming down a little bit, I would add more money to the bounty pool to get him revved up again, until it was something like 400-500 million ISK. Every time I did, he’d start ranting and whining even harder, and this went on for hours. By the end he was saying some pretty crazy stuff, talking about how he was going to speak to his lawyer friend about it, find out where I live, etc. etc. Lots of extreme cursing and cussing too, though thankfully nothing racist like I’ve heard some other miners say over the years. Finally, by the end of the evening, he just said “you know what ■■■■ THIS ■■■■” and logged off.

I don’t think he ever logged in again after that. I checked some time after, and he was in the NPC corporation the entire time after his mining corporation disbanded.

It was very fun to make him permanently quit the game using the bounty system. I enjoyed it a lot! :slightly_smiling_face:

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137

You know you can put a note on a character when you mark their standing, right?

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138

That is exactly the kind of content we need bounties back for.

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139

lol i dont
im very ignorant
i know near to nothing :smiley:

140

That’s just not true. Even when we had the old bounty system, where you got the whole pool paid out for a single pod kill, people with bounties saw them as a badge of honor. You needed to have a security status of -1.0 or lower to even be eligible for bounties, so only real baddies ever got them, since carebears would never drop that low.

My highest natural bounty was about a billion or two, which was moderately high, as anything higher than a few billion for the most prolific low-sec pirates was the domain of major null-sec alliance leaders, or was self-placed to get on the “most wanted” list that was an actual in-game feature. I, and other players like me, would never self-collect that money, and we’d make fun of anyone who did.

Then the bounty system was changed so you couldn’t do it anyway, and the most-wanted list was populated by characters with self-placed 12-figure bounties since they could actually go out in space and take losses without losing the entire pool from a single pod loss.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, back in those days when someone (usually carebears) would place bounties on us and smack-talk about it, we’d act like we were really disturbed about it so they’d keep adding even more money to them. Kind of like an inverse of what happened in my story above.

141

i remember wen mark the dragon was the biggest bounty or something
i used to find very entertaining that he had LOTS of isk did 2 hours videos on youtube and was reaaaaly bad at the game