Because sec status should mean something in empire space!
Sure, if you like being handed random ISK. From the perspective of the bounty placer though it’s not fulfilled its purpose, they’ve just paid people to do their normal PvP. Whining about PvE doesn’t change that. Yes PvE exists, and some PvE it’s possible to mitigate risks. So what?
It doesn’t though. From the perspective of the person fitting the ship, it’s one more thing to be added that’s mandatory to add, just adding further complication to the fitting. I assume it’d be the same as structure in that the core would fall out if you repackage the ship. From the perspective of the shooting it just becomes a bit of junk which bypasses normal loot rules to be a 100% drop and can be sold to NPCs. So it’s just adding PvE properties to PvP kills and has no relation to the bounty system.
In the end all it does is add yet another additional cost to ships and further discourages people from activity.
It increases their costs sure. It doesn’t really make it worthwhile to hunt gankers though, it just adds incentive to follow them around in a hauler to scoop their wrecks.
The reason it wasn’t total destroyed value is because that is easily manipulated. There’s always going to be weird rare but useless modules you can buy all of cheap to pump the price and keep the price high until the game thinks that the price, then you can use to farm bounties.
I don’t know why having it in a contract would be better than just sticking it on the target, but for all the gank catalysts with a little extra in cores gankers would also have targets which pay out a billion and a half or more in bounties and drop freighter cores.
They haven’t really taken the sand away, you can still pay person X to kill person Y. What they’ve taken away is the rigid and poorly designed mechanics to do so. I’m happy for them to come back but they need to just do the job of incentivizing bounty hunting, not rewarding all PvP with PvE drop and not increasing costs for regular PvP.
So do 0.0 players. They could be -10s that tag up for all you know. If you actually read the „drivel“ you would not be repeating points I have already soundly addressed.
Yes and I will continue to speak the truth. The nerve I hit with some of you folks really shows how brainwashed some people have become with this number over the past 10 years.
Tying the bounty system to this number was a bad idea. It gives zero additional value to bounties and zero additional value to sec status.
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Sec status does mean something, it dictates how long it takes CONCORD to react.
And I would rather the lore mean something than sec status.
Reinforcement mechanics long predate highsec citadels. They exist because they are supposed to give defenders a chance and ideally encourage fights. Without times people just log on out of the targets timezone and take the structure down while most of the owning corp is asleep.
You’re talking about System Security, not Security Status.
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No, I’m talking about Pinkerton Security not American Building Management Security which isn’t as old as the Pinkertons but a much larger organization now.
Who doesn’t like to get handed a 100 bucks randomly while doing his job? I don’t see any argument here. People doing actual ship combat and have a chance to randomly hit someone with a big bounty and get paid extra if they are lucky or skilled enough to kill him. Thats a fine thing without any downsides, yes? Each such event might motiviate the player to keep logging in for the next fleet/op/roam/defense. It’s nothing but great for the game?
The usual perspective of the bounty placer never was “I want to hire someone to hunt down and kill this guy!” but to simply a) send a message, b) have some fun poking the guy or c) simply reward anyone who happens to kill the guy. Or d) people placed bounty on themselves with alts, just to look badass because that supports their roleplay identity as a pirate. Among many pirate corps, those who didn’t have quite some bounty on them were often looked as “freshmen” or mocked by the older guys with big bounties. It was simple and nice to create immersion in a space/scifi-environment.
The least people had the impression that if you put 10M bounty on someone who blapped your hauler, suddenly dozens of Boba Fett’s arise, plan some mission-impossible like ops to finally bring down the target and grab the bounty.
Nobody whines about PvE. There is simply no reason why mechanics that reward PvP financially would be a bad thing. And bounties can be one small piece in a larger puzzle here. They are even paid voluntary, so nobody will complain of being “taxed” or that CPP is “taking something away” from him. It’s simply great overall.
One problem EVE has is that while PvP often simply costs ISK (at least as a beginner when you lose very often and mostly cannot even grab the loot or when on the receiving end of some curbstomp) while basically all other activities are rewarded with ISK. The game needs a lot more rewards of doing actual space combat, ship vs ship, to motivate people to take part in it, be it as FC, be it as F1-grunt, be it as scout, tackler, booster whatever. Thats where most of the fun and the most memorable moments come from and so many players will never experience them because they are conditioned to fly “risk averse”, since you can lose easily 100M for your ship but barely gain 20M for a kill.
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Sure, but it’s not an effective bounty system. If free ISK is a “fine thing without any downsides” then they could just randomly give people ISK throughout the day.
Only because that’s the only system CCP ever managed to implement. The idea of bounties was “Player X has done something bad to me, I will pay for someone to kill Player X”. You know, actual bounties
People whine about PvE all the time. I’m pretty sure I even saw you complaining about highsec ice mining in the MER thread, because even though it’s one of the lowest forms of income with more overheads and significantly more time investment than something like incursions, it’s apparently “too easy”.
It depends on the mechanic, but most of the time they end up getting exploited. The problem without bounties though is that they aren’t really doing what they are supposed to. If people want to randomly give ISK to PvPers they can scroll through zkb handing out ISK, and they don’t need some mechanic arbitrarily called “bounties” which aren’t actual bounties to do that. If CCP wants to add payouts to PvP kills, again, they can do that.
That’s not a problem, it’s by design. The game needs the economic cycle to live. If PvP players are mechanically self-sufficient purely through PvP then any ISK driven PvE becomes redundant. And let’s not forget, PvP is rewarding it just requires the victors to loot the field and successfully get the loot back.
Creating an environment where more PvP is encouraged is great, but EVE is not an arena combat simulator and shouldn’t be shifted too far towards that.
This is the issue I’ve harped on for years: that EVE is supposed to be a PvP-centric game (it’s not) and it’s supposed to feature vast and interesting PvP combat (in general, it doesn’t), but it puts all kinds of barriers in the way of PvP and very few incentives for doing so.
Ganking is the low-hanging fruit of PvP - it gets done by the dregs of the PvPers because it’s profitable, easy, convenient, and no actual PvP skill is required.
By and large, players avoid more interesting and engaging types of PvP for exactly the reason you stated: it has a terrible risk/reward ratio, especially for newer players.
I’m not sure why Elizabet is arguing that more rewards for bounty hunting is bad for encouraging bounty hunting… but some people get stuck in an argument position and have great difficulty accepting a concept once they’ve opposed it.
Sorry, but in this post you’re now basically just tossing in everything but the kitchen sink in order to support a weak position of “bounties are bad”.
Calling it “complicating ship fitting” is simply assuming poor implementation on CCPs part. It can be made entirely effortless, and fully refunded if the ship is repackaged. It’s simply an ISK counter on the corner of the ship fitting screen.
Balderdash. And who cares anyway? If someone wants to manipulate the market for a month to set up a situation where they can sometimes profit 50% of an RNG drop, big deal. It’s a drop in the bucket on EVE markets, and other players will find ways to exploit their ‘exploit’. Also addressed twice already by saying the lame estimate calculator in-game needs an upgrade anyway.
The average hull value payout for a Catalyst bounty was something like 260,000 ISK. Worthless and laughable as a bounty reward - it’s no wonder they became irrelevant.
If you go by “destroyed value” at a 50% destroyed ratio, Catalyst/Thrasher kills move to a range from a low of around 500,000 (still relatively worthless as an incentive) to an average of around 2 million, to highs of around 3.5 million for a T2 fit with a good roll.
Nothing amazing but considerably better, even at the low range, than before. Now add in a 2 million ISK power core, and the minimum bounty kill value becomes 2.5 million, with highs up to 5.5 million. Now it’s starting to become worthwhile to picture a bounty hunting career.
You’re not really even trying to address points here, are you? Just knee-jerk tossing out rejections. Let’s see, is it easier for me to say “I’m setting a 30% of destroyed value bounty on ALL OF SAFETY for the next 14 days”, or to put individual bounty amounts on every player in Safety?
You’ve also ignored all the other benefits, like ISK sinking, “making loss meaningful” for gankers/pirates, knock-on effects to conflict in other parts of the game, and the promotion of wars between entities if they can declare hit-contracts on each other.
Regardless, I’m fine with the disagreement, not everyone sees a full picture right away.
I’ll stick with the position that bounties can work, that even with the very poor previous implementation they were better for EVE than not having them, and that they’re a sandbox tool that CCP is just hurting themselves by ignoring.
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So what? Should they just rename it to “Killing Reward”, would that satisfy you? Isn’t the only thing that really matters if the game would be better with or better without it? And in my eyes the case is pretty clear here, the game would be simply better with a a so called “Bounty” system in it, even if it is no “real Bounty”.
Its because that is the only way it can work in the EVE universe. In an environment where players cannot be killed permanently nor jailed for long time, a real Bounty system beyond paying-for-kills simply cannot work. Any amount worth really chasing me would either be abused (paid out for a single kill = I would cash it in with my own alt), or take forever to cash in, making a hunt useless as the hunter would be set red immediately and then I can blueball him forever by flying uncatchable ships right under his nose or just staying barely out of his reach, just wasting his time for hours, days, weeks, until he gives up.
Thats unrelated to the bounty discussion. HighSec Ice Mining is simply bad in the way it currently works, because it just rewards lazy massive semi-afk-multiboxing or even botting. Thats not complaining about PVE, but pointing out an incredible bad game design. But as said, it has nothing to do with the bounty system.
The last iteration of payout being bound to a percentage of hull value could hardly be exploited, as the loss for the target would always be quite a bit higher than the payout. And ship hulls are too much ISK volume in the trade orders to be cheaply successfully manipulated large enough to influence the universe-average.
Thats a logical fallacy. At first, no one asked for a system that “PvP must be mechanically self-sufficient all the time”, (bounties are voluntary payments from other players, not mechanical auto-rewards). Second not everyone gets a bounty everytime they kill some other player. Third there is no single reason “any ISK driven PVE would become redundant”. People who don’t want PvP can still earn ISK by PvE, maybe less PvE would be done if people could finance more ships by killing other players. Would be a good thing imho.
Nobody suggested even remotely to make EVE an arena combat simulator.
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How am I? My position is clear. If bounties are effective at being bounties, as in encouraging people to actively hunt a target for the payout, then the will be exploitable. If they pay low enough to not be exploitable they won’t be attractive as bounties, they will just be an arbitrary payout on normal PvP. Nothing you’ve said suggests otherwise.
I’m sure it can be made relatively effortless but it’s still one more thing added into every ship, one more thing to factor into every calculation.
It’s certainly not balderdash, and I’m not sure where the RNG thing comes from. There was no RNG in bounties, and people built up bounties on characters, then farmed kills thousands of times over. When item values were manipulated the item didn’t need to drop as it wasn’t really an expensive item, it was just something rarely used, like some crappy storyline module.
The same thing happened at a huge scale with FW LP btw, creating this graph:
Right but now we’re going down a rabbit hole of changes needed to item calculations, fittings, core drop mechanics, bounty payouts, etc all to support a bounty system that I doubt a huge amount of people really care about.
ISK sinks can be made anywhere. The only knock-on effect to gankers is that when they kill a freighter with a huge bounty on it they get a payout and everything they kill has a guaranteed core drop. All of their own ships also drop cores which they can then scoop back up with their looter and it used to be the case that gankers lock up their mates and then fired shots at them when the main target went down, so often gankers got payouts on kills from other gankers too. Why do you think Syzygium supports bounties? Because they are beneficial to gankers.
And still constrained by you needing to get a ship on grid with the gankers before concord destroys them, then trying to scoop the core before their looter.
I just don’t see anything of value here. It’s just the same old bounty system in a different way. It didn’t work then I don’t know why it would work now by adding contracts and cores into the mix.
Don’t condescend. It’s fine for our opinions to just differ, it doesn’t mean one of us isn’t seeing the “full picture” it just means our opinions differ.
I just think they shouldn’t bother adding it. There are countless mechanics CCP could spend their time better improving.
Yeah, I know. That’s what I’m saying. Bounty systems don’t work because you can’t make them effective and are unable to be exploited because death doesn’t really matter. If the payout is too low, people ignore it, if the payout is too high people farm themselves for money.
Sure, but you said no one whines about PvE, which was a lie.
Sure, but bounties weren’t effective. Again this is a two-pronged thing, for a bounty to work it has to BOTH pay out enough to encourage hunting and not be exploitable through self-farming. They’ve only ever managed to fulfill one criterion at a time, never both. I don’t think it can be done in EVE.
Not really. I could just declare war at 3am in the morning for the defending corp anyway. The hull timer is generally around the same time of day.
If everything that was not perfectly finely balanced was removed from Eve…there’d be nothing left. Eve relies heavily on ‘unfair’ mechanics. But at the same time, everyone is free to choose to be the beneficiary or victim of those mechanics.
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This isn’t condescension, it’s exactly what I said it is. Yes, our opinions simply differ and that’s why I said I’m fine with disagreement.
“Not the full picture” is specifically in reference to the fact that I’ve got, and am describing, a series of interacting changes that support each other in-game. This is how you fix game problems, not by attempting to address each one in isolation.
It’s obvious you’re kind of hung up here on rejecting the concept of bounties - you’ve had to redefine what they should be, you’re misinterpreting what they do, and you’re missing out on grasping concepts such as “entity X putting a contract on Entity Y” being the same as “simply tagging the character direct with the bounty”. “Entities” in-game are generally well understood to be such things are corps, alliances, or even ship types as well as individual characters.
You’re also not getting that when paying only 50% of “destroyed” value, if you’re manipulating item values to increase your payout (which you state as “easily done” but is actually anything but), then the item has to be destroyed to affect the payout - otherwise it has no effect. That’s RNG driven.
Making six different changes to fix 4 problem areas isn’t “going down the rabbit hole”, it’s addressing game design flaws holistically, which is how they need to be fixed. CCP’s single-focus “fixes” are the source of half the problems in the game.
Anyway, I’m fine with your differing opinion. You’ve decided they’re a poor idea, therefore your approach is to break each concept down piecemeal and find (or make up) a flaw with that single concept in isolation. That’s what “not seeing the full picture” is.
Exactly. “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Potential adjustments to the game don’t have to be perfect, or completely non-exploitable, or absolutely free of abuse.
A somewhat flawed system that creates more and better player interactions and can be implemented with CCP’s existing resources, is far better than a conceptually perfect system that will never materialize.
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Well, I too disagree with the approach of “whatever isn’t perfect shouldn’t be bothered with”. For obvious reasons. The old bounty system was better than having no bounty system at all and it’s hard to imagine something better that can’t be abused very easily. It was as close to a perfect solution as it could get, at least nobody so far could suggest any better way. So it’s a pretty easy pick, I would like to see the old bounty system reactivated because it is a clear benefit over having none, as it offered fun, roleplay options or immersion in different ways for many players while de-facto hurting no one. Even if some newbie would be scared about some bounty put on him, it could be easily explained to him that a bounty does not make him attackable in HighSec or change any rules of engagement, so he must use the same precautions like always to not being killed.
Oh come on, what happenened to “people able to read messages in context”? I interpreted your “Whining about PvE doesnt help” as being pointed at my comparison with the NPC-bounty grinder in HighSec. So my “Nobody whines about PvE” was obviously telling you that “I don’t meant to whine about PvE with this statement” and not that literally trying to claim “Nobody ever whines about PvE content in EvE Online”, which is very obviously false. If you really want to try to make a point here, it looks pretty desperate to me.
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When said gameplay consist of crushing LMB on predetermined point in the screen for hours and then instantly docking within less than second then this is needed.
Kilright is certainly a better option than inability to dock which was discussed before.
But… since you can steal loot with an alpha clone, it doesn’t really solve much anyway…
That’s not how it works. Defenders set a time and the reinforcement timer is the next time the selected time is hit after a minimum amount of days minimum (4.5 for high sec on a medium structure for example) plus or minus some hours (1.5 for high sec on a medium structure).
This is a strawman. Enough with your dishonesty.
I find it funny that these people, like the one-trick ponies that they are, are framing bounties solely in terms of how they’d apply to gankers, not even realizing that the vast majority of acts that result in bounties(old) and kill right eligibility (new) have nothing to do with an activity that is at this current time performed by about a dozen total unique individuals out of the game’s entire population.
I also find it very funny to see a bunch of people who haven’t done a single bit of EVE PvP in their entire EVE lives (aside maybe from getting ganked once or twice), and posting on disposable throwaway forum alts, are talking about PvP mechanics with the authority of senior game designers.
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And yet with all that, they’re still more useful, better thought out, and better received than yet another of your pointless strawman parodies:
Or this:
Or, well, pretty much 90% of your posts.
Don’t be jealous that other people post better than you.
Just use your powers for good, not evil.