Having been recently “bountified”, I started looking into it and trying to understand it. So far, I’ve been unable to understand the rationale behind the current implementation and am hoping that someone can enlighten me.
If I have it right ,the current player bounty mechanic works like this:
Anybody can place a bounty on anybody, for any reason,for any amount.
2.The “bountified” gets to wear a big “Wanted” sign on their portrait until it suffers a destruction of assets equal to 5 times the amount of bounty or does not log in for a “long, long” time.
Shooting at a “bountfied” in hisec will draw the Concord’s wrath (with predictable results).
Shooting in losec is permitted and will grant the shooter a remaining bounty payoff of 1/5 of the bountified’s destroyed assets.
Ok now for the questions
a) Does the (hisec) shooter incur a standings loss? If not, is that not an incentive for gankers?
b) Is the intention to incentivize the “bountified” from losec?
c) What is “long,long” time ?
1 100 years
2 whenever CCP feels like it
3 until the player quits
a) Yes. The bounty changes nothing regarding aggression mechanics or the penalty applied for doing so. Shooting someone in highsec (or lowsec) that has a bounty is exactly like shooting the same player without a bounty.
b) No. The incentive is to provide a reward for destroying the target’s stuff. Whether that takes place in highsec, lowsec, nullsec or a wormhole does not matter. It is a way to pay other players for exploding someone you have a beef with. It is often meaningless as CONCORD still imposes a penalty in highsec for unlawful agression, and elsewhere you probably will shoot anyway as there is little penalty aside from small amount of security status in lowsec, but it can make a difference or even encourage someone to specifically hunt someone if they fly shiny things.
c) Unknown. Too long to make it useful. If you want to remove a bounty, you will have to do it yourself by losing some ships rather than trying to let it expire. But unless it is a massive amount to make someone take the ship loss to CONCORD in highsec, and you fly expensive things, it isn’t worth worrying about. A few hundred thousand or few million ISK in bounty is not going to make a difference whether someone is going to shoot you. Hell, half of the active playerbase probably has a small bounty of some sort on them.
TL;DR - ignore it. It makes almost no difference to your game play.
Than ks for clarifying a).
I disagree with you on b) as the risk/reward ratio has been skewed and in this scenario provides additional incentive to the shooter
Re c) let’s imagine a case where a relatively new player (< 3 months) gets 50 Mil bounty placed on him just because.
The incentive is minuscule outside of highsec. Outside of highsec, especially nullsec and wormholes people generally shoot you no matter what if they catch you, for the loot if for no other reason. A bounty isn’t going to make a difference. In lowsec, maybe, but the penalty is so low unless you pod someone they generally are going to take the kill rather than just let you go because you aren’t worth exploding.
50M ISK isn’t insignificant however. I gank miners all the time in highsec, and while a 50M ISK bounty isn’t enough to make me hunt someone, it would make me choose you over someone else in an ice belt you were side by side and I stumbled across you both.
That is sort of the point of the bounty though, to provide an incentive for someone else to shoot you. The typical 100k bounty is ignored by everyone, but large bounties might spark some interest from someone looking for something to do in the sandbox, or running the numbers to see if you are a profitable gank target.
Still though, the bounty doesn’t change the engagement rules in any way and losing ships is a core part of Eve. I wouldn’t worry about it very much as practically it isn’t likely to make a difference whether someone makes an attempt to explode you or not.
This. Unfortunately in a sandbox like EvE with unrestricted anonymous alts, an exploit-free bounty hunter profession is very difficult (or impossible?) to implement. So we are left with this “joke” mechanic. At least it allows to scare newbies.
Bounties don’t do anything. CCP didn’t know what to do with them; the previous system was also weird; it allowed bounties only on pirates with low security standings, but the first bounty hunter to make a kill collected the whole bounty. As a result, the pirate simply made an alt, shot his main with his alt, and collected the bounty.
CCP’s primary concern with this system is that you can’t make an alt to collect the bounty. But they suck at design, so this is what we ended up with.
As the others have said:
You can have 100 million bounty on you, if you fly frigates worth 400k, people get an 80k “incentive” to shoot you. Thus, the amount of the bounty does not matter, it’s just the ship that you’re flying that matters.
Nobody stops to check. In PVP they have a split second to make the decision to attack you or not. Most important thing that matters is your ship, how much threat it can be to them. Are you flying an ewar jammer? Logistics? T2 heavy DPS? Some sort of neutralizer ship that can screw them up? It’s purely a PVP decision. Maybe they take another second to look at your character, see how old you are, try to estimate how many skill points you have, but nowadays anyone can inject skill points, so it’s somewhat worthless. You could be flying a “bait” frigate with T2 and officer fittings that will kick their ass. Nobody stops to check the bounty.
This is a PVP game. Your “Wanted” sign is actually a badge of honor; maybe you’re not a complete carebear, stuck to mining all day long mindlessly. Maybe you attacked someone, and they put a bounty on you. It’s street cred.
Thus, just ignore the bounty. It really does nothing. People give newbies bounties just to give them a better chance to be recruited into the PVP corps that actually make the game fun. Try some PVP, because at most you’ll just lose a bunch of pixel ships that are worth 400k, almost nothing. But maybe you’ll find the fun in this game if you try it.
EDIT: Bounties don’t let anyone do ANYTHING extra that they couldn’t do before. In high-sec, if you get into a suicide gank attack, they’ll still lose their sec. status and get Concorded. In low-sec, they’ll still lose sec. status. In null or wormhole space, it still doesn’t matter what they do (free for all PVP). Bounties don’t do anything as far as the PVP rules of combat.
Oh yeah, also, don’t try to make the “perfect” character. Because if you try that, you’ll spend 6 months - 1 year - 3 years training the perfect set of skills and building the perfect standings with the NPCs, and then THIS happens (bounty). Or you push the wrong button or shoot the wrong thing, and oops now you have negative security and everyone thinks you’re a pirate. Character RUINED! All this time WASTED! Don’t do that.
Your character in this game lets you unlock ships to fly, and each ship is a role (tank, dps, remote repairs (healer), electronic jammer (crowd control), industry, transport, scout, tackler, bait, etc.). You unlock all these roles so you can have options: when you want to have fun, you pick a role and go try it; if it’s no fun pick another one and play with that. That’s the point. Your character is like a whole account of mages, warriors, and rogues in other MMO’s, and the point of these games is to have fun.
So take your bounty and whatever other mistakes may affect your character, and live with them. Your character is a toolbelt, doesn’t have to be perfect, just has to do its job.
Thanks to All for suggestions on how to cope with this “burden”.
BTW I am not that concerned with the threat aspects of this mechanics.
What I really find offensive, is that the mechanic paints a WANTED sign on my portrait and then lets anyone on the grid see it. If you think that is just silly, consider a “feature” that would allow me (for a nominal fee ofc) to deface your portrait.
It would be interesting to note what % of the player population actually supports the feature as it is presently implemented.
Does anybody know whether such a poll was conducted previously, and what was the CCP response?
You are wrong, the ONLY thing that keeps us from having a bounty system that makes full payouts AND cannot be abused / gamed for profit by killing your own characters is this silly ass notion that anyone can place a bounty on any other player, at any time and for any or no reason at all. Remove that and ALL of the other so called problems are easily solved.
Profit gained by killing your own character for the bounty is not specifically the problem from a historical perspective. Profit gained by placing that bounty yourself and then collecting it by killing yourself IS the problem. So how do we solve this issue? Simple really, you have the game remove the entire amount of the bounty from the wallet of the character that is placing the bounty. Instantly you cannot profit by placing a bounty on and then killing your own characters and from that historical perspective that solves the problem completely
Why yes it does still leave open the possibility of profit by killing your own character and collecting a bounty placed by someone else and I wan to thank you for pointing that out even before you have the chance to do so. My answer is I simply do not care about this, yes you are profiting from killing your own character, but you are not profiting by placing that bounty yourself and that is what really matters. The rest is an unintended side affect of the way things work you know like gankling.
But even then it would at least in concept be a simple change to the servers to have them check ownership of the characters involved and deny payment of bounty if they were both owned by the same player. Lag could be an issue so this would need to happen as a task outside the things normally handled by the servers and yet that delay can easily be covered by lore that states bounty cannot be paid out until the kill can be “officially” confirmed. Account security is a concern here and that is yet another reason for the delayed payout it would allow CCP more flexibility in running the required checks without exposing the account information part of the database to additional security risks.
I like the term, gotta make sure to remember it.