So … I just saw that news article.
@CCP_Falcon I’m a little confused. Will people still be able to make killrights available so I can pick those up, identify them on overview and enage on them?
This means that bounties and kill rights on player characters will not be displayed for the duration of time that this system is offline, they will however still be accessible and paid out.
Maybe it’s because I skipped breakfast, but as I said, confuzzled.
Go and check some of the usual killright-baiters and you’ll know.
It’s nice though that CCP reacted so quickly after it came out that during yesterdays fight players used this mechanic to overload the server.
That’s the thing though. One some I have killrights for I see nothing on overview. Others the option is available. I came across one guy with a public killright visible through the icon, but no option on overview. I’ll clear cache after downtime, but it’s … odd.
The service that was disabled is a call that clients make to the server in order to display bounty/killright status on the overview.
This has been switched off for now - the rest of the bounty and killrights system underneath is still working as normal.
So, does this mean, killrights and bounties are still in place, but I don’t see them anymore on players? How do I activate a killright then?
I haven’t got the foggiest. I see no option?
If we are going to play armchair game designer, I think the best would be to have the real-time bounty updates just autodisabled when the node enters TiDi. You might want to know if there is a bounty you can collect even in nullsec, but I think that knowledge could be sacrificed with little impact if the server is bumping up against capacity in the name of better performance.
What about killrights? They require server calls too I assume but are quite meaningless beyond hisec, unless I’m missing something.
No, killrights are meaningless. In fact, I think all that Crimewatch stuff is turned off completely on the nullsec nodes already for performance. Maybe you can pay someone and activate a killright in nullsec, but it clearly does nothing. That could be turned off completely if that is technically feasible with no impact.
If a DDOS was to blame yesterday, why even do anything about this bounty stuff
Maybe they were DDOS-ed by bounty requests. 
Something like this was reported. Players using the bounty system to increase system lag - possibly to stop people from logging back in, loading grid after jumping in etc.
This doesn’t mean there was no DDoS though.
But that is clearly an exploit, will people get punished for it? 
They should, but CCP has recently been quite forgiving towards people who use exploits. Without punishment, this kind of thing will continue to happen. If not with the bounty system, then with something else. It might be the right time to show that the rules are not just for decoration.
post-close edit to clear one thing up, @Emma_Valor this someone baiting you into paying the killright and then making it unavailable again.
This has now been re-enabled as of downtime today.
This has to be fixed, I’ve never seen it before and I really don’t know how long it’s been around. I went to activate a kill right on a tornado fleet, clicked activate for 20m isk launch 900 dps torps, message pops up “This kill right is no longer available” Get instantly Concorded.
This sincerely is not right, you only have seconds to act after a KR is activated or the player knows they are about to get blapped. I shouldn’t have to worry about waiting 3-5 seconds to find out the KR is no longer available.
Add insult to injury had the same thing happen the other night, but after It said it was no longer available, I clicked it again and it activated.
This is a serious problem.
There is even a safety setting that helps you prevent such accidents. The only reason to have this on red in highsec is if you want to get CONCORDed.
The disappearing kill right seems to be a bug that is around for a long time and I’m not sure why CCP didn’t already fix it.
Were your safety setting green?
Yep, as the others said… don’t leave your Safety set to Red, move it down to Yellow or Green. Then you won’t accidentally fire Torps on someone who isn’t a valid target (yet).