As you may recall, the bounty system was temporarily removed for one month in approximately November or October 2019? Since its anticipated return by the beginning of 2020, I have had a few years to think about this.
Should a game involving space piracy have a bounty system? Obviously, the administration of this cannot be offloaded unto players, for the same reason we do not expect players to enforce contracts or market orders. It just doesn’t work, because neither party can be trusted to complete their side of the agreement. There needs to be an official ingame system which governs the rules of a bounty, automatically determining which kills qualify and ensuring payment. Otherwise, we are left with the current system, which has no real bounties.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I profit from the non-existent bounty system, and it is in my interest for there to be no bounty system. While I benefited from the bounty system as a new player, today I benefit from the fact there is no system, to the disadvantage of new players who would benefit from a formal system.
What I propose, is that for now we focus the discussion purely on the question of whether a game about outerspace and piracy should have bounty hunters and bounties. Do you feel that bounty hunting is a staple of the sci-fi genre, and should be part of EvE Online? I certainly do, and I would hope that CCP intends at some point to revisit this issue.
I completely agree that a bounty system thematically fits within a space game and preferably should be part of it.
However it’s pretty hard to come up with a bounty system that isn’t easily exploited by cooperation between the hunter and the target. While a simple solution CCP used in the past was that the payout was limited to the value of the target’s ship lost, this meant that the payout for bounty hunting was pretty much worthless, irrelevant and ignored.
I recall I got a whole lot of random bounties paid out while killing people with bounties while I wasn’t looking for bounty payout and the payout was about as much as I got when my fleet members killed a few NPC rats on a gate: irrelevant.
I would love to see a bounty hunting system that avoids those pitfalls. I wonder if it’s possible though.
My wishlist:
relevant impactful payout values
not to be exploited through cooperation between hunter and target
actual hunting of targets, rather than random payouts during fights
It’s been a while since I thought of a system that could do this, but I recall last time I did I was thinking of a selection of randomly assigned targets to avoid easy hunter-target cooperation, bounty payouts only to active hunters who took on that job rather than any random player who kills the target to make ‘hunting’ a bigger part of it and enable bigger rewards, and bounty hunter scores that somehow measure successful jobs, increase the bounty payouts and also try to keep bounty hunters honourable by making it more valuable to keep a high score than it is to cooperate with some targets in cheap ships for quick ISK.
That last mechanic is something a bounty hunter system will most likely need, because if ISK is the sole driving force and only variable behind bounty hunting then it’s guaranteed to be exploited. A good bounty hunter rating is also the most complicated mechanic of bounty hunting as it’s the part that people will definitely try to game, like they game everything else from war declarations to Omega subscription prices.
I just don’t know if it’s possible to give us a bounty hunting system that isn’t going to be exploited. The last bounty system was bad, most suggestions I see on this topic terrible and if a new system isn’t at least mediocre then I’d rather have no bounty system than another bad one.
While you yourself may not have hunted bounties, does it follow logically that you know whether or not other players did? Obviously, there are no statistics available on whether or not the bounty system was actually “irrelevant” or “ignored”. This seems to be more of a popular myth than anything else.
I suggest that many players, especially new players, benefitted from the bounty system. For me, as a new player, it was a steady source of isk and it wasn’t “worthless”. This sounds like an example of a game mechanic which was removed because greedy bittervets didn’t think it was profitable, but there are other reasons to have a bounty system in a sci-fi game.
It was just my experience that the bounty payouts I got were random (I rarely was aware that some targets in fleet combat that I fought had a bounty) and low, i.e. only a fraction of a ship price, reduced even more by splitting it between fleet members.
I don’t dispute that the ISK helped some players, but is that really the fantasy bounty hunting should fulfill? A near negligible extra payout of only up to 20% of the target’s hull value in a fight you would have taken anyway?
My fantasy of bounty hunting is different.
I’d love bounty hunting to be a separate activity in EVE, rather than a small extra payout during regular PvP.
Let it be about really hunting targets to obtain large rewards. Getting special corpses of targets assigned to you to get hundreds of missions of ISK, even if you catch them in a cheap frigate.
For example, a new Agency window where players can ask to be assigned a random limited selection of currently active players with big bounties on their heads to obtain a large part of the payout if the target is killed and special bounty mission version of the corpse is looted while on that bounty mission, and brought back to an NPC agent. Possibly with temporary penalties for the target too so that they don’t even want to cooperate for a part of the payout.
I’d love for bounties to be paid out to players who were specifically hunting that target, rather than just anyone who kills them. And for payouts to possibly far exceed the price of the target’s ship, with enough mechanics to prevent cooperation between hunter and target.
And if you succeed in taking down some lesser thugs your hunter rating goes up and you can chase even more notorious targets (i.e. with bigger bounties on their heads) for even bigger bounty payouts.
Let bounty hunter be a new way to play the game, not just ‘extra ISK while PvPing’.
Surely if the player who places the bounty sets, and pays, the bounty, and another player redeems it via the kill, then it is cost neutral (or even profitable ccp if a tax is applied), and it shouldn’t matter if there is collusion between player and target?
i remember i once got a 5 mil bounty from someone in rookie chat that i was trying to help, and got mad when i messaged them to make it easier than being in the main rookie chat.
See, thats how different the opinions about such a system are. Some want it purely for the “fun part”. Others to make it a “profession”. Again others to fit into the lore and makes sense from a viewpoint of immersion.
You can’t ever come up with a system that brings all those different stances together. And one thing is certain: If it had the slightest weakness for abuse, it would be abused like mad.
I personally would like to see the latest version of the old Bounty system re-implemented. That 20% of the ships hull price as payout made sure nobody could just collect his own bounties via killing himself with an Alt, because there is no way to make that not come at a huge loss. And it at least rewarded PvP, even if only occasionally and at random. But still better than nothing.
Yes, there are ways to improve that. Quite a lot. But seriously, thats a very complex topic. And about half the players would still not like it and even less use it, for various reasons (see above ^^).
As long as bounty killrights cannot be placed on inelligible targets (ie. anyone who has not committed a suspect or criminal action or has low sec status), I am fine with a bounty system.
Should everyone be eligible for bounties?
Or should there be some protection against bounties on new players or goody goody players?
Who is coordinating the central bounty system? Who are the agents that pay out bounties? I would think it is an agency like CONCORD that arranges everything surrounding bounties. I can easily imagine they set some bounty prerequisites of “only set a bounty on players who have low security status” or “only bounties on players you have a kill right on” or “only bounties on players who currently have a criminal or suspect flag”.
Or we could have the old bounty system back without such restrictions. Give players full freedom to put bounties on anyone, including their mining competitors, other transporters or industrialists. But also on new players who ask questions in rookie help channel.
I think there should be a lot of freedom to set bounties and that we should also be able to put a bounty on some player just because we dislike what they say or do, not only because they’re criminals.
I’m just not so sure it’s good that we allow setting bounties on new players though, especially not if my fantasy of a bounty system is implemented, which means that this player is now hunted by players who are assigned the death of this new player and are chasing them with locator agents for a quick kill.
Do you really want bounty hunting to be about getting some spare change while you kill ships you would have killed anyway?
Sure, extra ISK is nice for new players, but wouldn’t it be much more interesting if bounty hunting involved going out of your way to actually hunt assigned bounty targets for much more sizeable bounty payouts?
Link it to security status? Bounty agents are less comfortable putting a bounty on a high security status so charge more. That makes it so even pilots with a 5 security status can be bountied…….it just costs significant isk. And/Or standings. For example an Amarr Bounty agent wouldn’t process a bounty against a pilot with a high Amarr standing. That would force a little effort from those putting bounties as the might need to travel across empires to find a faction where low standings allow the bounty to be placed.
What I’m getting at is creating a bit of friction would guard a bit against just creating a bounty because someone posted a crap fit in chat. Although if someone really wants to harass a player and continually apply bounties it would still come down to how much isk they want to throw at it.
But yeah. It’s difficult. The amount of safeguards that would be required to stop griefing would likely result in a system that just isn’t impactful.