Proofs?
Anyways im not talking about mechanics that are already implimented into the game currently. Im talking about how the mechanics would work with my idea of how it should be. You can’t sit here and tell me i have no concept of game mechanics when im talking about entirely new mechanics that could be implimented. Most of which either piggy backed or revisions of current game mechanics.
It is certainly a laudable goal to try to improve the bounty system because it is so broken currently… The best use I’ve found for it is to put a bounty on your friends, so you can keep tabs of what they’re up to (you get a notification when they get killed!). That’s pretty far from the intended system…
The problem with what you are talking about, is that you are forgetting the loot incentive. If, by putting a bounty on you, I can make it so that it becomes possible to kill you without CONCORD involvement, this is going to be abused by people. Let’s say:
I see you in a ship carrying lots of shiny stuff? I put a bounty on you. Nothing big, just a few millions so you enter the lottery. Not because you did something to annoy me. Because I want to make it possible for myself (or my 100 alts/friends) to randomly draw you in the bounty lottery. Then we can wait for when you are carrying shiny stuff, kill you legally (hey! This guy had a bounty on him and we’re the good bounty hunting dogs! move along CONCORD) and grab all the shiny stuff that the loot fairy dropped in your wreck.
Investment: a few millions
Return: a pricey kill mail to boost our ego and ~half your shiny loot
That’s just unsustainable. Freighter gankers would switch from suicide ganking in Niarja and Uedama to sitting anywhere between trade hubs, placing bounties of a few millions on freighters as they go by and then collecting the bounties entirely legally without getting blown up in retaliation, killing people who have actually done nothing wrong.
You can make it so that bounty hunters can’t put bounties on people, but that doesn’t help anything since you can have so many alts in this game, especially now with alphas.
You can make it random so that people can’t be specifically targeted, but I assure you that gankers would make sure the number of freighter pilots with bounties on them would be so large that they’d come up in the random draw often enough.
You can make it difficult to be a bounty hunter, but people grind for all kinds of things for long periods of time in this game and safe ganking in high sec by exploiting bounties would certainly warrant that.
There’s a few possible things to do to address that:
To circumvent the profitable ganking problem, you could make it such that when a bounty hunter activates a “bounty kill right”, if the target ship is destroyed, the wreck along with all its content are automatically destroyed: The hunters are not in it for the loot, they are in it for the revenge and the bounty.
To take away the griefing ganking, make it so that bounties can only be placed while in space with the target pilot and only if the target pilot has a suspect or hostile flag (ie they need to have committed a crime to get a bounty put on them) OR if you have kill rights on the target pilot (at which point placing the bounty “consumes” the kill right).
Setting-wise:
CONCORD handles all bounties: to place a bounty on someone, they must have committed a crime as CONCORD understands it (ie an action for which CONCORD would give you the right to shoot them). Stealing from your corp hangar, betraying your friends, afk mining in high sec and other such “crimes” aren’t crimes, they are normal behaviour (or a consequence of the victim’s stupidity) and not something CONCORD cares about.
Suddenly, you have a system where:
The empires fund CONCORD to retaliate against hostile activities. The capsuleers pay CONCORD (who would take a cut off every bounties as they are put on someone’s head) to keep known criminals out of HS.
your over complicating it.
and you underestimate the “random” roll of bounties. you can’t just keep re rolling bounties until you get what you want. you get 10 random bounties. and until one of those bounties is taken out and you are payed you cannot get another list. once one is taken out you can replace that bounty you claimed on the list with another random bounty. idk why that is so hard to understand. your trying to poke a whole where there shouldn’t be. and with a system like this there will probably be A LOT of bounties out there so the chances of getting those haulers or that shiny ship you randomly flew by is minuscule.
the best way to circumvent all of these problems you’ve listed. since we would take away kill rights and transfer them to bounty hunters. basically instead of getting a kill right you would get an option to place a bounty. when they kill you and such and if they have the hostile flag like you stated. and thats just out in space.
and for bounties for players who steal from a corp, bounty placements have to be submitted and approved. by concord. alot like how wardecs are approved or denied.
I didn’t know what you intended for your “random 10”. Also, if the solution were simple, it would have been found by now… I suspect you underestimate the capacity for EVE players to find ways to exploit mechanics, as was pointed out by the above poster.
If the random 10 are fixed, one runs a risk of getting 10 that they can’t find.
If it’s re-rollable, we run the risk of “bounty hunters” getting the one they want.
You can add filters and add timers to reduce one risk, but then you increase the other.
You do know all wardecs that go through concord are approved right? There isn’t some person sitting behind a desk working out whether or not a war should be started. You pay isk, War goes live in twenty 4 hours. there is no yes or no.
not true i’ve seen concord not approve wardecs.
You seen a wardec end because the dec’er didnt pay for the next week of war. Not someone deny a war because of ‘reasons’. Concord is an NPC.
i’ve watched a wardec the whole 24 hour period. someone tried to declare war. and at the 24 hour mark it said concord denied the wardec. so no wardec ever happened.
It wasn’t a physical person canceling the war. The aggressor has the option to back out before the war goes live. Which is what happened. Your knowledge in just this area of the games mechanics is telling as to why you think the bounty system is such an easy fix.
i know it wasn’t a physical person
regardeless war dec’ing has nothing to do with my system. your just being an ass
Im the ass but you insist your system be based off how concord confirms or denies a war request. Concord does not invalidate a war for any reason other than the aggressor telling them not to. So where does that tie into your bounty system? You suggested it. But im the ass. Stop overlooking your intelligence.
Here’s where you said an NPC is gonna decide whether or not I get the bounty from killing you. And this is the part of your suggestion I call into question. Because said NPC has no bearing on anything. I wasn’t trying to be an ass but you are forcing my hand.
fine so i misspoke it was just a suggestion as to it would have to be approved. it was just an idea to throw out there to see if it sticks. point is that one thing i said doesn’t invalidate everything else.
tl;dr.
but if this is where we’ll be discussing bounties, and chance ravine hasn’t chimed in, here’s a vid he uploaded of him talking about it while driving his car.
my points on that:
5 slots.
there should be a ranking based on the total bounty pool that determines information supplied to the hunter. based on a 5 tier system, where tier 1 would show some rudimentary intel on where you may be located, and tier 5 showing everything from where you are to what ship your flying, maybe with tier 5 having a constant update to when the target changes system, making it extremely difficult to nail someone such as the one who gets the tiny bounty for trivial harassment of a n00b but easier to locate someone who most likely has that 2 billion bounty for being an elite PVPer.
And by “keeps coming up” you refer to your own three threads on the exact same topic? Great!
i wanted to read, but the lack of structure in your thoughts and the equally poor layout of your post made me dismiss it. glancing over responses, it seems to be the right choice.
could you try again, with less enthusiasm and more cold, hard, structured, linear logic?
thanks!
The reason this is a dead horse, the reason CCP have done nothing with the carcass, and the reason this topic is doing nothing to move and/or revive said carcass is because there’s a fundamental problem here.
If you can pay ISK to kill someone in High Sec without repercussions then the system will be abused, no matter how much you try to get around this as long as this is the case the system will be abused. Even your system here is easy to abuse. I put an alt who can fly a T1 Cruiser or similar into the Bounty Faction and then have my main put bounties on all the Freighters I can find.
Those Freighter pilots now either need to clear the bounty by getting ganked in a noob ship or something or they’re dead meat.
Limited slots? Doesn’t matter, everyone in PIRAT can take a different set.
This is why the horse is dead. The pro-Bounty Hunting side wants something that gets around Crime Watch and that’s never going to work.
I’m hearing you, but I fear that the reason bounties don’t work in eve is because isk is always going to be a pointless reason to fight.
The only people who care about risk in pvp are the fat feeble who worship killboardz stats. Real men don’t care about the numbers. Real men fight for honour, and bragging rights.
Think about why you out a bounty on a person. It is not to see their ship blow up. It is to humiliate your enemy and make him regret the day he raped you in all your holes and stole your stuffs.
The other reason bounty hunting doesn’t work is because it presumes that Eve is the sort of game where folks can’t dock up and spin ships and chat, as a valid play style. The bounty hunter can’t force the prey into combat. He can’t wait for him to need a dump, and set upon him when he stumbles to the outside crapper at 3 am. Which is how grandpa always did it.