The "Wretched hive of scum and villainy Patch" (Bounting Hunting, Smuggling, and Contract based wars)!

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

Imagine with me for a minute an Eve Online that has bounty hunting, smuggling, and a contract-based war system. A place similar to Star War’s “Mos Eisley”, and while Jita is a top contender for this title, I don’t see it being well suited as the hub where all the following exists. We’ve all seen thread after thread with suggestions for various iterations of the above, but the following is what I envision (yes this is long, and that’s because it’d be a whole freakin patch or series of changes to actually create playstyles for once instead of CCP’s typical behavior of nerfing them from the game):

Creating OUR Mos Eisley - “Home to smugglers, bounty hunters, mercenaries and other undesireables"

NEW NPC GROUP / FACTION:

  • There’s a new NPC group / faction that has stations in Lowsec scattered all around New Eden. These stations house a black market where illicit goods are able to be bought and sold by players.

  • Boosters beyond synth tier are once again illegal to transport in Highsec. The same previous mechanics that existed are used except you can only buy and sell them directly to market at these Lowsec stations.

  • Pirate Implants are considered illicit goods and fall under the same category as boosters (I mean they are PIRATE implants… should be illegal to transport).

  • An LP store where you can purchase exclusive skins, enhanced mutiplasmids, and such.

  • Completing “work” rewards pilots with an item as proof of completion. Can be turned in for standings increase and LP. Can be exchanged between players. Standings can be lost if you die to the bounty target.

  • Standing with this faction grants access to reworked Locator Agents! Having the standings for L4 locator agents allows them to tell you if the target is currently online. (Locator agents are currently broken where if a target is docked in an Upwell structure, it tells you they are in space. This should be fixed for all locator agents)

  • This NPC group has Locator Agents scattered throughout New Eden for the sake of hunting.

  • New Security and Distribution missions to go alongside this new groups lore and purpose in New Eden

Locator Agents desperately need to be fixed and need a rework. The removal of the Watchlist (thanks to you abusing the Log Server) is something that actively promotes hunting, since it’s really annoying and is a huge deterrent to make 100 jumps with your scout, hunting players that are offline.

BOUNTY HUNTING! (Reworking kill rights to serve as a bounty hunting system):

Killrights currently serve as a way to directly benefit the person that was unlawfully attacked in the form of being able to set an ISK value that must be paid to the holder in order to attack the offender. This has turned into a system that is mostly used for “Killright scamming” and a system where constant offenders can easily shed their killrights to reduce risk of untimely aggression, but I see a better way!

  • Gain killrights (opportunity to place a bounty) as a result of being unlawfully attacked in Highsec and being podded in Lowsec.

  • Instead of putting a killright on the guy that ganked or podded you, the opportunity to add to their bounty is presented. Example of how this system works:

  • Ganker or Lowsec boi currently has a Bounty pool of 2b isk.
  • Each bounty has it’s own 30-day timer that sheds the ISK from the total upon expiry.
  • You were attacked by a ganker or podded in Lowsec, so you have the opportunity to place a bounty on him. You place a 1b bounty on him and have the option to make it available to a single pilot, an entity, or available to all and lasts for 30 days or until the ENTIRE bounty is depleted.
  • Bounty Hunter sees ganker or Lowsec bad boi flying a Vindicator with a 3b bounty and kills him.
  • Bounty is paid out at 100% of the HULL COST, split between all involved and is subtracted from the total bounty pool.
  • Insurance is NOT paid out to the target.
  • The amount paid out is subtracted from total bounty placed on pilot. When bounty reaches 0, the killright is cleared.
  • Killing the target rewards each pilot involved an item to loot that serves as a trophy for the kill and can be turned into the NPC faction for a standings increase and LP. Can also be exchanged on the “black market” to other players.

  • This removes killright scams as we know it, and has the potential to have better payouts compared to the current joke of a bounty system.

  • Bounty Hunting lowers your Security Status as it’s an unsavory activity and the upstanding citizens of the empire disapprove!

  • Since the bounty is paid out at 100% of only the in-game value of the HULL cost and there’s no insurance reward, I can’t think of any way to effectively use this for RMT (which is the primary concern with a proper bounty system).

  • The Bounty Office UI will display the bounties available to you, and can be searched for by time till expiration and amount of bounty. The Bounty Office UI will also serve to publicly display New Edens top bounty hunters in terms of targets killed and bounty claimed. Can also use the search option to find specific hunters and see their stats!

  • The Bounty system should serve to promote bounty hunting and not a vanity badge for self important pilots to flaunt with little to no risk of having anyone claim it (RIP WHENIMINSPACE, our sweet Nigerian Prince).

RE-REVAMPING WARDECS (Fixing bad mechanics and adding a contract-based marketplace!):

We all know that some seriously stupid mechanics still exist around Wardecs. They are things that I have been vocal about changing because while CCP was rushing to push the previous iteration of Wardec changes I was thinking of all these dumb loopholes and broken mechanics that weren’t being addressed.

A mercenary marketplace is long overdue. A place where two parties can enter in a contract, and in this case it will be a contract for the removal or defense of an Upwell structure. Players need a way to see who is taking this kind of work, what history they have with the work, and how well / efficient they’ve been in the past.

  • Contract for war is created by “Party A” and has a base cost that scales with the size of the target and duration. “Party B” would be the mercenaries that accept the terms at determined cost and the war is started 24-hours upon clicking accept.

  • “Party A” can leave a review or a thumbs up / down to serve as point of efficiency and success (think Yelp for Wardecs).

  • Must have a War HQ to accept contracts (this is also a requirement for assisting).

  • Assisting works the same way where “Party C” offers to either defend the structure for “Party A” or destroy the War HQ of “Party B”.

  • Wars can still be put in as they currently are by the mercenary group assuming the target is War Eligible.

In order to combat the ability to game ridiculous mechanics I offer these suggestions:

  • If you leave an alliance while at war you can’t simply rejoin by joining a different corp in that alliance. You must wait till the wars are dropped OR 7 days (whichever is shorter).
  • Corporations with a War HQ cannot be booted from alliance with active wars.
  • Weapons timer on a wartarget also gives you limited engagement timer.

Essentially wars function as they currently do but the difference is in mercenaries having a calling card with their accomplishments and vetted prior work to better assess their capability. This extends into attacking and defending structures in all areas of space.

The contract system can also be used for Mercenaries that do work outside of Highsec. Your mercenaries that work in areas of space outside of Highsec can have a resume to directly point at to express their ability to do the work and justify the cost.

ADDITIONAL CHANGES THAT ARE GOOD AND STUFF:

  • Athanors in Highsec require starbase charters. You are essentially renting the mineral rights from whichever empire space you are in.

  • If you aren’t on the Athanors ACL and you harvest it’s moon chunk, you inherit a Limited Aggression timer with everyone on the ACL (specific users / entities… not everyone in New Eden). What this does is allows the Athanor owner to sufficiently protect their investment and fend off freeloaders. No, I don’t think ganking or bumping to be a reasonable strategy for your average player or group.

  • If “Player A” is from a War Ineligible player corp and is mining under an Athanor that belongs to a group that is currently at war, “Player A” becomes legal to attack for the group that the Athanor owner is at war with with a rolling 5-minute timer that is active during the harvesting and begins to countdown to 0 upon stopping.

What the above serves as is a partial closing of using neutral corps and the ACL to shed any and all risk off of the players that are ineligible for war. The normally War Ineligible player is unable to be a victim of war while they are mining in asteroid belts, missioning, hauling, and/or doing anything else. This is just isolated to the clear ability to use this loophole in order to directly benefit from the structure while having 0 risk.

  • Logi on killmails.

TL;DR:
There is no TL;DR

2

@Brisc_Rubal you said that you’d be interested in a bounty system that wasn’t open to exploits. I believe this to be it.

3

I don’t see anything to prevent me from placing high bounties on random new players and watching the lulz roll in…

1 Like
4

It doesn’t work like that. You only get to place bounties if you are the victim of illegal aggression. Basically how killrights work now, except the ISK doesn’t go to the guy that setup the killright - it gets paid to the hunter.

I agree that any system that allows players to flag anyone for legal combat in Highsec would be utterly broken. It has to based off a revenge system otherwise I’d just dunk on Freighters and Jump Freighters all day with nothing they can do about it.

5

Well the way it currently works is you can place a bounty on anyone for any reason or no reason at all. And what happens to those who already have multi-million isk or billion isk bounties. Would everyone’s slate get wiped clean to start this off?

6

Right, so I’m calling for the way bounties work where you can freely place them on others to come to an end or at least change how they work.

CCP can do (2) things I reckon.

  • Place all bounties on a 30 day timer that works and is claimable exactly as listed in the OP.
  • Erase all current existing bounties as it’s nothing more than a vanity badge with little risk to having anyone claim a substantial sum (it’s not worth pursuing someone because they have a 100b bounty because you’ll get peanuts)

Either method is going to have those self-important people in the Top-10 of the Bounty Office crying, because like I said… it’s a way to peacock around and seem important or scary. CCP should ask this question: Is it better to upset a very small portion of the community for the sake of opening up the door for compelling and interesting gameplay?

7

Dude, paying out at 100% hull cost and giving them LP means they can just use an alt or a friend to claim the bounty and actually make a profit.

And, that’s really the biggest problem with bounties in a game with immortal characters (not RMT). If you make the payout worthwhile for bounty hunters, you also make it worthwhile for the target to collect it himself. And if you make it not worthwhile for the target to mess with, you make it not worthwhile for bounty hunters.

I also have more nitpicks. For example, if you restricted bounties to when a player had killrights, no one could place bounties on ninja looters, corp thieves, scammers, trash talkers, competitors, and so on. This would exclude a lot of people who would want to place bounties for legitimate reasons, and drastically reduce the total number of bounties available to collect.

Also, why lower the bounty hunter’s security status? What is this supposed to achieve? It seems like it would just discourage bounty hunting, as it would make traveling around looking for targets more difficult. Moreover, how much would it suck to catch a target, be working on killing him, and just have the faction police show up and kill both of you.

Oh yeah, you do know that gankers only fly disposable ships, right? I mean, they can vary in cost, as they’ll sometimes bust out with more expensive ships like tornados and taloses, but most gankers spend most of their time in cheap catalysts. So, to collect a 100mil bounty on a ganker, you’d stand a good chance of needing to kill him a hundred times. And, even killing him once can be a PITA. You see, gankers already have to contend with the faction police (and criminal timers). So, the ganker toon himself will remain docked or tethered 99% of the time, and only actually be vulnerable for 20ish second chunks of time no less than 15minutes apart. So it would start with bounty hunters having to do a bunch of bumping at first, and end with gankers quickly adapting (they would hug upwell structures when tethering and/or only undock as soon as their ready to warp to a target). And how would you handle hunting gankers while they are executing the gank? Like would the bounty hunter need to actually get the kill? Or would just being on the killmail be good enough (remember Concord will be there shortly)? Personally, I think you should go with the latter, because otherwise the bounty hunter’s actions would be meaningless outside of the isk he pockets, and it would encourage hunters to follow around large ganking fleets and just cycle their guns on as many gankers as possible without actually killing any of them.

Alright, that’s enough. This is turning into a wall of text, and I haven’t even read past the bounty hunting proposal yet. And yeah, I think making a bounty hunting system that works is a beast of a challenge, and I’m not even sure that it’s actually possible in a game with immortal characters.

1 Like
8

Apart from adjusting the payout % you can easily combat this by having the target be in the dark for the duration of the contract. I’ll elaborate:

  • The entire experience can be contract based where the hunter accessed a list of bounties through the Agency Window.

  • There you could shroud it in even more uncertainty by simply not being able to look up your buddy’s name and accepting his contract.

  • Maybe Bounty Hunters are required to present a Bounty Broker with an item or token of sorts… something that you get from Lowsec belt rafting (more people in space more people to shoot at).

  • When a hunter buys a contract and activated it, the target gets no notification or warning.

Problem solved.

The bounties you describe are useless and serve as nothing more than a griefers badge of honor. Trust me I have over 20b bounty between my characters R-0-B-0-C-O-P and STOP AND FRISK. When I received those gifts from an upset freighter pilot he was pretty bummed out that they were effectively useless and that no one was going to have incentive to hunt or kill me because of it.

A bounty system where someone can place a sum of ISK on someone’s head and then a hunter can then force combat upon that person will never work. I don’t think I need to explain how it just opens the door for new player griefing or making freighters extinct.

Currently bounties are useless and have no meaning or value. It’s wasted ISK. Imagine this opening the doors for really interesting gameplay!

  • A super pilot podded someone. That person creates a bounty contract on that pilot for 25b. Bounty Hunter gets the contract and he’s able to infiltrate the group with a spy and setup a trap in which the target loses his super, resulting in a job complete.

This has far more use and impact than just killing a gankers Catalyst. I can think of plenty of interesting examples like the above.

This is just spitballing an idea to get more people out in space farming security tags that someone wanting to operate in Highsec would need.

Increase demand and belt ratting is more worthwhile. More worthwhile, more people in space doing it, thus more potential for meaningful interaction with other players.

—-

Your point about hunting gankers is valid. Maybe just make this a thing where you can hunt offenders from Lowsec instead of Highsec gankers. So you’ll try and catch Lowsec dudes in all areas of space.

9

Why do we need this? What benefit would there be beyond NPCs selling/buying blue loot?

Boosters were highly underutilized before, and to a large extent they still are - this would take things in the wrong direction

Customs Policeis a little-understood and somewhat unpredictable mechanic (sometimes a one-second warpout ship gets caught, but a ten-second warpout ship doesn’t???) that honestly doesn’t bring much value to the game - it’s better off removed entirely rather than beefed up

This would detract $$$ from CCP, detract from PLEX being sold in the market, and go against the fact that, with maybe one exception, SKINs aren’t sold in any LP store. Why start now? And Mutaplasmids being available in LP stores would diminish the value of Trig sites tremendously and would flood the market with cheap abyssal modules.

As Co-Head of the United Standings Improvement Agency [USIA], few people know more about this area more than I do, and I can tell you right now this is very dangerous territory in terms of being grossly abused in a manner CCP would NEVER approve of. Standings mechanics could use some love, and any standings rework (namely making it easier to raise standings with existing non-empire factions) should be implemented in other, more direct fashions.

So we’re going to break Locator Agents into two behavioral categories? Why not just have them all function identically???

New Eden has no shortage of Locator Agents left and right. We honestly don’t need more in general. Maybe in some places but more for the sake of more is not sensible. In either case you’d have to raise standings to get access to agents when you could have raised standings to get access to existing agents that were probably in the same area of operations

What lore and purpose, exactly? The purpose (and benefit) hasn’t been established as it is, and there’s no lore to correspond to what you’re talking about. None of the lore about piracy, smuggling, bounty hunting, etc remotely resembles any of this, nor does the existence of any factions worth naming outside of the ones already named.

So how are these gankers killed in Hisec?

So we’re going to impose a mechanics change (other than timers) just because someone has a bounty? I don’t think so.

EVE has no shortage of useless items. Can you imagine how cluttered EVE’s database will get with useless one-time items? We’ll crash the cluster with all these item spawns. We already have trophies anyway. They’re all on zKill. We also have a way of trading them with other players in the form of “bets” and “bragging rights”

The killright system and the bounty system are very different and largely unrelated and they should be. They often work in conjunction with one another but that doesn’t mean they should be tightly integrated. The current bounty system already rewards the value of the hull destruction -what you described is a payout largely redundant.

Player interactions are already shown in character sheet. Top bounty hunters are already shown in Bounty Office window. Showing in-game stats is a bad idea. Not saying the data shouldn’t be publicly available, though: maybe available through the API but not shown in-game, as is the case with numerous other data fields about pilots.

It is literally impossible to make this enforceable or back it with meaningful consequences.

The reputation of a corp/alliance changes all the time with the player composition and leadership, so this is not a useful tool. The integrity of the corp/alliance in relation to a contract also depends on who the client is. Corps/alliances are closed and reformed all the time (often under the same name), so this review tool could be circumvented easily.

This already exists. If you read EVE Forums or Reddit or various high-profile EVE websites you’d know this and their reputations. Merc groups can also post service adverts on EVE Forums and have clients leave reviews - this is already a thing.

Why do we need a formal system to do poorly what we’ve been able to do well without a system that is probably incapable of handling the terms and conditions of what needs to be done?

Starbase charters? You mean that item that is being phased out? What’s the point? These are so easily destroyed that your rent is in the form of suspect-free mining and/or easy destruction if you are incapable of defending them.

Why are we making Athanor-specific mechanics?

:point_up_2: this is the only good idea I’ve read. And it’s not exactly original or recent.

10

Thanks for your input. Some of your comments revealed issues that can definitely be tweaked as the post serves as a framework to better support and carve out a facet of the game that would add immense value.

I don’t agree with a lot of what you mentioned, but it’s not our jobs to convince each other who is right. The best I can hope for is that CCP sees this and they can hammer out the best way of at all possible to make something like this happen.

Changing mechanics and altering what we’re currently used to isn’t a bad thing if the result is a great and new part of the game that I can imagine LOTS of players enjoying.

1 Like
11

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.