So you want CCP to put them in jail or something? Issue bans? Or just provide a way for someone to blow up their cheap T1 trash ships?
Are you going to try and force them to fly around in expensive ships then? Bounty hunting isn’t going to do anything. Do you think they care about losing a destroyer? If that bothered them, then they wouldn’t have sacrificed their ships to blow up your mining barge or exhumer.
So what then? What exactly do you want? You want CCP to make it cost them 2 destroyers to blow up your way more expensive ship? How’s this bounty hunter thing supposed to work? Do you even know?
They fly cheap ships. They work together to blow up your expensive ship.
I could gank as much as I want, log in my alt bounty hunter, kill my ganker alt, and claim the rewards for myself. And that is exactly what would happen…
Hell, one of the most obvious rewards for bounty hunting is a boost in security status, in which case a ganker would just shoot the rest of their fleet after the target goes down to get bounty hunting rewards for being on the CONCORD killmail of their own alts.
You cannot implement proper bounty hunting without either rewarding gankers for killing their own alts, or making the rewards so small that it’s not worth doing (which is where antiganking is at already, all you get out of shooting at a flashy catalyst is whoring on an NPC KM).
You can attack anyone you like, anywhere you like, as an omega.
Alphas ( such as me ) can only set to “red” in LS, WHs, and null. We are not allowed to set the light on the HUD to red in HS. I don’t think we are allowed to attack people in HS, even when we have their kill rights.
This is a “safety light” and won’t affect how you are displayed to other players. Also I might be chatting with the wall right now, I see you haven’t been here since November 5th. Hope this helps whoever reads it.
Don’t ask me why, but I set mine to yellow? Lost some hard fights by picking on what I thought was going to be another quick kill. Not all the chances you take in the game pay off. Most do, but not all!
And I don’t think any of these ‘but people would exploit it’ arguments are particularly good. It’s just a seeming inability to think outside of how EVE has programmed people to think about playing this game.
Like I said, I would incentivise the polar opposite of this. If you can keep getting away with ganking, if you can avoid losses, you should actually be rewarded even more. If you can work together as a team and survive, you should make more ISK. If you can maintain kayfabe style persistence in EVE’s universe as an outlaw, rather than exploiting limited game mechanics, you should gain way more. As in notable, worthwhile amounts more. Think of it more like a ‘streak’ that everyone wants to keep, not a thing to be thrown away.
So the trade-offs can easily be made with some reasonable carrot and stick. It’s incredibly easy for EVE to disincentivise cynical exploits, CCP choose not to. If the carrot was based on survival, if you got diminishing returns for certain gameplay patterns, it would work. Either way, just saying ‘some people are nobheads therefore we shouldn’t have one of the most obvious elements missing from the game’ is reductive imo.
I’ve proposed lots of specific changes above. If you want minute detail, then fine, I can provide examples, but It’s an idea, likely never to be implemented, and it’s an open discussion.
If, for example, you rewarded pilots for playing as a character, you could offer them ISK bonuses that increase with every successful gank.
You can tie incremental outlaw bonuses to a specific skill, and effectively say ‘keep this specific character/module alive to increase this skill, and then subsequently, the ISK value of stolen goods’. It would incentivise continuity of characters developing, rather than allow a new toon to do the same job. Every time you die while ‘hot’ (ie: every time someone else returns that proof of kill for a bonus themselves), it resets the bonus % and you have to build that up again.
That same process would be at the root of the cops and robbers dynamic. Rewards for killing associates are minimal. You’re after the person who actually masterminded the crime and took the majority of the profits. The incentive should naturally be for this person to fence the goods, as they will get notably greater rewards - enough that you wouldn’t use a new toon to do this.
I have said before, a form of tracking system that broadcasts locations of ‘hot’ suspects for say, 20mins, would be great. In that time, the ganker would need to be constantly wary of being pursued by bounty hunters. By performing certain tasks, they could make the tracking less accurate, the latency longer etc
The main balance/deterrent for exploit here would be that in any gank, the ultimate end result is that there should only be one significant winner - either the ganker, or the bounty hunter. You can’t double-dip by killing a suspect as an alt, and them having the benefit of the gank too. The ganker should make more money than the pursuer, but only if they continually build up a rank.
There are small mechanics I would change. I would make new ships or variants. modules etc that hold loot, so that the entire process is separate from ordinary cargo, and allow for greater flexibility in these mechanics. I’d penalise cops who bring in the same robbers within too short span of time. Like I said, lots of ways to think about double dipping and exploiting.
But there will be lots of ways that would differ from a collegiate approach. I would suggest that in almost every way, the game would be significantly better if people took a mindset that there’s no need to defend cynical exploitation, rather think about why people choose that path, and how it can be made mroe fun for all parties.
