A serious and easily implemented suggestion about bounty:
Remove it and refund it all outstanding bounties. The system has never worked.
A less serious and more complex suggestion about bounty:
When you get the notification for a bounty payout, you can opt to pay a higher percentage than the default 20%. If more than one person has bounty on the target, your higher payout selection affects only your proportion of the payout, pro-rata. When viewing someone with bounty, you can see the average payout percentage received on their previous losses, if they have any (weighted to kill value, so I can’t lose 9 shuttles at 100% and then one battleship at 20% and get a misleading number). This lets the bounty-giver increase the incentive to shoot the target.
(But you might pay out so high a percentage that it’s worth the target killing themselves on an alt! Yes. Caveat bounty-payer. This isn’t a real downside because the current system already gives the unwary a way to waste their money.)
I’m quite pleased with the billion on my head, and I would hate personally to see it returned to the rich idiot who put it there. However, this doesn’t mean the bounty system isn’t worse than useless.
The proposed system (if it can’t just be removed, which it should be) doesn’t work less, if you see what I mean. At the moment bounty does nothing; in my second proposal it could at least do something if used judiciously.
30 day expiry as an ISK sink isn’t a bad idea, but unfortunately means the bounty system becomes even more useless in incentivising people to shoot the target (a neat trick given how useless it is already).
Another thought about Karl Pojus’s objection; it could just be made impossible to place any more bounties. Existing ones would wither away with losses, but we could keep our billions for now. This might be the minimum-effort solution to removing the system
Why worry about refunds? Just delete the system entirely. No refunds, no payouts, the system is just gone overnight. It doesn’t work, and probably can’t work in any form. No suggestion has ever managed to come up with a bounty system that encourages people to kill a target (vs. passively rewarding them for killing a target they were going to kill anyway) but can’t be exploited with alts. When a feature has been around for 10+ years without working at all, and no possible solution is in sight, it’s time to just get rid of it.
The “bounty” system is not fulfilling its intended purpose I agree, nevertheless it fulfills other purposes well still:
Namely placing even the minimum bounty enables you to get notified by CONCORD whenever your pal or enemy loses his/her ship, a great opportunity to drop them a mail or just smile may the “victim” be a friend or enemy. In case of friends or people you know it can lead to a fun conversation and learning an interesting story about how things went down, in case of enemies it can be a relief knowing they lost their junk especially if it was an expensive junk. Often you can look up the kill on zkill too for extra info and funfacts.
The other is it shows your interaction with others. My Jita thief alt has over a billion bounty and it somewhat shows how successful that alt is at its job, obviously most people don’t bother to put a bounty or just a minimum bounty at best, still or even especially because of this reaching that amount is a true showcase of fun times and player interaction.