Player Features and Ideas Discussion

We all know that the current bounty system isn't amazing and that making a good bounty system that allows someone to actually become a professional bounty hunter would be very difficult, if not impossible.

I propose an idea which might help make it more viable.

Under the current system we get a chunk of isk every time we blow up a ship with a bounty on it, which if I recall correctly is based off of insurance and a magical formula CCP doesn't want us to know.

I think that if you kill a ship, it should pay you that same amount, however, if you pod someone, you receive either a portion, or, what I think would give people more incentive to hunt players, all the isk on their heads.

Even better, it could give a sort of temporary war dec against a player, and only that player. Meaning that one could be spotted by bounty hunters in highsec and killed for their bounty, although most players would be smart enough to get their pods out, the bounty hunters could run with insta-locking ships.

The main issue I see with this is that it could be used to make new players targets for everyone, and being able to constantly put a bounty on that person for 50mil isk or whatever.

Either A) Make it so newbros can't have bounties on their heads for a while, B) get rid of my idea of an individual wardec and make it so if you want to hunt them in highsec you have to declare war on their corp. Or suicide gank them. This would hopefully prevent people from trying to send bounty hunters after someone unless they seriously do want to give them hell.

This could make bounty hunting a viable profession similar to mercenary work, in which someone posts a large bounty on the head of a person that they really think is a prick, enough to cover the wardec costs/ the ships the bounty hunters would lose, and still let the hunters make a profit.

That's a valid point, I suppose there really is no good way to make bounty hunting a profession. Without some fairly large changes, like identify alts and multiple accounts on the same ip or whatnot and making them ineligible, there would be no way under my system that I can think of to stop people podding themselves for profit.

Smart old man

If you were given the ability to restrict access to whom could claim bounties you place on a person it might spice things up a bit.

i.e. make it so you could set a bounty on a person, but only people are are 5.0 or higher standing with you may qualify for it.

Another option would be the ability to create a by name authorization list which you could then add specific pilots/corps/alliances.

At that point it might be worthwhile for individual bounty hunters to start banding together to benefit from the single point convenience for authorization. Get Bounty Hunter Alliance established, and after awhile with a bit of publicity people start adding it to their authorized bounty lists. It would be an organizational convienience service to coordinate business operations of numerous independantly acting individuals. (Think Redfrog, but with killing instead of hauling cargo). This would be even better if it was tied up with killrights.

Granted there would be some people who try to get moles into such groups so they can farm thermselves, but the invested effort for such a thing would at least be a lot more of a pain than the current setup.