Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I was thinking about the current system for bounty hunting and how horribly inefficient it is in it's current state. While I don't have any ideas to fix it as a whole I do have some food for thought on tweaks to the system.

I was thinking that bounties on pilots should be more customizable than they are currently in that the player placing the bounty should have the ability to dictate the terms of the contract by ship type and amount of isk earned as a reward. In addition high security space should in now way be a safe haven for those with a bounty on them where only gankers with sacrificial ships can reach. My idea is to have players look through the list of those with bounties on their heads and choose which mark they want to go after. After they have accepted the contract Concord will no longer protect the pilot with the bounty from the bountry hunter who has a license to kill from Concord. This ensures that bounty hunters can travel in all regions of space and ply their trade without having to resort to the types of tactics that the petty criminals of the univers use.

Any thoughts on this idea would be apreciated.

People would never, ever do this to every single freighter pilot they saw leave Jita 4-4, honest!

This is good. A new type of hit contract where you can specify the target and the amount of damage done is a good idea. It would provide protection for both parties and facilitate bounty hunting as a profession.

This is bad. If you give players a way to turn off CONCORD against another chaos will ensue. Criminals will use the system to gank targets all over highsec without losing their ship. Real criminals are already free to shoot so bounty hunters can go after them right now, but perhaps kill rights could be tied to the contract system you proposed above. That way, if you were wronged and awarded a killright, you could hire a bounty hunter with a contract to go get your revenge.

But otherwise, the first thing I could do with this system is put a bounty on your head and allow by bounty hunting alt to destroy you without CONCORD getting involved. That may be good for bounty hunters, but I am not sure the good people of highsec will think that an improvement for them.

Any bounty system must use the current ways to bypass CONCORD (wardecs, low security status, killrights, suspect flagging, etc.) to get targets in highsec, or it will be used more for mayhem than retribution. Maybe that isn't a bad thing, but I doubt it is your intention from this proposal.

Bad idea as others have pointed out, way to easy to use it simply as a tool to bypass mechanics CCP has wisely placed in high sec to maintain a reasonably safe place for ALL players to enjoy the game.

I disagree with those that think this idea could be abused for profit through the use of alts.
If you bounty character 1 and use character 2 to kill him for the bounty why bother when all you are doing is transferring ISK from one character to another with easier ways to do that.

I find myself liking the basic concept of tying bounty hunting to kill rights as mentioned by Black Pedro above. There are many ways this could be used to change and improve the current bounty system.