EVE General Discussion

I'm fairly new to EVE, and haven't really found a career path to follow yet. So i'm looking around to find whats right for me, and thought i'd ask abit about being a Bounty Hunter. Now from reading up on what being a Bounty Hunter is and what involves, I know that what it should be about really does interest me. It seems like good money could be made, but with high risks. I enjoy the PVP side of EVE and would love the challenge of what being a Bounty Hunter is advertised as being.

BUT.

Ive read in some old forum posts that the profession really is a waste of time and effort, as killing anyone anywhere but Null and WH's will get you a standing hit and in High-Sec you'll be concorded, plus the fact that if anyone does have a noteable bounty on their head, they'll just have a friend or Alt pod them for the reward.
I understand that it's a tricky situation for CCP to work around, and the game is always changing, but the bounty system really does need to be revamped.

The first problem regarding the the low and high-sec kills getting you a standing hit seems pretty simple to me. Just as in Faction Warfare, you join the war effort and are put into an NPC corp, or the corp you're in joins up. This instantly gives you the right to kill players, belonging to enemy factions in any security space, with no standing loss. When you opened up the Bounty office window in station, it could take you to a sign up screen, where you join the bounty office.. as a pilot on your own, or you could bring a corp into it aswell. If you joined alone you'd be put into an NPC corp, given a new corp chat channel to to talk to other bounty hunters and also given a license, to hunt pilots with bounties in any security space.

The second problem is abit more difficult, and something I don't really have an answer for.. But that's kind of why I posted this on here, so people could come up with similar ideas on what could be done.. Because in all honesty, what's the point of advertising a career path on the main page of the site, that really has no relevant purpose in the game.

AFAIK pilots with a bounty are considered fair game by Concord. But then I'm still only a couple of weeks old myself.

heh, well that's why I said AFAIK since I knew I could easily be wrong.

Bounty Hunting is the greatest cat-and-mouse game of all and has the potential to be the most fun profession in EVE. A proper BH mechanic would add Karma for the podded.

CCP has really let the community down here. This profession is beyond broken and has been since day one. As far as I'm aware, there has been ZERO tweaking to this aspect of the game. Such a shame considering this could be loads of fun.

As it is right now, people put astronomical bounties on themselves just for laughs. because the system is so useless it's downright stupid.

How I'd fix this mechanic:

When taking a BH mission you are given an anonymous list (no names or photo's) sortable only by BOUNTY AMOUNT.
However , list should be sortable between high sec, low sec, and null (for obvious reasons). (The only additional piece of info i'd list is how long the bounty has been there. This way, sorting out the alts in a station is easy.)

-List will be of only players currently online.

-Only ONE BH mission can be accepted at one time

-the list is anonymous, target identity not revealed until close to target or contacting of some NPC information broker or something else (each BH mission should be a quest, speaking to NPC information brokers at last known location to get more recent location....and use special BH scanners to find targets, etc).

-More than one person can get the same bounty mission (same target) but you'd have to really work hard to get the same one since it's anonymous.

-Should be able to abandon a BH mission and select another (for all sorts of reasons).

-Person being hunted should never be forewarned, the initial bounty on them is warning enough. Enjoy constantly looking over your shoulder.

-The person with the bounty should never know the size of the bounty on their head (to discourage scamming).

-The Bounty Hunter does not take a sec status hit (of any kind) for attacking/killing/podding his target. The BH system should be about karma.

-However, both (target & BH) should be openly attackable to each other anywhere. Including and especially high sec.

That's a start anyway.

One problem is that of scamming/abusing the bounty-system by having an alt or corp mate kill you and cash it in for you. Not entirely preventable but it can be discouraged:

-Corp mates and all alliance members should be exempt from accepting a bounty of one of their members.

-Worth repeating from the above: no one knows the size of bounty on their own head. In fact the only person who does know is the person who put the bounty on them--the only other person who will know is the BH once he accepts the mission.

As a former Star Wars Galaxies player, I know a lot about Bounty Hunting. That game had a working mechanic. Really wish CCP would create this profession.

I like these ideas, hiding the bounties from everyones view would be especially good to stop people from using an alt to collect the payout. But in order to find the pilot with the bounty on them, wouldn't you need to know who they were to run locator agents on them, and figure out a plan to catch them when they least expect it. I mean pirates sit and wait for long periods of time to catch a victim, and I think for a Bounty agent it should be the same, to scope out the prey and what not. Another way would be, that if you were to join an agency of sorts, as I stated in my original post, you could have a seperate standing with them. The higher your standing is wih the Bounty Office Agency, the more access you have to the more lucrative bounties. So it'd be kind of like running lvl1 missions for small bounties in the 1-10 mil range, and then on from there, and you'd have to grind your standing up just like you would in anything else. It's all well and good using an alt to collect a bounty, but would someone put in the time and effort to get to level 4 or 5 bounty contracts, just to see if someone had placed a bounty on their heads. Or another alternative to that, would be to throw in some new skills to train, that give you more access to bounties and better means to find targets.

When? Probably when CCP crashes hard due to overreaching the market, and "goes back to its roots" in an effort to salvage the brand.

Alternatively, Dust becomes really successful, EVE's player count magically increases due to space segregation, and therefore never.

Edit: no but seriously, we've been asking for transferable kill rights and percentage-payouts for as long as I can remember. It hasn't happened, and in fact hasn't even been considered.

We'll start bidding for James 315's corpse at 500 million isk.

Philosophical question: Does something have a price if it can't be obtained?

It is a worthy profession, if you Bounty-hunt yourself.

All you need is an alt with basic ship and guns, dual boxing, and an alt with bad guns and ship that ganks mission runners.

Brilliant idea, I love the idea of getting a mission to kill a randomly selected player, who all he know is there is a bounty on him:)
Its time CPP added this.