EVE General Discussion

The current bounty system, while an improvement over the old system, is generally agreed upon to still need work to reach its full potential. The following suggestions could possibly help with fleshing out the system, making bounty hunting an actual profession in EVE and even add a new ISK sink to the game.

Here is how I consider bounty hunting should work:

Meet Joe Spaceguy, your average EVE online spaceship nerd. Joe has decided to become a bounty hunter, because of the kickass trailer for Retribution. In the current system, Joe needs to do... nothing really. Bounties get placed, and if Joe is lucky enough to get in a fight with a bounty target he rakes in some sweet ISK after he pops them. Not exactly meting out justice to the evildoers of EVE, now is it?

Let's fix that. First things first, the current system does not actually entail much hunting. You could wardec people, or hope to catch them in null/low, but it lacks that visceral chase, that cat and mouse.
What if people with bounties placed on them became freely attackable, even in highsec? If just that changes, I imagine every single eve player will end up with an endless slew of 100K bounties and every zone will be a constant nuke-fest. Not exactly a... pretty solution.
Let's keep that idea on the back burner for a minute while we tie in a specific condition: Bounty targets can only be attacked freely, without Concord intervention, by officialy sanctioned bounty hunters.

'Officialy sanctioned bounty hunters' Basically, a privateer of the EVE universe.
Luckily there's a very simple tie-in to make this work. Faction Warfare. And no, I don't mean the actual FW itself. The Militia Office! Make the bounty office work similarly to the Militia Office, where you sign up to become a Bounty Hunter. You sign up, you get a free pass from Concord to shoot spacenerds. Sweet deal I'd say.

Now obviously just these implimentations have their faults. Everyone would just sign up as a bounty hunter and be done with it. Bounty targets are at such a disadvantage that it's unbalanced. So let's fix that!
Bounty targets can shoot any and all bounty hunters without Concord intervention, just as the hunters can shoot any bounty targets. Suddenly it's a fair match and the risk is equal to both parties. You sign up as a hunter, you can get blapped by any player with a bounty on him. You have a bounty, any officialy sanctioned hunter can blap you.

Fairer than it was before, but still easily broken. See a freighter you want to pop, slap a 100K bounty on him and waste that mofo. Not the intention obviously, so a simple caveat: A bounty hunter cannot freely agress a target they themselves have put a bounty on. If you pay others to hunt someone, others hunt him. Not you.

We're starting to get somewhere now. Bounty hunters need to actively sign up to be able to hunt, they can hunt in any system regardless of sec status, targets can fight back and you can't "hunt" the target you put a bounty on yourself.
Let's expand on it a little more by adding these two changes:
Raise the minimum bounty that can be placed on players. This obviously to combat the 'lol everyone has 100K on them blapfest lol' scenario. Make it 10 million or so, just high enough to not have every single person always have a bounty on them. Numbers pulled out of my arse obviously.
Secondly, institute a bounty hunting licence. You want to bounty hunt, you pay for the privilege. Make it a renewable licence that has to be renewed every [x amount of time]. The isk paid for the licence leaves the game, thereby adding an ISK sink.
Obviously the amount the licence costs needs to be determined. I'd sooner place it in the several hundred million a month region than lower myself, as it is a luxury career with possibility for massive payout in the fixed system. Hell, you could even couple the licence cost directly to the current bounty total across all eve accounts. The more bounties are around, the higher the cost of licence and vice versa.

These conditions entail one more, logical, change: If you're not a bounty hunter, you don't get the bounty placed on a player. Period.

While I was typing out the preceding, I came to realise a few more faults, thanks to EvE players' tendency to have multiple accounts: Put bounty up with alt, pop with main, collect. Luckily that too can easily be fixed.
Make placing bounties have a "tax". If you want to place a bounty on a person for [x] isk, you pay Concord [x+y]. That [y] isk is the cost of placing the bounty. Another isk sink too, so double profit. With the currently active system of bounties paying out no more than 1/5 of the loss, the tax should keep multi-account players from proffiting.
Also, put a delay in placing bounties and them becoming active. Whether that is 1 hour or 24 hours (like wardecs) I'll leave to brighter minds than mine.
I'll admit this is the weakest of the changes so far, so this is likely to change depending on input.

TL;DR version
You sign up to bounty hunt for an [x] amount of isk (monthly renewing licence cost, for the privilege of hunting), this gives you the right to aggress bounty targets in any sec space. Bounty targets are also free to aggress any bounty hunters.
You can't hunt targets you put a bounty on yourself, minimum cost of bounties raised to combat endless 100K isk bounties. Add tax to bounty placement as isk sink. Add delay on placing bounty and it becoming active to avoid someone with >1 account placing a bounty with 1 char and instantly popping target with other.
Not a bounty hunter, you don't collect player bounty.

Exploitable as hell



But your alts can..



exploitable..... So i will wait.... so?

Also, while the random bounties getting placed on everyone is pretty funny, they're also relatively harmless. What you're suggesting would force a lot of players into a situation that they are not interested in. Now, I'm not talking about avoiding risk, they should all be aware of the risk that they face the moment they undock, bounty notwithstanding, but you'll be forcing far too many players to play a game that they don't want to play. That would not be good for subs at all.

And that's coming from a guy with half a billion on his head. You can come and get it if you want - like I said, this isn't "carebearist" risk avoidance. And I'm trying to explain why something like this would break the game, but possibly not doing a very good job...

Right now, hundreds of miners are sitting around with bounties on them because someone thought it would be funny to give them one. I'm not saying it wouldn't be hilarious and painfully fun to have an opportunity to fly in there and blow them all to hell, but what you're talking about parallels the outright removal of concord and any deterrence this game has against actual griefing. I'm not talking about the occasional gank here and there for the lulz, I'm talking about actual griefing - ruining someone else's game for the sake of your own.

The unsubs would happen so fast you'd simply run out of targets anyway.

Have you seen how the average faction mission BS is fit? If you let me attack anyone and only charge me isk, any bounty placed on them will not matter, the loot they will drop will far overshadow that. Ditto with haulers/freighters. Your tax method will not do anything, I'll kill missioning faction BS for a loss, I don't care I got isk to burn.

all the players in game would become license bounty hunters then high sec gank fest



they had what your talking about before war decks before the 24 hour warning all players did was sit at jita are gate to jita and put war decks on players and pop then 2 sec later players in this game will all ways take easy route to pvp you all most have to force them to fight other players with weapons real pvp players know this .

I don't think what the OP wrote would work, but one way to make "Licensed" Bounty Hunting somewhat legit is to require a minimum number of kills and solo kills against combat ships. (smartbombs, ganking etc. doesn't count)

What about... only the Top 100 Bountys can be hunted down via a Licensed Bounty Hunter.

When the Bounty have to get in the Billions i dont think you would place it to gank someone, oh and put a 24h timer between "getting in the Top 100 list" and "Killabel by Licensed Bounty Hunters"

Would that fix it?

This isn't a discussion on what counts as legit PvP -- anything that falls under EULA is -- but rather how to identify a Bounty Hunter, give them extra rights and not exploit it too much.

It's also more in the spirit of the Bounty Hunter profession (someone with demonstrable PvP skills) -- again I'm talking licensed. Gank away for bounties if you like.

But you would have to kill ihm yourself over and over again to get the Bounty back... and when you dont? Isnt that exactly what a big bounty should do?

And the target has to die over an over again, losing five times as much as you make by killing him, in the process. What did that player do to deserve that kind of treatment? There is too much room for exploitation and griefing in such a sytem (hence why the above Goon is grinning from ear to ear at the suggestion - trust me, I know the feeling). As much as I want to agree with you and say "go ahead and implement it" for the tears it would produce, the problem is that those tears would rapidly become a flash-flood of unsubs if something like that were to happen.

Not good for EVE as a whole = not a good idea. We all have to make sacrifices and compromises sometimes, and this is an idea that is just not polished enough to be a good one for everyone.