Crime & Punishment

Problem 1. Bounties pay too little.

At a roughly 20% payout of the total ISK loss, bounties just pay way too little to be an effective motivator to aggress a wanted criminal. I understand the need for the fraction payout, it makes sure that when combined with insurance, its impossible to make a profit by repeaing both insurance + bounty.

Solution 1. Void insurance for criminals up to the extent of bounty pay out.

People who get concorded don't get insurance. In the same vein, criminals should not be given the full economic shelter of insurance benefits. Now, immediately some people will point out the "exploit", what if gankers bounty players the minimum 100k to void their insurance? This will be useless if bounty only offsets insurance, instead of eliminating it.

Assume a players loss is 100m ISK, and their insurance payout is 80m ISK. Their maximum bounty payout under the current system would be 20m ISK, hence they can't make more than their loss if they combine insurance and bounty.

However if bounty were to offset insurance, then larger bounties can be paid while still making it impossible to profitably scam the insurance. Imagine under the offset system, this same player had a bounty of 30m ISK on them. Now the bounty will pay out the full 30m ISK, but their insurance payout will be reduced by 10m ISK, so they only get 70m ISK in insurance. The offsetting of insurance by bounty allows larger bounties to be claimed, and at the same time adds a new cost to criminal actions, that of losing insurance benefits. It also still keeps the insurance scam impossible, while preventing gankers from maliciously invalidating whole insurance payouts (without hurting their own wallets at least).

Problem 2. Dormant kill rights.

Of the 7 players who have kill rights on me, not one has made it available to anyone. As a result, I roam high-sec scott free, with the only added "punishment" being that of keeping an eye on local.

I understand that some players may like to retain kill rights to exercise themselves, or by proxy at a time of their choosing (when the victim is in an expensive ship for example). But this isn't always the case. I have been in expensive ships (3b+) openly in high-sec, while keeping an eye on local and my watch list. The people who have kill rights on me have completely forgone their use. I imagine this might be because of the sheer encumberance of making each kill right you own available one at a time. Others yet simply ignore the system, paradoxically enough, while still thirsting for revenge.

Solution 2. Set the default availablity of kill rights to public at an ISK value commensurate to player age.

This will remove the aforementioned problem of dormant kill rights, and at the same time award bounty hunters more targets to shoot at, making it a more viable career. Remember, even the greatest features are useless if people don't actually use them. The default option thus, should be one where the feature is being utilized.

Of course the default price of the kill right should be high enough to dissuade it being used immediately, and thus depriving the owner of a more personal revenge, but it should be low enough to be exercised eventually should the owner forget or forgo the kill rights use. Thus an amount commensurate with player age (perhaps some multiple of the cost of upgrading the clone?) is the ideal amount.

Problem 3. Hiding behind alts.

I might be shooting myself in the foot here, but I have 60 kill rights on my low sec alt, and only 7 on my high sec main. If I had planned more prudently, I would have liked to have 0 on my high sec main. By making a dedicated (yet permanent) "criminal" or "low sec" alt, I can roam freely without retribution on my main and only commit clandestine criminal acts on my alts. Clearly, revenge is not something I have encountered often.

Solution 3. Make kill rights account wide.

This is probably the most bold suggestion. It will be met with extreme hostility from those who lead a double lifestyle, but revenge should not cater to the criminals habits. If you have wronged someone, your hauler, miner and traders "alts" are just as criminal.

Without this feature, criminal alts will become prevalent and bounties will again become broken badges of honor, only this time it will rank criminals and not people looking to provoke pvp combat.

There are yet more problems to which I can not envision solutions. These are the problems of friendly kill right activation and removal and the problem that killright activation doesn't always coincide with bounty collection (thus discouraging activation). I'm sure there are even yet more problems that I've left out.

So in the spirit of fixing this, lets take this game mechanic to it's ideal state. We all know Eve is harsh place where being a criminal is all too easy. The idea of a player run justice system is very exciting, it is precisely the kind of thing that sets Eve apart from other MMOs where justice is something GMs dish out after a lengthy investigation, and even that only happens after the rare instance of crime in those games (Im talking about WoW). The moral dimension, while completely absent from those games, is pervasive in Eve. A flawless bounty system will accentuate this feature.

Too many words, stopped reading halfway through. The only flaw with the bounty system is that not enough people have put bounties on me yet. I blame myself for being too nice.

EVE is built with many safeguards in place to make bounty hunting a long and laborious process. I've tried it for a bit but simply don't have the time to put behind just FINDING a target. They have thousands of safe houses all over New Eden:

-POS
-Cloaking in space
-Station sitting
-Going "off the radar" into a WH

It's less about bounty hunting and more about "bounty sitting at a gate until some poor sod with a bounty and a killright (or just a killright) flies through" And even then, by the time you trigger the killright there's a good chance they have flown away -- unless you use a suicide fast tackler to start.

The bounty system had absolutely no effect on the gameplay of any player who chooses to ignore it. Having a bounty placed on you only affects your character portrait, which now says "WANTED". I fail to see how this is such a big deal. Your post makes it seem like this is a dramatic change in the nature of the game, when actually it is quite superficial.

You don't get it do you?

People pay hundreds of dollars per year to play MMO's. They live. breathe, and obsess about their MMO of choice. Their character is extremely valuable to them. It's a virtual avatar representing themselves. And company's like CCP, and Blizzard all make untold hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars per year offering a service. The service that some of Eve's players want is to customize their character, play the game in whatever manner they choose without people making fun of them, and live in peace without being harassed. You refer to them as "carebears".

So now some Douche-Bag has gone and placed a bounty on an innocent person he/she found in local, that hasn't aggressed, violated, offended, talked sheet to, popped, can-flipped, or raped his momma til her eyes rolled into the back of her head in delight... for nothing.

And now the portrait of their precious toon says "WANTED" when they know damn well they did nothing wrong.

The bounty feature now takes away the choice of "following the Light Side of the Force". Now good players with morals are branded as criminals just because some fat kid (who pi$$es in a 2 liter bottle next to his computer desk, in his moms basement) thinks it's funny.

Some people actually find that "WANTED" banner across their portrait to be offensive even though you may not.

The new bounty system is a tool of greifing, and its still not a viable career choice in eve. Bounties should only be able to be placed during an aggression countdown timer. The minimum bounty per pilot needs to be raised so a hunter can actually get paid well for his risk.

Bounty system is still broken. Not as utterly broken as before, but yes there are still plenty of problems.

For one, security status of the target has zero effect on how bounties work. Now there have been many suggestions on how this should be changed, some good & some bad, and I'm not going to go into any of them. I'm am going to say that some kind of change to factor that in is needed.

Second, as others have said, bounties can be placed for literally no reason at all. Again, this is screwed up. I'm not saying that passive industry & station trader types should left completely out of the system (both ways), but there is an obvious need for some kind of casus belli mechanics added.

One definite change I would like to see is simply a time limit on all bounties. If not collected within, say, one month than the bounty is removed and the ISK refunded - minus a 20% surcharge. That alone would get rid of probably 90%+ of all the stupidest & most pointless bounties right there.

Come to Dodixie sometime and have a drink on me!

+1

I'm not really on board with most of your suggestions (#1 is ok in principle but would be technically hard), you articulate the shortcomings of the feature rather well in the OP.

those interested in this sort of stuff will definitely want to give the Bounty Hunting section of the CSM Summit minutes when they're out.

I agree with Nastajjia's sentiment regarding the 'Wanted' graphic affixed to chars portraits in that some people will have spent a lot of time & effort designing their pilots look. Not to mention all the time and money invested in the whole 'Carbon technology' part of the game client. Only to have an ugly red rectangle placed upon their lower body. I think there should be a redesign of theis graphical element. At the very least make it opaque but preferably another symbol actually affixed to the clothing of the char or a smaller marking such as a red star placed in the top right corner of the portrait .
Alternatively another idea would be to remove the 'Wanted' bar from the portrait altogether and add another symbol to represent chars with bounties in the 'overview' . Would have to be distinct from the other symbols and not flashing.

I'll bet $20 via Pay-Pal that these bounties go viral and soon every pilot in Eve will have one.

You'd think the pilots who greifed hard in the past to earn their bounties would be a little upset too, because now their prestigious title means nothing.