Assembly Hall

Now that CCP are ~doing stuff~, I'd like to see one of the longest-standing gameplay issues get a little attention.

So imagine that you put a 500M bounty on Malcanis, whom I'm sure we all agree richly deserves it. Under the current system, I will simply jump to an empty clone and pod himself with an alt, collecting your 500 mill, less the cost of a new clone. Malcanis: 480,000,000 You: 0. The current system is worthless to you.

Transferrable killrights tied to bounty contracts, with payouts based on hull and destroyed module value are the most obvious solution, with plenty of scope to make exploitation reasonably difficult. That stops me using a Joe Random alt to create the bounty, although it might enourage me to use bait alts (I am OK with people doing this).

For instance, we could design the contract system so that the person placing the bounty contract can restrict who can accept that bounty by taking a cue from the fleet finder; the bounty contract could be restricted to "People in my corp" "People in my alliance" "People I have set a positive standing" or even "anyone I haven't set a negative standing" or just "anyone". The looser the restrictions you set, the more people can accept it and show me their ammo, but the greater the chance that someone you don't want to accept it (ie: me or my friends) will be able to collect.

Likewise, bounty hunters could accept for themselves, for their corp or for their alliance. Bounty contracts accepted on behalf of corp/alliance are paid direct to corp/alliance when collected. This is to encourage the formation of bounty hunting corps/alliances, who would encourage aggrieved bounty-placers to set them blue, and who would thereby depend on their reputations. It allows groups of less powerful players to work together to collect a bounty, but it also allows for solo bounty hunters. Bounty hunting corps which carelessly allow Malcanis alts into their ranks to "steal" the bounty contracts will quickly lose their reputation and be excluded from further business.

And the payout per kill on the bounty should be limited to less than the irretrievable loss from that kill, allowing the bounty payout to cover multiple losses if it's high enough.

Under the system I envisage, I would have to have an alt who is in a corp or alliance you've set to +ve standings to even accept the bounty contract. That 500M bounty would then be paid out according to the losses that I suffer. For example, if my clone costs 20 mill, then the bounty paid for podding me would be 10M. If I was wearing a pair of +4 implants, which cost 12M +12k LP from the LP store, then a further 24M gets paid for podding me. Likewise, the bounty paid for destroying my ship would be 2/3 of the effective NPC value of the hull - which we could usefully define here as the cost of a platinum insurance premium. So if someone blows my Maelstrom up, they get ~35M or so (can't recall the exact value).

After the killrights expire, so does the bounty contract, with any remaining unpaid bounty being repaid. It might be worth extending killrights to 60 or 90 days, or possibly making them cumulative. But I am against making them last indefinitely.

This way even if I do manage to somehow get my alt in a position to accept the bounty, I will find it difficult and unprofitable to use that alt to collect it. Not impossible, but at least that way the bounty you place is very far from simply being a free gift as it is now.

Looks like a sound plan from a quick glance and certainly a huge improvement over the current totally useless bounty system.




Try to obsess about goons a little less. The topic has nothing to do with them and from personal experience they are generally supportive of ideas, that improve the overall gameplay in EVE.

Actually, I just thought of something. What's to stop someone from essentially griefing someone by repeatedly putting up a bounty? A gentleman's agreement?

The bounty system has needed fixing as long as I can remember, supported.

Excellent! A working bounty system will solve so many hi-sec issues, and create some really good gameplay possibilities.

The important thing is to plug as many of the exploitation holes as possible, and I like to think I've struck a good balance with my proposal.


(Coming up this weekend: Malc's thoughts on Wardecs)

value for value. this is the core of working bounty-hunting system. everything else is flavor.

Something I thought of but haven't really worked through all the details of: what if the bounty hunter was paid out from a mixture of the bounty on the target's head and the criminal's normal insurance payout?

Yep, missed that one.


Agreed.

That one.

Which I think is more elegant in its simplicity, even though it eschews the topic of kill-rights.
Baby steps, you know? :)

Fair enough.

Will you offer an amount of isk for people to come up with ways to exploit this in order to amend your proposal accordingly? ;)