Jita Park Speakers Corner

So imagine that you put a 500M bounty on Lord Zim, whom I'm sure we all agree richly deserves it. Under the current system, he will simply jump to an empty clone and pod himself with an alt, collecting your 500 mill, less the cost of a new clone. Lord Zim: 490,000,000 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 gankers using a Joe Random alt to create the bounty, although it might enourage them 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 Zim their ammo, but the greater the chance that someone you don't want to accept it 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 Zim 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, Lord Zim 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 Zim suffers. For example, if his clone costs 10 mill, then the bounty paid for podding him would be 10M. If he was wearing a pair of +4 implants, which cost 12M +12k LP from the LP store, then a further 24M gets paid for podding him. Likewise, the bounty paid for destroying his 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 his Maelstrom up, they get ~35M or so (can't recall the exact value).

This way even if Zim does manage to somehow get his alt to accept the bounty, he 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.

I posted that as a proposal in the assembly hall btw.

Yeah I tidied it up some for the proposal. Anyway, please help to plug those holes. One of the biggest disappointments I experienced when I started EVE was learning that there was no credible bounty-hunting profession.

Read through it a second and third time, and it seems solid enough. There's just a minor aspect of abusing it to grief someone, but we can take that discussion to the thread proper.

Actually, just noticed this bit:

:smith:

Don't players have to have a negative security status to have a bounty placed on them?