Crime & Punishment

In the interim, there is a fully functional bounty hunting mechanic made available by the players themselves that actually works well...

Want someone hunted? Hire a merc corp/alliance to zap them, by paying a bounty directly to them.

Want to be a bounty hunter? Join a merc corp/alliance, and collect payouts from those who hire you.

F

Bounty hunting is fine. Shoot red crosses, receive bounty. What's so hard about that?

The only current working bounty system in game is to hire a mercenary alliance and pay them to mess with someone, that is the only way people will pro-actively hunt your target, rather than randomly collecting the bounty as an incidental of killing them anyway a year later...

@CCP: Mechanics wise....

- Remove the current 'bounty' mechanic entirely, its useless and meaningless having people put amounts on others that do NOT inspire hunting, nor convey an activatable kill right.

- Instead..allow someone holding a killright to post that killright in the bounty office, along with the reward they are offering. No more everyone bountying everyone else uselessly, only killright-holders would post bounties.

- People wanting to do 'bounty hunting' would train a long duration 'Bounty Hunting' skill, allowing them to access bounties of increasing values, AND locator agents (for bountied players only). The bounty hunter could also run a locate in any bounty office (up to his trained level)

i.e.
A level 1 bounty hunter could access bounties below 10m isk, and access ALL level 1 locators (to run bountied players only)
A level 2 bounty hunter could access bounties below 100m isk, and access all level 2 locator agents...
etc

Gameplay:

- Bounty hunters would select a bountied player from the bounty office and run locate to find out where they are, once on grid with them they could activate the killright at no cost (or a small percentage of reward amount?).

- Bounty reward is paid out based on percent damage done. i.e. If 2 players engage, the guy doing 70% damage gets 70% of the reward, etc.

The benefits of this method are obvious. People would be inspired and rewarded to hunt bountied players, with score keeping more relevant to actual bounty hunter success (as opposed to St0ner Smurf killing everyones pod anyway :)

F

Good point.

I also see a blog post in this to consolidate the alternative mechanic; will invite comments therein once ready, to fine tune it over time.

F

Here it is, feedback at the bottom of the article via comments appreciated, so I can fine-tune the post over time.

There are some very interesting twists re: killrights, activation timers, skilling etc that hopefully address key challenges to making bounty hunting an actual compelling career.

F

Here's the first part of this series.