EVE New Citizens Q&A

So I got ganked/podkilled last night. My bad, I was flying foolish. But it got me looking at the bounty system. I asked on the noob chat how big a bounty needs to be in order for it to matter, and someone thought it would be funny to answer by putting a million on my head!

Did my life just get exponentially harder? I'm not even done the trial for crying out loud. :)

Can I "give" the bounty on my head to a friend by flying out in a pod and letting them kill me?

No, they fixed any way to "give" your bounty to another player. You could clear it by getting a friend to blow you up in a 5M ISK ship, but there is no reason to.

Have a bounty makes no difference as to whether you are a target, except in a few niche situations. In any case, 1M is nothing and will not influence any other players actions towards you anywhere.

Just don't worry about bounties. They are only of concern when they are huge and you are flying more expensive ships. Heck, some of us treat bounties as a good thing and try to collect as many as we can as a sign we are playing the game correctly.

Also, don't bother placing them for now. Their only real utility for you now is providing you with free intel when your target gets exploded by someone else.

bounties are like that hair that grows in funny places, after a certain age its odd not to have.

no they currently will not effect your gameplay whatsoever.

except being slagged off for only having a little one

I would counter this by placing so many bounties on random people that my inbox is already 99% bounty notification spam! HAH!

Bounties are in general useless.


Why?

Because they do NOT change the aggression flagging modules. So, in high-sec, no matter how high your bounty is, you won't be a legal target anyway.

If you are, you would have been anyway, even without a bounty.

Same with low-sec and null-sec. In the case someone shoot you, they would have shot you even if you didn't have a bounty.\



Now, about size of bounty


A bounty payout is 20% of the lossmail value. So if you have a 80bil bounty, but lose a 100mil ship, the payout would be 20million ISK, deducted from the 80bil bounty pool.

So, the only reason someone would gank you, is if you fly something horribly expensive around, which in itself would make you a target in the first place.

Basically, in the end, bounties don't mean much and hardly anybody will take a bounty into consideration in their threat assesment on to engage or not. They are basically just a tip the killer is paid when he kills you.



Verdict:

Relevance of bounties in current mechanics:

Irrelevant.

Hell, I would even go as far in that the current system might aswel be scrapped all together as it doesn't actually add gameplay.

I think one can now select which notifications are received. Something to investigate.

wait, there is a bounty system in eve!?

I will have to keep that in mind.

bounties are that nice thing you get that pays for the first volley of ammunition occasionally.

The short answer is that the bounty system was supposedly fixed when the Crimewatch system was iterated but in actual fact it is still broken and you are perfectly safe and can ignore almost any figure of bounty on your head.

There could be a case to say that if you are in a pimped up billion ISK+ level four mission boat that a multi million ISK bounty on your head may increase the likelihood of your ship being suicide ganked. But it will more likely be the case that the suicide ganker was looking to gank a mission runner and he spotted your ship and would destroy it anyway. But as you are a new player you can ignore this scenario on both counts.

I personally have about 75 million ISK bounty on my head atm and an additional bounty on my corporation. It matters not one iota to me how high the bounty gets and will not prevent me carrying out my contractual obligations within New Eden. From my viewpoint they have just thrown ISK down the toilet and I just laugh.

Some other people collect bounties with a view to having the largest one possible. Each to their own and may they gain some enjoyment from it. But for you and I will can safely turn our heads and ignore the bounty system until CCP actually fixes it and it becomes effective and something to worry about.