EVE New Citizens Q&A

Today a guy attacked me in lowsec, I tried to fight but he was better and my ship is gone. While my capsule headed back home I've got the message that he put 100 000 isk bounty on me. I don't do much pvp so I don't know how it is with bounties, but what's the points? 100 k doesn't really make me a juicy target, so I guess that's not the reason. Or is this a common practice? Though it's the first time I got bounty on me if I remember correct. Can someone explain?

Here's a thread we had recently discussing this topic.

Sounds like yer man felt like you earned it, wear it with pride

When CCP changed the bounty system so we could put bounties on anyone for no reason, people went nuts giving bounties left and right, for no reason. I guess that's still going on.

A bounty is almost a badge of honor, it's intended to convey a couple messages:

1. Someone noticed you (which, in EVE, can be a good thing, since the game is about meeting people, making enemies, and shooting spaceships for fun). If you exchange shots with a decent veteran player, you may learn a thing or two and may get into fights that are actually fun.

2. You shouldn't try to make a "pristine" character. Some people sit in station training skills trying to make the perfect character, and then a bounty happens, or they lose standings to a mission bug, or someone pods them or they join the wrong corporation, and their character is "ruined" forever. Message is "don't do that", take your character out, shoot ships, experience the game, have fun, don't try to keep the character pristine.

A bounty doesn't mean much, because if someone attacks you for the bounty, they can only get 20% of the value of the ship you're flying out of it. AND, they still have to deal with Concord police and all the other combat rules that are normally in place. If you're flying cheap frigates, it's not even worth it to attack you, and if you're flying the big billion-ISK ships (carriers and such), you typically have a whole alliance fleet with you and won't die easily, so your bounty will be pretty much impossible to claim.

In your particular case, it sounds like you put up a decent fight, and even though you lost, the other guy had some fun out of the fight. It'll probably be ok to convo or mail him and ask for pointers on how to fit a ship a bit better, and/or how to PVP better, and go have another shot at him, see how it goes.

Very good info.

In the past long before CCP turned the Bounty system into nothing more than a griefing option, having a Bounty was definitely a 'Badge Of Honor' for Pirate Players. The higher the Bounty, the more infamous that character was.

Seeing a red flashing 'Wanted' character with a high bounty struck fear into the hearts of law abiding citizens of New Eden. Back then most Pirate Players followed a code of honor, basically a 'Parley' would happen after being caught by a Pirate Player who would ransom your ship for ISK and usually honor the terms of the parley, in other words let you go. Bounty could only be placed on characters with negative security status and whoever podded the wanted character collected the full bounty.

However in time other players deemed that Kill Mail stats were more important than honoring a parley for ISK and they just started destroying ships for the stats. Then they started using alt characters to collect the Bounty on their main character, soon word spread to not place bounty on other players. Basically it's just putting ISK into the Pirate Players pocket.

Eventually CCP decided to add a Bounty Hunter aspect to the game (which they had talked about for a long time) and in the course of it decided to fix the bounty game mechanic. What they ended up with was a total fail and they still haven't even tried to fix it.

I have a 315 mill bounty, mostly from other players here in the forums due to my speaking out against the new bounty game mechanic. The fact that it can be placed on characters with positive security status and that bounty is condoned by Concord breaks the immersion aspect in this game.

The 100k bounty you have is the minimum amount of ISK that can be imposed. It's basically used to grief any player who doesn't have a bounty. It's meaningless and pretty much a waste of ISK.


DMC

Back when the current bounty system went live, asking a question in the help channel was a bountiable offense. As was answering a question in help channel, undocking, and having no bounty.
For at least a week, there were players who used it as a means of tagging people. They'd have a specific amount thatthey would tag players with. I got a bounty of 132231 randomly, and I'd notice other people with that bounty and say "huh." for the most part that has died down by now.
I say all that to underline how pointless and trivial 98% of bounties are. I'll get to the other 2% in a bit.

Now, most new players do not realize that bounties in there current state are pointless, and there is nothing to explain that but these threads which pop up every week or so.
It takes a fair bit of reading, researching, and experiencing to learn the aggression mechanics of high and low sec space, and realize that the wanted tag does not mean you can be shot wherever. A lot of players assume that bounty makes them more likely to be aggressed in any space. One poor guy came to the help channel, panicked that a 1 million isk bounty was going to make him unsafe in high sec. Within minutes his bounty had risen to 30 million and he posted, even more frantically, his concern. The help channel spent about 10 minutes and around a billion isk on this guy (who couldn't have been more than 1 month old) just watching him scream and beg while his bounty soared. I think I contributed around 60 million to that one.
This could be considered reckless and maligned griefing of a player, except there is no way for anyone to claim any meaningful amount of his bounty. He'll be paying it out in increments of 60k isk dying in frigates, or maybe millions if he flies anything BS or bigger. But no matter what he is flying, he will be killed no more often than a player with 0 bounty.

Now, not all bounties are placed for giggles. About 2%* of bounties are placed in anger or belief in retribution. This 2% can be divided equally** into retribution for scams and piracy. Players who spend most of their time hunting other players would see bounties as a measure of their space-pirate-epeen. Players who routinely steal other people's missions and escalations view it the same way. Space shenanigans committed against carebears can result in contributions to the player's I-do-bad-things scoreboard, and the bounty office shows the top 10 Asshats of the Week.
Players putting bounty on scammers is almost the same with the difference being: a lot of station scammers are just throwaway alts, so bountying them is like lighting your money on fire before you flush it.


Ideally, bounty hunting would be a legitimate and more dangerous way of making money. Bounties would mean something and have a significant impact in the way you play the game. Bumping miners, ganking freighters, general asshattery committed against missionbears would result in high bounties that any player with a gun could try to collect. Pissing off some of the guys who hang out in the Ships trade channel would be suicidal.
At least, that's what the release trailer for Retribution implied would be the case. But it turned into a farce where people throw money at eachother because they can.





*Studies have determined **a recent poll has shown

I can think of two reasons:

Either he thought you fought well, and wanted to compliment you by giving you a nice "wanted" sign.

Or you acted like such a noob that he thought he could milk some tears by bountying you.

for me it's usually

thanks