EVE General Discussion

As somebody who has amassed at least 1b in bounty, I'm an expert on this. Here's how to fix the system:

Have the ability to assign the bounty to particular groups or individuals for them to collect, like kill-rights currently have, and let the payout be 100% (of killvalue, or of bounty) instead of the current 20% of KM value.

This fixes the problem of it being no incentive at the moment, and also ALLOWS for clever exploitation and scamming without it being the epidemic that comes with 100% payout available to everybody which just results in the bountied person killing themselves with an alt to collect all the bounty isk.

It would make it a real bounty system that can be set as high as the angry miner wants, and then if I want to collect it myself I have to infiltrate whoever they set it to be available too, or collude with them...

See how it would make for a fun and useful system that CAN be scammed, but not so easily scammed that it would be rampant or not worth bountying? Useful but fallible, that's what ccp should be aiming for with everything like this.

If this was implemented , the dude that bounties everyone in the Help channel would carry on doing that only he'd set the bounty group to Everyone, so the noobs would then not only get 'noob bounty stress' bu they'd also actually get killed for bounty more often due to the higher payout.

Hunting people you know are online isnt something we need anymore help with, plenty of us are quite good at it already.
Ensuring the system isnt just gamed by the bounty without making it utterly irelivant on the other hand ...

20% payout + no legal rights to attack = useless system.

I used to have 100 million ISK bounty on my head. And i only flew cheap ships. Never cared about bounty.
I kill someone and i get little payout on the top of l00t. Nice but won't make me spend effort hunting for bounties.

To collect someones bounty you either need to get CONCORDOKKEN (lose your ship + lose your SS) or somehow scam the person to get LE. Either way i'm not sure who will seriously look at this as profession without proper reward. And 20% of Eve's value of killed ship (which is already deflated because some stuff has value 0ISK) won't make it.

I'm not sure if bounty system can be fixed as long as bounty does not give hunter rights to legally kill the target. And this will not exist for obvious reasons.

Having ability for bounty putter to set payout amount for each kill (like giving 100 million ISK for every kill) will make bounty hunting interesting. This way hunter can check if bounty worth suiciding or spending time scamming the target for LE or not.
But it WILL be used to harass newbees and still will need to be protected from using your own alts to clear your bounty.

March rabbits post details the issues fairly well,
its the agression right thing thats the catching point, if the bounty offers one then you can just buy the right to shoot anyone without the need for them to be in a player corp or leaving them with any recourse.
Nedless to say we cant have that in empire.

abusable, the bounty payoff can be assigned to the alt corp. of the person applying the bounty, what now.

Currently, bounties are just a pleasing bonus that one gets upon killing someone. I know nobody who actually plays as a professional bounty hunter, and I have not heard of PVPers checking bounties to select their targets. The actual usage among players, or rather the lack thereof, shows that it is essentially a broken system.

You can find my suggestion on how to fix the bounty system here. Please note that the a number of objections are answered in the thread (I hope).

Bounties are next to useless imo other than an added benefit for someone killing someone normally. Even if you have a high bounty on yourself you will work it off naturally in low, null or wh space and you will keep it permanently if you are in high if your even remotely not stupid. It takes some time if you fly cheap ships but not so much with moderately priced stuff.



Even a locator type function with actual RNG variables to range( number of systems, constellations or entire regions) or even just being dead WRONG and giving false information wouldnt solve the issue as like the above posters have said it is worthless in high sec without an aggression factor thrown in. The other factor is if you DO throw in an aggression factor and the minimum buyout is 100K and people will bounty entire systems or groups itd just become a cheap way to shoot people for free basically. To make a lower limit cutoff, ie once your bounty gets high enough you can get aggressed because concord waives your right to... blah blah blah*RP mode on/* in high sec and youd now be talking about something. But again would it just be a griefing tool for the super rich? Likely yes but might work in someones favor if you had a higher payout as your bounty goes up giving people more of a reason to aggress you one way or another even in high sec.

Personally Id like to see locator agents basically be wrong about intel or give assumptive intel so you still have to hunt and then limit the usage from several minutes to maybe once a day or at least several hours between as well as a HUGE isk usage increase. 250K for eve wide was BIG isk back in 2003 but it hasnt been changed since.

So far people suggest the bounty system just is not worth it.

So instead of 20% this should be reviewed to reflect a viable incentive to become a bounty hunter.

Also people seem to be suggesting we need to protect vs scams so including some form of investment initially from the bounty hunter.

I like to keep things simple so could this work?

The current bounty system is about as good as we're going to get until CCP care to take the time to integrate bounty hunting into the contract system (or some similar mechanism).

If I can issue a bounty contract on a player (or corp, or alliance) to a specific corp/player/alliance, then I have at least some agency over who can collect. Sure, corps and alliances can be infiltrated, but that takes some work, and if there are multiple competing outfits, probably isn't ISK efffective.

CCP could structure bounty contracts something like this:

They can be issued against specific individuals.
They can be issued against specific corporations
They can be issued against specific alliances

Any destroyed implants, hulls, items or structures belonging to the target counts for the bounty contract.



They can be issued by individuals or corporations
They can set to have the following acceptance parameters:

1) Private: the contract has been issued to a specific individual character. Only that character can collect bounty from the contract.
2) Corp: the contract has been issued to a specific corporation. Only members of that corp can collect bounty from the contract.
3) Alliance: the contract has been issued to a specific alliance. Only members of that alliance can collect bounty from the contract.
4) Coalition: the contract has been issed as an open contract. Only individual characters with a standing set by the issuer to equal or greater than the required level can collect bounty from the contract.
5) Open: anyone can collect bounty from the contract.


As observed several times in this thread alone, restricting who can collect the bounty is the key to the issue. If there's no way to stop anyone from collecting it, then the bounty has to be limited to irreducable loss, the way it is now. But fully open bounties can be fun, and they have their place in the scheme of things, so leave them in as an option.

Having decided who gets the contract, the issuer then sets the bounty conditions:

0-100% of destroyed implant value
0-100% of uninsured hull value
0-100% of insured hull value
0-100% of destroyed item value
0-100% of dropped item value
0-100% of destroyed structure value

This allows bounty issuers a fairly straightforward method to decide who the contract is aimed at, and also enables fine granularity of reward conditions to incite specific results.

So for example, if all I care about is paying bounty hunters to destroy pods because I'm fighting a group like Snuff* who all use HG slaves, I might set the implant value to a high percentage, the hull values low, and destroyed/dropped modules to 0 - I don't care if the hunters are spending their time blowing up shuttles and t1 haulers, as long as they're popping the pods.

Alternatively, if I want them to target Snuff's capital ships, I could set a high rate on hull values.

Or if I just want Snuff's staging towers killed, then I put a high value on structures and low or zero on everything else.

If I'm the IWI guy and I want goons dead and damb the cost, I could just set them all to 100%. And so on.

Because of the different bounty conditions, contracts can be tailored towards specific groups and even drive specific playstyles.




*No Snuff members were harmed in the making of this post.