EVE New Citizens Q&A

History lesson:
The old bounty system was designed such that the only way to collect a bounty on a person was to destroy their Pod (see: escape pod).
This didn't really work because you could have a friend (or an alt character) kill you and collect the bounty money.

Moreover, you could only put a bounty on characters with low security status (which is only indicative of a player's willingness to attack people, aggression mechanics be damned... not that they are bad people or that they have necessarily done bad things).



The current bounty system makes it so that you can place a bounty on anyone (regardless of security status). However, the bounty you can potentially collect is dependent on the value of the ship of the target player.

See... in order to prevent players from essentially suiciding themselves into another friendly player and collecting both the bounty money AND insurance from their lost ship... the attacker will only be paid about 20% of the value of the target player's ship.

This means that if a player has a 1 billion ISK bounty on their head, but is killed in a 1 million ISK ship... the hunter will only collect about 200,000 ISK... which will be deducted from the bounty pool.




All of this has nothing to do with Kill Rights however. That is a separate mechanic.

Simply put... you gain kill rights against someone if you have been illegally attacked or killed by them.
You can then sell this right or put it up for anyone in the public to activate.


tldr;
- Bounty payout is ~20% of the value of the ship hull you destroy
- Having a bounty on your head will not make you a "legal target" for anyone to attack. All aggression mechanics will still apply.


"Locator Agents"

Any player can gain access to these.

Essentially they are mission running agents that have an extra ability tacked on.
When you can run missions for the agent, you can also use the agent to locate people.

To gain access to the agent you have to run missions for a small while.
Training up certain skills in the "Social" skills tab can increase the standings you can gain per mission... meaning you will not have to run as many missions to get the right amount of standing for the agent you want.



Locator Agents will, at best, give you a general idea of where your target is.

I say "general idea" because Locator Agents take a few minutes to "find the person in question" once you make a request. And if the person you are tracking is moving... a few minutes can be an eternity.


An alternate method of finding where someone is located is to check out the various killboards that exist.
If you notice a pattern, you can deduce where a person might be located. However, you will still have to go out to that area and have a look yourself (because live intel requires actual eyes).



Honestly though... I would simply go to low-sec and attack anything that moves. More than few of us have bounties and, if you get good at killing other players, you can definitely make some money from both bounties and the loot.

However, based on your questions, you seem a bit "green." I would suggest joining a small PvP corp and learning how to effectively kill (or assist in killing) players.
And don't worry about getting killrights or bounties or losing security status yourself. A lot of us laugh in the face of the first two and the latter can be corrected with a bit of money.

Thank you for the reply's, great advice.