Jita Park Speakers Corner

Of course, I can largely support this proposal, however I believe that this is merely a first step in creating a better 'anti-pirate' experience.

I have long argued that the existing bounty system is functionally useless, and during my previous campaign I supported the notion that kill rights should be transferrable to entities more capable of delivering vengeance. And furthermore, I have suggested on many occasions that bounty payouts should be entirely pegged to a verifiable loss. This of course leads to a minor conflict with another popular request to reduce clone costs for advanced players, which would reduce the potential payout for a podding.

During the CSM 5 election cycle I'd also argued in favour of buffing low-sec by making it the source of 'Black Codes' - hacking modules and codes with functionality that could be exploited by both pirates and law enforcement. One of the features that these codes would deliver would be a replacement for the existing locator agent system, taking the existing system probing experience and scaling it up to galactic scale, moving your software probes around the networks to trace your targets with more finesse. But of course these grand ideas need to be tempered by the acknowledgment that CCP only has a limited amount of developer resources.

Right now the opposite of a pirate is a carebear, I believe that the game can be improved through adding a legitimate player driven law enforcement element. Fixing the bounty system is one small step in this direction, but it should not be the last.

Also, ponies are pretty. (says Skye)

There have been so many good suggestions for Bounty Systems and still we've yet to see a viable solution implimented to both secure the system from abuse and to create a "proper" mini profession out of Bounty Hunting. Alot of CSMs candidates have supported various Bounty ideas but they're still sitting rotting in the to-do vault at a secret location in the CCP lair.

As a supporter of mini professions this topic interests me and I'm definately willing to support it again. Two interesting conversations with Dierdra Vaal and Evelgrivion who've both come up with similar ideas on Bounty Hunting last week reignited my hope that there is a solution - and Evel's idea from his blog follows:



Combined with suggestions from posters like Malcanis and Lana Torrin (whos original thread alot of us supported during CSM4 and CSM5) we've got a pretty solid foundation for a decent system. As I'm not a professional bounty hunter nor have I spent much time in this profession (although I've been on the recieving end ) I must rely on others who do and I'm open to suggestions from those in the know aslong as they're relevant. While all these suggestions could be potential fixes to the current system theres possibly some room left for increasing the viability of this being a fulltime profession if a pilot so wished - some sort of non-isk but i have a big ***** reward that can be shown off to all and sundry.

From my platform document:

Any hope of a player-driven security solution is DOA while we are hampered by archaic kill right
and bounty mechanics. The problem with each is simple. Kill rights are only useable by the
victim, and bounties are only redeemable on pods.

It doesn’t matter how old your toon is, or how rich you are, or whether you're strong enough to
engage in PvP, CONCORD currently says that only you can take care of your issues. That's
bullshit. This is EvE, its a sandbox, being able to pay someone else to take out a revenge hit just
makes sense, no matter where you live.

When Mittens catches one of my Mackinaw pilots with their pants down, fapping away while
mining a belt, he won't hesitate to blast it into oblivion, tech 2 rigs and all. I deserve the right to
make him pay, but my Mackinaw pilot will never be able to enact the revenge herself.
I should be able to head to the nearest CONCORD office, pony up 100 million isk, and relinquish
my kill rights to create a bounty upon his property. Nope, not upon his pod – no one's going to
catch that in empire space, without the assistance of bubbles. And he'd simply pod himself to
take my isk, which would be completely wasted.

Until the kill right period has expired, the 100 million isk placed on the contract should be paid
out in the form of bounties equal to a fixed percentage of the values of the ships and modules
Mittens loses to those that accept the contract. This prevents exploitation. If a partial bounty is
only worth 75% of the property destroyed, there's zero economic incentive to deliver on your own
contract, unless you just want it off your back. Some pilots may WANT to do this, because lifting
a bounty will mean they won't be actively hunted anymore. That freedom shouldn't come cheap
though, you'll still have to incur a stack of loss mails.

CONCORD should also provide me the option of exactly who I can offer the bounty contract to.
For example, I could pay an individual to take on the task (such as a professional, skilled
assassin) – or pay my own corp-mates to assist in retribution. I just don't want anyone being able
to accept the contract, otherwise The Mittani might just take care of it himself.

Bounty contracts should also be able to be used to transfer kill rights to the general public, but we
could limit this to a subset of licensed bounty hunters who would be authorized to accept such a
public contract. Remember those Navy Comets with the police skins? Let's give em back to
players so they can punch those blinky lights and yell "WHOOP WHOOP" to their hearts content
while they chase down the bad guys. Of course, any publicly licensed bounty hunter would have
to have a high security status to pass CONCORD's background check and be accepted into the
program. That just makes sense!

Having had a chance to give that proposal a complete read, I have to say that I think it's got potential but is ultimately too convoluted. There are pieces of it that I like with regard to ensuring that the system could not be completely exploited but, as others have said, I don't really agree with tying it into the player-controlled market in terms of how payouts are determined. I would like to see players be able to take direct control over this mechanic and tweak it as much as possible.

A long time ago after the Dominion expansion, there was supposed to be a feature implemented called 'Treaties' which would have re-vamped the current contract system and made proper bounty hunting and mercenary work actually workable. I bring this up a lot because of the fact that I've spent the majority of my EVE career in mercenary alliances / hunting people down. Having an in-game mechanic, an officially supported system, that formalizes player agreements / assassination through a modified contract system is something that I've been a proponent of from the day my corp took its first mercenary contract back in April of 2004. Having gotten very close as a CCP dev to getting that into the game only pushes me to want it and demand it that much more.

It would make sense to do over bounty hunting during sweeping lowsec pass, which I am pushing for. The lack of a working bounty system isn't as pressing as other things (0.0 in general)

I'd support scrapping it in favour of more fleshed out pirate/antipirate mechanics and some wardec tweaks.

I can see 2 proposals on a link, concerning 2 different systems in EVE.
1st is a bounty hunting system.
2nd is a killrights system.

The 2nd proposal is pretty clear for me. Allowing players to contract their killrights to revenge seems like a good idea for me.

The 1st is much more complex.
I agree, that the current bounty hunting system in EVE does not fulfill it's goal - to punish the bad guy.
On the other hand, in a complex game of EVE, every player have it's own values, and keeping his pod alive is just a single option through all other available.
Making most of my ingame money as a mercenary, I'm aware of these issues. The problem is, that every time you want to revenge and seek a mercenary, you need to find out - what type of damage should be more painful to your victim: Is it a pod, or the most expensive ship he owns, or a pos, or you want him to stay docked forever? The second step is to make sure that the mercenary did the job the way you want it. This is a real issue, all you can check at the moment is a reputation of the "punisher" corp. Some tools could be improved to control this. Lucky for us we have an API killmail verification now. The most difficult question is the payment. Each side does not tend to trust the other. The KPI determining the success of the revenge are hard to define. Obviously, the only way this could be solved in a current time is a third party service. Sigh, we need more Chribbas.

We had alot of discussions on the subject in CCP during CSM4 and 5 terms, I remember same discussions on a last fanfest, I can assure you, CCP are aware on this issue.