Crime & Punishment

Forwarning: little sleep makes me type like I'm hyper. Bear with me.

There are probably a thousand threads about bounty hunting and the complications that arise from it, but the drastic revisions to aggression timers alongside the new +5 and -5 system affords a golden opportunity to slip bounty hunting into the game in a meaningful fashion that wouldn't require any particularly new systems or major changes (besides those already being implemented).

It was the question I was begging them to ask during the livestream. If +5 gives the game a difficult-to-achieve means of telling the "bad guys" from the "good," then wouldn't paying bounty rewards only to those with +5 essentially create a niche for the bounty hunting profession?

It also affords a means for the bounties placed by victims to mean something. Assuming it's honestly difficult to farm to +5, far less pirates will have the alts required to kill themselves for the reward, and only a death at the hand of a +5 would trigger the bounty payoff. Players would be far more willing to place a bounty if they knew a "good guy" would be more likely to get it than the pirate himself through an alt. Additional incentive for the bounty hunter than what already exists could be granted, such as a system where the target is fined a value equal to their bounty upon, a fine that is turned over to the hunter and effectively doubling the reward put out by players, and making a player with a bounty more inclined to stay alive (their deaths cost the value of their bounty, which can easily ramp up).

I think the new mechanics open a way for a robust bounty hunting system of the sort this forum has demanded in all the years I've lurked.

humm......no

Again, I said assuming it was honestly difficult to farm to +5 security. Or +7/8/9/whatever, if +5 is too easy. I believe they mentioned a hard cap on "easy" sec status methods (ala missioning/bc ratting), so to gain a high value would require significant effort. Obviously if all it takes was a newborn alt, it wouldn't work (you're describing only the current system). In theory, though this goes beyond the premise of the direct utilization of pre-existing systems (that is, making it easy for the devs to implement), one could add additional requirements of course, but those would require more code.

One such possibility is a bounty payout function of B(x) where x is the total value of all previously gained bounties (before reduction), and B is some slowly increasing function bounded between 0 and 1 which is used to multiply the total payout before gains. Thus, an alt with 0 bounties earned would nullify most of the reward, and continue nullifying all gained rewards until they have a lot of bounties on their hands (thus driving B(x) upwards), at which point it's really no longer a newborn alt since a lot of time and effort would have to be put into it. Since X is the total value of the bounties, not the total number of bounties, either the pirate main is nullifying huge sums of money with fake bounties (economic suicide) or it cant be exploitatively farmed. This, however, is more complexity, and that means more code, and asking the devs to use more code feels like a nono if there's any hope of it happening soon. An "if sec_status>0.5..." before payout isn't a difficult change... and doesn't require bothering with crimewatch to add transferable kill rights, they aforementioned tracking of total bounties and payout equations, or any other more complex system. Just limit bounties to +5's, and I suspect more people will request bounties. Add a penalty for dying with a high bounty to a pirate, and they wont put fake bounties on themselves for their ego. That creates a bounty hunter niche. The only question is if people will put out high enough bounties to make it profitable for the hunter in terms of isk/time. Probably not, but it's possible. Certainly better than now.