EVE General Discussion

from http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca/2012/09/retribution-bounties.html

I've yet to see a bounty-like system implemented in any MMO that wasn't made pointless via exploits.

I hold out little hope that CCP is going to be able to solve this problem, where so many others have failed. But I'm interested in seeing them try, nonetheless. I would like to see them succeed. They do seem committed to success.

The current bounty system is made useless because of alt characters. Put a 100M bounty on someone, that someone is going to collect his own bounty with an alt. Blown up and podded in a naked clone flying a rookie ship. Putting a bounty on someone is giving that someone free money.

Every bounty system I've seen is made moot due to alts.

There's little in the way of information yet on CCP's re-implementation of bounties. And nothing yet from the CSM, other than to confirm that this is the team they're working with directly, the stakeholder pilot project. A risky project to hang your hat from, for sure. CSM7 may sink or swim depending on how solid or riddled with holes the new bounty program turns out to be. Being a stakeholder means having had direct influence on the design and development of this new mechanic. So if bounties turn out to be awesome, CSM will deserve some measure of credit along with CCP. If it turns out to be a dud, CSM will deserve ridicule and scorn in equal measure to CCP. (If the new mechanic does turn out to be a failure, I hope that the CSM will not turn on CCP in an attempt to save their own skins, that they'll cowboy-up and accept their portion of responsibility.)

So, the EVE London Meet was this weekend. A few devs attended. And during the drunken festivities a couple tidbits about the new Retribution expansion (the winter expansion) made their way to news sources.

The following concerns bounties: "Redoing bounties: Instead of the current system, put a bounty on anyone, corp or alliance. On ships as well as pods. A percentage calculation is involved."

A tad vague, but just enough, perhaps, to build a bit of a picture on what we should expect bounties to be.

You'll be able to set bounties on characters. You'll be able to set bounties on the members of corporations. Bounties on the members of alliances. You'll be able to set bounties on ships types (maybe even ship classes). You'll be able to set bounties on pods.

Unlike the current system, where if you pod a specific character, you collect the entire bounty, in the new system the bounty is a pool of ISK. When you meet the bounty requirements, you pull an amount of ISK equal to a percentage of the kill. That's how I'm reading this new system. (I could be way off base.)

For instance, you set a 5B ISK bounty on EVE University. If anyone kills a member of EVE University, they get some percentage of the kill's value. Let's say that percentage is 50%. So if an EVE University Hulk is killed and it is worth 250M ISK, the killer would collect 125M ISK. The bounty pool of 5B would be reduced by that 125M ISK.

This seems to solve the alt problem. Someone can use an alt to kill the character with the bounty on its head, but the alt would never collect more than what the kill was worth. There's no longer any profit to be made.

There may still be holes in the mechanic to be found. If there are, certainly Goonswarm will be one of the first organizations to take advantage of them (see faction warfare.)

The new bounty system looks to be promising, at any rate. And if it ends up being what we all hope, a very fine addition to EVE Online will it be.

This is a solution that would work. There would simply be no way for the bounty to make any profit or cash out, if he has to lose ships and modules and gain only 50% of it back.

SWG (pre-nge) had a great bounty hunter system.

It would be nice if you could restrict who has access to the bounties you set (if you want to set up an internal corp bounty system), or in some way share kill rights as part of the bounty system (setting a bounty on that guy who ganked you won't do much good if nobody can shoot him because highsec).

Also, scoliosis.

No. One boob is bigger than the other, which shifts my weight.

Wait till you've collected enough bounties and manipulate EVE's market value calculation. So long as there are useless items that are effectively untraded, you can manipulate them quite cheaply then blow them up for profit a la FW FOREX.

Yeah, good luck with that ;) CCP has changed quite a few things behind the scenes in the wake of the FW exploit, in order to specifically prevent that type of manipulation.

I really don't care about voting reform. That's between the players and CCP Xhagen to work out, and CCP Xhagen has already mentioned that Trebor's proposal is dead on arrival. You're welcome to continue making an issue out of it, but I won't be.

Have at it. If it's exploitable, exploit it.