Assembly Hall

EDIT: Lowered ship explosion value to 25% due to insurance shenanigans; see post 14. Changed values are in bold.

Pulled from Vile Rat's thread on highsec, since it affects players everywhere:

Flat death bounties have never worked in any game. Too easy to exploit. Only way to make them not profitable is to set up a bounty escrow with CONCORD that pays out for less than the value of the destroyed items like so:

Dead ship: Everyone on the killmail splits 25% of the base value of the destroyed ship and destroyed fittings (not dropped), up to the amount in escrow. (Deleted the insurance thingy since I forgot to do it before, doh; Yeep reminded me about it.)

Dead pod: Everyone on the killmail splits 75% of the base value of the implants plus 75% of the cost of the clone*, up to the amount in escrow.

(Base value determined by typeID, not by market value. I need to look up implant base values to see if they need adjustment. <-- clarification)

This makes it unprofitable to get podded by your own alt, makes the pod potentially more valuable to kill, and a high-bounty target can be hunted for a very long time. If the target flies small ships instead of supercaps, it lowers the value of an individual kill, but keeps the escrow running longer.

Example:

Vile rat gets bountied by annoyed highseccers after he trolled them in Assembly Hall, for 100M ISK total (cheap bastards). This goes into the CONCORD escrow.

He gets his cruiser blown up by 5 attackers. The loss in hull and destroyed modules is 50M ISK. (Dropped stuff is up for grabs.) Each of the 5 attackers gets a 2.5M bounty payout [(50M*25%)/5]. The escrow goes down to 87.5M still on Vile rat's head.

They manage to nab his pod and all 5 get on the killmail. Vile rat had implants, and their base value + the cost of his clone are 500M. 500M*75% is more than what's left in the escrow, so each attacker gets (87.5M/5)=17.5M for the podkill instead of [(500M*75%)/5]=75M.

Now if the bounty was significant, like 10B ISK, not only does Vile rat's pod become a potentially juicier target, but the escrow stays high enough that he can be hunted again and again. He can hide in a station or go out without implants, but the clone value still makes it worthwhile, and not having implants only makes the escrow last longer.

Adding a bounty to the destroyed ship is just a thought, as it gives a solo roamer a reason to go after a wanted pilot even if he might not be able to nab the pod. If that gets too complicated, just forget it and keep the 75% bounty on the implants and clone price.

*Clone cost: Since clone cost is in flux and not necessarily directly related to SP, use the cost of a clone that would cover the wanted player's SP. Over- or under- cloning doesn't count, and just results in expense or SP loss as normal.

I like the idea of the bounty not being fully paid each turn.

+1

But I hereby offer a 100m bounty to the first person who can figure out a way it can be gamed so the guy with the price on his head makes a profit.

Wanted man gets podded once, then doesn't pay for a medical clone upgrade, and lets his alt kill him repeatedly, losing skillpoints.

Please send ISK.

Edit: You didn't say it had to be a sane way.

Insurance is its own bucket of worms. The problem with insurance going to paying down a bounty is that insurance pays more than the investment, so then you create ISK out of nothing, if that's the mechanism suggested. Plus, you get to profit as the wanted man (get an empty hull and plat-insure, then destroy it a lot).

I think I originally posted that the killers get the insurance in addition to the bounty escrow portion, without affecting the bounty at all, but that gets messy and math-heavy. Would it make more sense to say that wanted people are uninsurable (due to the increaed risk of shiploss when everyone is paid to blow up your ship) and existing policies just don't pay out?

Of course, I'm not sure what happens when you are at sec -1.0, you get a bounty, and then rat your way back to 0. I'd recommend staying uninsurable for as long as you have a bounty on you, regardless of security status.

If this would work, I may have to pay out. But I must insist you provide a personal demonstration.

It's about time that the bounty part of eve was actually playable. I support this one.

I'd like to see this tied to killrights so that miscreants can't simply place a bounty on people that smiled at them the wrong way (you can do that the unofficial way). So you could only place a bounty if you had killrights and placing a bounty would use your killrights.

I'd also like to see killrights changed so that they are granted any time a pilot GCCs and successfully destroys the target. As they are now, you won't get killrights if you return fire which includes ECM, tracking disruptors and other "defensive" measures.

This would make criminality more of a choice and people might start thinking before they shoot and before you know it people are flying into low-sec because it's not simply instant helldeath. Who am I kidding, it wouldn't change anything -- but there would be a plethora of bounties for pilots to collect.

Some good ideas and discussion at this guy's blog and it's from a pirate perspective.

I was against voiding insurance because I thought it would penalize criminals too much -- but some pirates convinced me they were okay with it. Seems like it's the best solution.

-5 sec status should void insurance policies on all your ships. It's supports the risk vs reward myth that is the weak link/ lynchpin of EVE that is constantly tossed about in discussions. If you are willing to risk having no ships insured at any time you can have the rewards that having earned a -5 sec status gives.

I like this payout system! My question to the new system is who can hunt? Of course we don't have a specific class, "Bounty Hunter," but shouldn't there be a qualification, i.e. Faction Standing or Sec Status to be able to freely engage a bounty that is in high sec? I've been partial to the idea of establishing a "Kill" contract, like a mini war if you will for a limited time. You fail to eliminate the target within a specific time it goes back up to a bounty pool that only qualified Bounty hunters can obtain. Of course this is all theory crafting but something along these lines would help establish a much wanted proffession.