Assembly Hall

One thing that just occurred to me: have you considered the ramification this poses for newer, relatively poor players that might get griefed with a huge bounty just for lulz? How badly might that impact on them and their prospects of going about their business or moving out to low or null sec eventually, and how could they rid their toon of the huge target sign they'd carry around that way?

And this is one of the many reasons you would want to tie this to killrights or at least criminality somehow. And then maybe you could limit the bounty to some isk amount based on the hull lost in the criminal action (limit it to 3x the hull cost or something reasonable).



I wasn't proposing that the bounty hunters be allowed to pursue targets in high-sec, though I think that's a logical step. Rather, I was suggesting a mechanic to prevent abuse.

Give him the money.



Contract with a mercenary group.

If there is a security status limitation you already have this problem. What if the corp thief, scammer or POS killer doesn't have a negative security status? Just because you don't like the pilot doesn't mean CONCORD has anything against the pilot.

I agree that this is a problem. But there are a few fundamental decisions you have to make about your kick-me sign.

How do you want to restrict application of the kick-me sign?

I think in general you want to restrict the kick-me sign to players that have done a bad thing. But you have to define bad thing. If you define bad thing in terms of actions that can't be measured by the software then you can't restrict with the software anymore. At this point, the only bad thing we can detect with software is exploding someone's spaceship. You can see that this is how bounties are restricted now to people with negative security status; but the set of people who do bad things aren't restricted to that set.

Do you want to restrict the size of the kick-me sign and the stickiness of the tape that binds it, and if so, how do you want to do it?

I posit that you do want to restrict the duration/size because we are making the kick-me sign have actual meaning. This has got to be tied to the size/duration of the bad thing. Because the only bad thing we can detect is exploding someone's spaceship, logically it's the only thing we can measure. Since the kick-me sign is supposed to be incentive to take away the spaceship of the person that did a bad thing I don't see a reason not to link them directly. The current system is so restrictive that if a positive security status player pods you out of your high-grade snakes you wouldn't be able to place a bounty on him.

I think this is especially true if it's going to impose any other kind of penalty (aside from the kick-me sign) such as reducing or removing insurance payouts.

Which is worse, allowing a bounty for any reason but only on a negative security status player or allowing a bounty only for known criminal actions regardless of security status?

I like the way Taurean Eltanin discusses this issue by making a distinction between bounty hunters in Star Wars who are generally bad people working for other bad people versus bounty hunters who are good guys (he uses Judge Dredd as an example, but I know nothing of him). The model for Star Wars is all about mercenaries -- you hire somebody you know will take care of business for you and you pay them when you are satisfied. There's no law involved and you don't find jobs by sitting down at your computer and scanning the galactic bounty hunter network.

At the end of the day, I'm okay with a small-ish change here -- something that would make bounties worthwhile without the bells and whistles I'm suggesting -- and your original proposal fits that bill. But I think we should at least discuss the additional ideas, rules and issues because in my optimistic world I believe CCP (or their representative) will take the kernel of this idea and make it their own by pulling in interesting bits rather than plugging in exactly what any of us said individually.

I think bounty hunting has the potential to be great even if it's not exactly what I want it to be.

I write too much.

Bounties only apply up to the amount the vengeful player originally entered. As soon as that is covered, things continue as before the bounty was set. Bounty hunters will not get a higher bounty just because they destroyed stuff that was worth a lot more than the bounty.



Nobody is, unless they want to get rid of the bounty sooner. But that's part of the point, isn't it?

As paritybit pointed out, there's currently no heuristic for software to track many activities that **** people off, including scamming/being a jerk in local/corp theft. I think for the more abstract cases, counter-pissing-off or mercs are still viable, as is just ignoring the person. I'm not really looking at bounties as a catch-all for all behavioral problems in the game; I just want to propose a relatively simple mathematical solution to a long-broken system.

Regarding character age/assets: I unsubbed for a long time (twice), and so I don't have the SP or ISK/assets you might expect based merely on toon age. Some other characters are disproportionately rich/poor, for whatever reason, and you can always hide assets on a second account if you want.

Nice one op.

I like this idea of bounties being payed out by concord based on the value of the ship.

I'm not sure how well the bounty system itself would cope if this was introduced. By this I mean quite a few bounties will be placed on hi-sec griefers so the only real way to collect is to sucide gank them or (shudders) try and war dec them.
But I guess you could leave that problem for the future and concentrate on solving the current one.



TL;DR
A very good idea. I want to see more discussion and debate.

Not sure what the insurance value of a hurricane is (I don't have one handy), but in this case the profit was realized when rat bought a 23m base value ship for 20m. He effectively profited 3m on the purchase.



I believe insurance values are derived from the base value of the typeID, not the market. I also intended for bounties to be paid on this same value, sorry that wasn't clear. The bounty value on the ship in question is (23m*25%)=5.75m.

Plat insurance costs 30% of the base value of the ship, so the policy costs 6.9m.

At base price, the profit (loss) for Vile rat/The Mittani is [-(BasePrice=23m)+(InsurancePayout=23m)-(PolicyCost=6.9m)+(Bounty=5.75m)]=(1.15m), minus the opportunity costs of setting himself and his alt up to do it.

If he got the hurricane at a discount, then he nets 1.85m on the scheme, minus the additional opportunity cost of shipping the thing in from Verge Vendor, but the profit is still predicated on someone selling below base value, not the alt-killing. Even then, he might have just flipped/refined it right way and realized a greater profit.

I agree that insurance is really the big problem in the system. However, I still want Trebor's money.

Insurance is a whole other ball of fish guts. Previously I thought it would make sense to give ship insurance to the hunters, but that does nothing to players killing themselves with alts in order to void the bounty, so there's no reason to do that. I'm not quite willing to jump into the horror of the insurance system yet, but at 25% of ship value an alt-kill loses a little, instead of losing a lot. Voiding all insurance on a wanted player unfairly penalizes poorer players. Applying insurance to the remaining bounty (as I think was what VR had put forth) takes more money out of the game, but it trivializes the intent of the players who placed the bounty.

Rather than try and fix two incredibly broken systems at once, I'm in favor of using a 25% ship-blower-upper value to mitigate insurance exploits, and pray that someone looks at the insurance system as a whole. If that's not sufficient, then you can always lower the ship-blower-upper percentage, or even do away with it, but I'd like to keep some sort of incentive to go after a ship even if the pod is likely to get away.

As for CONCORD, they don't get a share of the bounty. Consider these situations:

1) A player jumps into Jan and two bountied pilots jump him in battleships, triggering the gate guns as expected. The target is in a plated baitship and scrams the attackers instead of trying to slowboat out, and his friends warp in and take down the wanted pilots. They should get their share of the bounties even though the gate guns aggressed the attackers.

2) A hulk pilot with his drones out gets targeted by bountied gankers. He loses his ship, but his drones attack the gankships before CONCORD destroys them. He should get the bounties, piddly as they might be. (I can imagine a bunch of frigs trolling around trying to slap on a sensor damp to leech some of the money, leading to more hilarious escalations...)

If you mean that players get no insurance when CONCORD is on their killmail, I think that makes sense but it's out of scope for this proposal. A complex set of calculations to determine insurance rates, ehh... maybe it makes sense, but it also discourages explosions, which is one of the benefits of insurance. Personally I'd like to see all insurance pay out less for everyone no matter what, but again, out of scope.

If that dinosaur of a system ever gets improved, I'll gladly be bountied.

OT: Best wallet comment evar.