Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Silly thought, probably wouldn't work:

What if bounties were tied to ships rather than players? In EVE, killing someone isn't really the majority of inflicted loss, and thus having bounties tied to players is pretty easy to step around. What if in stead one could apply reactive bounties to individual ships with some sort of concord oversight?

This would make it kinda impossible to post bounties on people that didn't kill you though, so that's kinda crappy. Maybe use a system similar to kill rights?

IDK. I do agree that those most likely to accrue big bounties (pirates and suicide gankers) make a point of flying cheap disposable ships which kinda neuters the whole "most wanted" concept. I mean, why bother hunting the top ten if you can make the same money killing anyone with a bounty? Sadly, I can't really think of a way to implement an automated system that would prevent people from pretty easily collecting their own massive bounty.

I like the contracts idea the most. You could assign them to reputable hunters or BH organizations, your on corp, etc. This would be pretty sploit-proof unless the target wedged a spy in the hunting corp, or sucessfully convinced people that their fake BH alt corp was a real thing, in which case I feel like they deserve the bounty anyway. In stead of having a general payout the red "wanted" banner could just pop up the contract.

These would have to be handled differently than normal contracts i think, as the public contract types don't account for a system in which you might want to offer a semi-public contract that simply goes to the first guy to collect. Maybe bounty contracts should have a system similar to war reinforcements? You click the bounty and send anotification to the payer that you want to work this, and the payer decides whether to authorize you. In this manner you could have winder ranging bounties that could include more than one corp or solo hunter, without making it completely public and easily allowing the target to collect their own bounty.

Of course not. I didn't think to write about it in this post, but if you'll read through the blogs I linked you'll see a part about being able to pay off bounties.

It's important that a bounty system is something that people want to take part in. Like I mentioned though, it's equally important that it's not a way to circumvent wardecs, and it's certainly just as important that it's not a free-for-all on anyone. I do believe that the mechanics that I've written about are a great foundation to find that sweet spot, but I'm not quite egotistical enough to think I got it right on the first time.

EVE is a game where risk and reward are proportional, or should be. Right now, bounties don't fit into that scaling system very well at all. Something has to change to ensure that it does, and that includes both sides of the system: the bounty hunter and the bountied.