Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Bounty Hunting in Eve Online Will Never Work

Now I'm not saying the new bounty system won't work, I'm saying that the 'profession' of Bounty Hunter will never be viable in Eve Online.

Whilst Eve doesn't have official professions like many other games, most of our characters can fit into one or more of the unofficial categories  Be it miner, industrialist, trader, researcher, cyno ship pilot, militia pilot, pirate, there are a lot and you probably have a main theme for each of your characters.

Many people would like to be professional bounty hunters. However, it can never be the proper profession in Eve as many people would like it to be. You known, hunting the space-lanes for your target, setting up the ambush and waiting for them to go down in flames so you can pick up a big reward for bringing that scumbag down.

TL;DR - By making the rewards sufficient enough to make it a viable choice as a profession in Eve Online, you would to open it up to exploitation.

The current system is pointless as I've pointed out before. You put a sufficiently high bounty on someone and they'll get a corp mate or alt to pod them and collect the cash.

But Drackarn! Retribution will revise the bounty system!

Yes it will. Looking at the details it will probably be like this....

Mr Piwat ganks Mr Miners Hulk. He then goes on to question Mr Miners linearage and suggests he should find another game to play before finally resorting to "Yo Mamma" insults.

Mr Miner is not a happy bunny and puts a 10bn ISK bounty on Mr Piwat's head as Mr Miner has more money than good sense!

Now this will be paid out as a percentage of the kill each time Mr Piwat's ship is assploded. Here is and example of how it probably will work.

Mr Piwat jumps through a gate to find a gate camp of Loki's, Insta-lock Legions and teir 3 battle-cruisers. He's in a Drake. He is utterly ****ed and goes down like a sack of s***!

His T2 fit Drake was worth around 80m ISK. If the bounty payout is say 20% of the true loss then those killing him will get 16m ISK split between them.

So are you going to track and hunt down players for a bonus 16m per BC kill? And thats if they are flying a 80m ISK ship. And you can find them. And they are in space. And you can catch them. And you can kill them.

16m? And I very much doubt you can do one every hour with having to track them down and get to the system they are in and find them in space etc. 16m an hour for all that work? That price cannot be really raised much as the guy got 40m back in insurance if he had 90% platinum. You raise the bounty much higher and it'll get exploited.

Whats. the. point.

Missioning level 4's will get you more than that with a lot less risk. Mining will get you more than that! The only way to make Bounty Hunting successful is to bring the value of ISK per hour up to compete with other professions. But that will make it so the target can exploit the mechanics and profit from the bounty on his or her head.

What's that I hear you say? You have an idea on how to stop the target profiting when the payout is more than the loss?

"Stop the insurance for people with a bounty. That way the reward could be raised to almost the value of the loss."
That would be the greatest greifing tool in history. At war with a corp? Put bounties on all of them and stop them from insuring any ships! Nasty!

"Raise the payout!".
That wouldn't make much of a difference if it was 90% of the loss after insurance. Still only 36m. "Raise it more!" you say? Then you are into the exploit area where the return is greater than the loss which makes it profitable to kill yourself! A few years ago people would build cheap BS, insure them, undock them and then self-destruct. This was profitable. By raising the payout to above the loss suffered you will reintroduce this mechanic.

"Do them as contracts. So you know the cash is going to a bounty hunter and not their alt!"
So when you see you have a bounty on your head, accept the contract with a random alt. Profit.

"Have people sign up with Bounty Hunting corporations. A corp has to 'sign up' for a BH licence like they sign up for Faction War."
Yes, but still if the profit is high enough you'll simply get Eve mails to the tune of 'Hey mate, I'm a licenced bounty hunter. I see you have 5bn on your head. 50/50 split? Meet me at.......'.

By the time you make bounty hunting worthwhile enough (ISK wise) for people to bother with, the value of the kill is such that it is open to exploitation.

So bounty hunting is unlikely to be  worthwhile in Eve. It is simply a "gift" you give to a random person for killing someone you don't like.

The only dis-benefit I can really see if there is some icon that marks the overview that you have a bounty on your head. In a fleet fight, after the obvious primaries are down and the FC moves onto the other ships, they may choose the one with the bounty on their head. If you have 10 Drakes to chose from, why not primary the one that may net your fleet some bonus ISK?

Am I wrong? Is there anyway to make bounty hunting worthwhile in terms of risk verses reward against other things in Eve?

P.S. Now if they put a bounty symbol on the overview so you know which pilots on grid have a price on their head, are you going to get people starting secret alts to put bounties on their fleet mates heads so in a fleet fight the bounty targets get primaried and not them?

P.P.S. On the flip side, will people make someone with a bounty on their head fly a really tanky fit ship in the fleet. So the enemy FC goes for the one with the bounty but he's flying tank?


  1. There's more to alt killing alt than just the insurance. If I set up to kill alts who have bounties on I would put them in opposing militia. Then I'd get:
    Platinum insurance
    Salvage from destroyed ship
    LP for a FW kill
    Player bounty.

    I suspect any large bounties will be collected by alts of the people they're placed on.

    And yeah I don't see any fix. I was thinking that you could restrict collection to once per bounty per character but that just means I'd use lots of different alts or invite my alliance mates to help me collect it all.

  2. Dat pic... Remembered I saw a bio thingie with yo mamma's so fat she needs to be cynoed in :D

  3. You have to think of bounty hunting differently in a world where nobody can die - you're not paying someone to assassinate a guy so much as paying someone to trash that guy's space-car a few times. In fact since our space-cars get routinely trashed all the time, all you're doing really is incentivising more people to trash that space-car more often than they might otherwise do. You're paying a large group of thugs a little extra to make someone's life slightly more difficult over a prolonged period, rather than hiring a professional assassin to strike a devastating blow. It's important to recognise the difference.

    If someone wants to be a professional bounty hunter, I think that can still be viable. Not all professions have to be competitive as income sources; good examples are lowsec piracy (in the traditional sense of ransoming and PVP for profit) and hisec mercenary work. These activities don't generate a substantial profit - do them well and they'll cover the costs, but most people supplement them with other income sources. They're viable professions, but done more for the lifestyle than the isk.

    I can see bounties going the same way. While the majority of bounties will be claimed by opportunists who happened to kill a guy with a bounty, there should be enough of a system in place that someone who wants to play a bounty hunter can do so and cover their costs while doing it.

  4. Like Azual said.

    I have heard there are people out there who play the game for fun. They do roamings in lol fleets and just want to shoot each other and everything else too.

    If you enjoy that and the new bounty system provides your fleet with some extra income fine. Take your example of 16m for the drake. Fine thats a fast tackler reimbursed. Better than nothing and a few red crosses less to shoot to finance your roaming.

    And maybe some big alliances end up putting huge bounties out on there enemies like goons vs nc.. Than you can roam through there spaces and even if they form up a homedef you will get paid for every ship shot from that alliance.

    Maybe we don't see the cold blood assassin who hunts down his prey to death but uups, WE ARE IMMORTAL! But if you fry that bad guy in his HG Snake impset clone you will get a huge 20% bounty cut!

  5. I also got the impression that the bounty system is to deter griefers, gankers and criminals, so that, like the ad says: actions finally have consequences. If you want to harass others, prepare to be harassed yourself by being repeatedly shot to pieces until that bounty is paid in full. Myself, as a carebear think this is long overdue and might finally see some frustration and tears from the griefers for once :-)
    If somebody wants to go all bubba fett, go ahead, it might not be an awesome income but I'm sure you'll have as much fun shooting people that actually run or heaven forbid; shoot back

    Just my 2 cents


  6. One thing I'm looking forward to is the private bounties, it'll be like a small competition only open to corp mates.

    That guy who always talks in fleet? 100m bounty open only to my corp, go kill that blue ;)

    That enemy who always smacks in local? 200m bounty, go rustle his jimmies.

    Sure, bounty hunting may never be a profession, but it does open up the door to new ideas withing PVP.

  7. In Low and Null, everybody's a target anyway, so as you noted, bounties may change priorities in very minor ways in isolated circumstances.

    In High, bounties are almost irrelevant. Having a bounty doesn't change the agression rules, so the only way to collect is a suicide bounty attack (or randomly find someone who's flagged *and* has a bounty on them).

  8. Hey, there is an overview icon already...

    Go to filters and you should see "Pilot has a bounty" or something like this. It's a grey skull by default.

  9. Hmm sp loss/dead would be a much better way to provoke tears.