The game offers short battles , 15 vs 15, with four main tanks roles. A bit like Counterstrike, when your tank is killed, you are out of that specific battle, but the nice thing is that you can go to your garage instead of spectating, and pick up another tank and immediately start a new battle.

They also have a clever incentive to buy tanks that are not part of the standard tech tree, like the  Lowe. When you use this tank, you do make a bit more virtual money in game to pay for your ammo and repair, so when you reach the higher tank tiers, using those tanks insure that you do not have to incessantly pour your cash into the game  if you don’t want to. You will have to get your Lowe out of your hangar a bit, until you can recover enough to continue playing with your hard earned higher tier tanks.

Now they do have incentives for using your cash, but what you pay for will always be for things that you will keep on your account. Their XP system is set in such a way that the XP you earn with a tank can only be used for upgrades for this tank only, or the next tank down the tree. So when your tank has reached elite status (has all the upgrades) and you have unlocked the next tank, the largest part of the XP you accumulate if you like this tank so much that you continue playing it will just sit there and be useless… unless you transform it into generic XP that can be then used for other tanks in the tech tree. But to do that you need gold that you get with your cash.

So overall, this is a great game, a good business concept, and a fun way to use your gaming time, 15mn at a time.

I myself  went for the german tank destroyer line, and the tanks I have is my garage are a JagTiger (Tier 9 Tank Destroyer), a ferdinand (the tier below the Jagtigerm, great for sniping), the recently added VK 2801 Light tank, and my Lowe that allows me to keep my vehicles rolling and firing…

They have just released a new version 7.0, and that brings me back into that game, as my tank destroyers will have nice camo effects, and can shoot at french tanks too

I did resume playing Company of Heroes, and went back to World of Warcraft where i finally leveled up my druid to level 85 (after switching from Tauren to Worgen). I also got into Starcraft 2 of course, and more recently World of Tanks. While not being a MMO per se, it is a fast paced series of battles where your tanks improve and level up with experience acquired on the field. At least in that game tactics matter a lot for every skirmish, and there is no lag, no subscription and still the capability to save ramp up time by spending money to jump start your levels (the Lowe heavy tank is characteristic of what somme players called pejoratively wallet warrior – i do not know why they see that as pejorative, as without the money of these wallet warriors, the game probably would have folded already..). Freemium is a great business model, I think, regardless of what players going the time route say!.

I like your end game there.. having BH (Bounty Hunters) collect as much as the killed target worth in insurance and clone value, with no player driven money to scoop for alt.

I do have a possible alternative to the warrant and location system though:
- issue warrant in all of the bounty offices of Eve for a crime, not just in the current constellation.
- For each pilot, track the number of warrants generated by this pilot’s criminal action.
- Allow other pilots to issue a warrant on anybody for a flat fee (not to cheap, but not too expensive either). This money is just paid to the bounty office, and not recovered by anybody.
- Allow BH to buy a warrant on a target (the max number of BH that can pick up a warrant on the same target is the current number of warrants issued). The fee would be a fee paid to the bounty office and lost to the BH, and that fee would be increased according to the number of BH that already bought such a warrant (so the more BH on the same target the more expensive it gets for them).
- Every time the criminal under a warrant docks in a station, he has to pay a small base sum like 10 ISK time the number of current active warrants to land incognito there (greasing palms to remain incognito). If he does not pay this, all the logged-in BH with warrant on this guy receive information about his current location when he lands.
- When a target is killed, all the BH with a warrant on him that participated to the kill lose their warrant right, and the number of warrant for this criminal is decreased that much.

keep up the good fight. Improving the rules for bounty hunting is badly needed. This is the best way carebears can get back to PvPers and griefers while having do the revenge work for them. Griefing is too easy and cheap to do atm…

…

I think players need to be able to put a warrant on someone else for whatever reason they chose. People can already flip can with no possible retaliations, other than risking a mining ship into a PvP engagement (the game mechanic currently favors Orca based can flippers). There is no mechanism to really allow carebears to counter this type of player’s action, and I think issuing warrant on them at the players discretion (and possibly convincing his corp/alliance to do so for each pilots..) is a neat player interaction mechanism, as well as a fair way to compensate for whatever action triggered the decision to pay money to issue a warrant.

I can see can flippers as well as scammers of various sort getting hit the most but such a system, which in turn would regulate this kind of practice, without forbidding it.

One thing to highlight is that one person could only have one active warrant per target (i.e. he could issue of warrant for as many players as he wants, but one per player only). When I see that the map systems track how many times a player visit a given system, I am sure this kind of warrant management is technically doable.

I like the ideas you are developing. Keep pushing the good changes, bounty hunting really do need love!

PK, we do not fight on the same side, but I enjoy reading your blog. On this very issue of lag and black screen death, I am with you 100% against CCP. I will even go one step further: by keeping these technical issues going, CCP is close to be outright lying on their advertisement for this game. I have been drawn in by the perspective of one game world where all the players play together, and large fleets fight for space domination. These ads are misrepresenting what the game experience really is in the large fleet area. In the past year since I have started playing, I have spent a lot of money in plexes to get my ships. I do not have the time to mission or mine, and mostly do pvp. As bounty hunting does not work and is not well thought out, I do not have much opportunities to make isk in game as a PvPer. I am also lucky I can afford sustaining my hangars through real world money, but losing ships to lag and black screen is thus losing real money to false advertisement. If this continues beyond the upcoming tyrannis launch, I am seriously thinking about a class-action lawsuit against CCP for false advertisement. I sincerely hope it does not have to go to such extreme for a game I do like, but it’s not because it is a game that a company can choose to ignore it’s customers experience. PK, keep up the good fight (on your blog) and I hope I can pod you one day in game

You have my vote dude! great explanation of your views on all the points, and you are representing the two issues I think need the most addressing: the use of local to detect presence and bounty hunter love.

I like your take on the other points. Good luck for the vote, but you got mine!

Now, I want to offer some ideas to your own reflexions

Removing local as a detection mechanism:
imho, local should be like it is in WH everywhere.
Now, I think the directional scanner should be available to be put on by the pilot, at the expense of some capacitor cost, and alarm horns should blare when a ship comes within 14 Au of the scanning ship. the default passive directional scanning would just do a passive 360 degrees sweep every two seconds automatically. it could also be turned off, or manual. manual would allow more precise pinpointing like it does now.
Only the ship type should be identified, possibly the corp to which this ship is registered, but not the pilot name and all that crap giving access to all info all the time..

Bounty Hunter love:
Bounty hunting need to be a viable profession, and not one that is perverted by being killed by friends, alt and such.
A player that has a bounty on him should have to pay 1% of his bounty value every time he docks up somewhere. This would be the cost of greasing palms and such to remain incognito in the station.
Bounty hunter would register to hunt specific quarries, paying themselves 1% of the current bounty on their chosen quarry to the authorities, in exchange for getting the following: having their quarry flashing red like an outlaw to the bounty hunter (and vice versa, the hunted would see the hunter red too), and receiving info on their quarry location whenever he or she does not pay the 1% cost of remaining incognito when docking somewhere.

You couldn’t put a bounty or take a hunting license for a pilot in your corporation or alliance, and a character with a bounty could only change corp by paying the total amount of the bounty currently on him or her to the authorities (i.e. money lost, not transferred).

These plus the 1% cost to dock would prevent people from putting bounty on characters just for the fun of it as it would have consequences to the character himself.

Killing a quarry would net to the bounty hunter the value of the bounty, and would reduce the total bounty on that character by 10%. Anybody with a license on a pilto with a bounty would receive information about their current bounty value (even when it goes up), and can request a refund of their 1% license cost against that pilot if they estimate the cost of hunting this specific target is not worth it anymore.

Last but not least, pilots would not be able to take a license on someone they have themselves put a bounty on. Bounty hunters can not have a stack in the bunty that was set.

here you go, hope these ides help advance the sisues.

Last but not least, I’d like to point out an idea done by the guy from hydrostatic capsule that I realy believe would go a long way to favors manuevers in smaller groups rather than in blobs.. please take a look at this entry at http://cailais.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/theyre-coming-outta-the-goddamn-walls/

One thing I forgot is that a player with a bounty on him, after being killed at least once by a licensed hunter, would have the option to pay off his bounty value by paying twice as much to the authorities. Each licensed hunter would then receive half of the sum paid by the pilot with the bounty divided by their number.
It’s important to allow a character with a bounty to pay off his “debt” after being killed once.

This is a great idea, and I have put the link to that page in my bio to help spread it! I will also help push this to the new CSM members as much as I can…

I tried farmville and mafia wars myself when I started being on facebook, but I quickly stopped after one week or so. The main reason for me is that I found these games too much of a time sink and not rewarding enough in their game play. I have been hooked on WOW for around 2 years, and I am currently playing a lot of EVE online, including using my real money to buy plexes and get ISK (their virtual currency for this game). I stopped playing WoW when they released overpowered new classes in their extension, throwing away the balance of the existing ones to satisfy the power lust of a broader mass and get everyone and their sister to become a death knight, leading to boredom for me. So as i am prone to fall under the lure of games, why don’t I do it for farmwille? I think first and foremost games that only reward time spent for simplistic mechanic and pretty pixels on my screen do not cut it for me, but I also think that my subconscious is fighting against games that are too easily played during the course of the day… When i am playing games, which still is often, I am in playing game mode, and I do not like to switch off and on of that mode too quickly so the model of the facebook games really do not work too well for me because they are by nature calling me out during the other modes I have to be in during a day (like working mode or being with my family mode…).