Cailais at the hydrostatic capsule has posted a bunch of his design ideas regarding smuggling and bounty hunting starting here (5 parts). I posted my thoughts on the matter in response on his last design post.
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…
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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!