Before my time, I understand that VO had a bounty system that was handled through the Marshal NPCs at capitol stations. While I don't know the specifics, I've been lead to believe that it was exploitable- simply raise your own bounty and then let your buddy kill you to split the profits.

What if, as an alternative, bounties were posted by players? Simply send the name of your target and the credits you'd like paid as the reward for his head to a Marshal NPC, who will then bestow your reward upon the first player to kill the target. As an added bonus, for every five credits you put up for the reward, the Marshal will match it with a credit of his own.

Thus, if Denji puts a 1000 credit bounty on Azumi, the next person to destroy Azumi would recieve 1200 credits. To be eligible to receive payment, the killer of Azumi would need respected or better faction with the nation used by Denji to post the bounty.

Is this system exploitable? Not very profitably. These changes would return the bounty system to the game in a way that would be enjoyable and safe for consumption.

Got a pirate making you nuts? Post a bounty. Everyone who targets him will see how much his head is worth. Ideally, also which faction's marshal is posting the bounty.

As a side thought, I would also put a marshal at Corvus Prime- so that the shadier side can also call for someone's burned out hull. I wouldn't name him 'marshal,' though. Maybe 'book-keeper' or something equally ominous.

I like. A few ideas along these lines:

Bounties can only be posted against someone who has killed you in the last 24 hours. This legitimizes the bounty and prevents "bounty spamming".

Bounty hunters should have to register with each faction. Registraton probably restricted by license and/or standing (Respected?). Jurisdiction limited to that faction's monitored space. Possible to register with other factions with appropriate standing showing trustworthiness (PoS?).

Once registered, bounties could show up as special missions. If NPC pirates come back, this could be expanded to cover them as well making Bounty Hunter a viable career choice.

Posting a bounty should require a small fee to cover administrative costs, about five-ten percent of the posted bounty.

Bounties can be posted anonymously for an additional surcharge of five-ten percent to cover the cost of the extra paperwork.

Newbies can not have bounties posted against them nor can they post bounties. Mentors, however, may post bounties on behalf of their proteges until they leave the nest.

I really like it Aramarth! I always liked the idea of more communication between NPCs and players, and this and an example of just that. It also involves players more deeply in the game.

Would it still require a bounty-hunter sign-up? Or would such info/rewards be visible to all? I personally think we could do away with the sign-up and just let everyone know who's hull is worth half a mil!

It would also add a whole new level of complexity to PvP.

I did just realize an exploit in this system though: The player who posts the bounty is not allowed to collect on it. If they could, it would allow players to cooperatively up the bounty by 20% (imagine a 100mil bounty...). That said, as long as only anyone but the poster can collect on the bounty, then bounties can be as large as ppl please to pay. Lord knows that some players will pay millions to have us pirates killed.

-R IBA 3.14rat

Is this system exploitable? Not very profitably.

I beg to differ.

You may beg to differ, but you also offer no conclusive argument. Beg all you want.

JimmyN00b93 puts a 10,000,000c bounty on Aramarth's head. Aramarth let's me kill him. I collect 12,000,000c. I split the 12,000,000c between myself and Aramarth. We both make 6 mil pure profit. JimmyN00b93 gets nothing and is 10 mil in the hole. Am I missing something here?

Person A takes 1 bil out of guild bank, puts it on person B, who is then killed by person C. The three split the gains and repeat.

Am I missing something or was that not obvious?

Minus the marshal matching the bounty to some extent, this is exactly what we had before.

Marshal shouldn't match the credits with his own if it's player-issued.

However, I think kills within the NFZ or player-set bounties within monitored space should warrent some kind of special bounty set by the gov.

Maybe if a player kills 3 different players within the nfz or monitored space, he gets a 50k bounty?

It's all exploitable because death has no meaning. Give death meaning and consequence, and then you can talk about a bounty system.

Faction credits. Bounties are paid in script that can only be redeemed at the issuing faction's stations. Faction credits are non-transferable and can only be used to purchase non-transferable items (I guess that means ships at the moment) and for repairs and weapon reloads.

I like this bounty system. Player driven conflict is the best!

Well then remove the marshal's contribution entirely. I suppose there is always the chance that a friend of yours has an alt that has faction, and the two of you could effectively take the cash of the posting individual. You're right, that doesn't sound like much fun.

I've been working on making death matter in my mind for a while now, but unlike my hundreds of ship/weapon mods, I doubt Inc and co. will have the ability or inclination to implement any of them overnight.

Examples include ejection/pilot recovery and a simple loss of a percentage of your credits (call it a death tax- maybe 6%). Then, once death has meaning, the duel system could be altered to end the fight without any death, and thus become the primary way people fight. Tadaa, the end of duel rating misers. So many issues solved so quickly if death had meaning..

I would make the death tax even more substantial, actually. Something in the nature on 10%, rather than 6.

Hmm, that seems way to high, and would really discourage both new players who get killed early on in the game and established players for whom a 10% tax might be as high as 500 million cr .

Such a system would kill off many fun events such as the NW and pirate / trader furballs leading to a lot less pvp in general .

With regard to the bounty system I'd base it on combat and weps xp , not cash . That way the bounty could not be split between the killer and the killed, thus negating the exploit .

Other games easily require our equivalent of a day of running escort missions in 'armor repairs' per death. Ten might be high, but six sure as heck is not.

A new player with 100 credits will only be out six- he might not even notice. I can understand how someone with 6 bil like yourself would object, however. You have something to lose.

Tax can't touch the guild bank though, so with a tiny bit of ingenuity you're around it anyway, right?

This whole bounty thing has become asinine.

The best thing you can do if you don't want it extremely exploitable and feel like people got something out of it, I suggest a max limit to bounties that can only be placed by nations (250,000c?), the player that claims the bounty has recognition of killing the player, and the number of bounties he/she has claimed with a list of who.

You could also add in one more detail, in order to claim a bounty one must be at least neutral to the 3 main nations to claim the bounty.

To add more restrictions, to claim bounties in the first place, a player would have to pass 'tests' to prove they are a worthy combat pilot ready to be a bounty hunter which would require a fee to obtain that license.

In short, 250k credit limit, neutral stance or higher with all 3 nations, pass bounty hunter test to obtain license, level requirements to take the test in the first place, and specific licenses for each nation and quite possibly each faction, especially Corvus.

P.S.- If being neutral with the 3 nations isn't fair for the Serco/Itani then I suggest that Serco nationalists and Itani nationalists can only claim bounties on their counterparts, i.e. Serco claims bounty on Itani and vice versa.

P.P.S.- The above P.S. but with pirates, if the pirate is KOS with their native nation then they can only claim bounties on respected or higher players of the pirates native nation.

well, if the mechanism of the guild bank was allowed everyone would just hold a few thousand in hand and the rest on deposit . The tax idea would then be defeated ...

Surbius, you have hit it on the head. Only make bounties 'claimable' (is that a word?) by select players that are most likely not in league with one another. And 250K is very reasonable, as most players aim to make a mil in some set amount of time. This means only 4 kills nets you just that.

To make bounty hunting actually doable, I suggest a special tab in station that list bounties one is capable of collecting and the last station that said player docked at. This gives the bounty hunter something to work off of, but not any exact location.

-R IBA 3.14rat (soon to be "R IBA bounty hunter"...)

My concept for bringing back bounties was based on the idea of monitoring the flow of cash collected from any bounty.

So, before we had this "bounty hunter" process that you could go through to be able to claim bounties (at least, I think we did, honestly a lot of things are fuzzy for me lately). That was the intention anyhow.

In a revised mechanism, the bounties would be turned over to the hunter in question, but if any economic ties were ever found between the bounty and the person on whom the bounty was placed, the hunter would be immediately kicked out of the "bounty hunting guild" or.. organization or whatever. Maybe even temporarily kicked out of their faction, under the new faction rules.

The implementation would be the annoying part.. we would have to kind of "mark" the cash and anything it was used to purchase, and see if any of that ever ended up in the hands of the person who had the bounty (account-wide, on all characters). That could become way too complex, especially with a large bounty (money to purchase goods, sold and used to purchase other goods and so on, ending up with a vast tree of marked.. "stuff"). After all, the person with the bounty might be a pirate and might genuinely attack and kill the hunter at some later point, at which point the poor hunter would also be stripped of their license.

It's all kind of messy. I haven't spent much time thinking about it lately, so if you guys come up with an elegant solution, let me know. I'm sure there's some simplified version that's feasible, I'm just not sure what.