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Bounty Hunting: Risk Based ISK

While eyes look forward to Odyssey as CCP dangles delicious goodies before us, Retribution cannot be ignored. Its touched ripped apart and restructured many aspects of game play and now, four months in, some of the after effects are starting to surface.

Low Sec has changed. My own corporation has changed. I've written about that a lot. Most of these changes have been for the better. One discussion the other day was a question about gate guns. Being able to warp off and warp back is amazing but people are worried that CCP will take it back away from us because we commit so much more spaceship violence because of it.

Today, I look at bounties and the changes the Bounty Hunting system brought in place. Or, more specifically I look at the Bounty payouts and my opinion on them.

The dev blog is here.

The biggest problem with the old bounty system was that you could pod yourself for your bounty. The second problem was that a bounty was only collected on a pod. It was just not a feasible way for someone to put a price on someone elses head and it had to change. It was changed with Retribution.
From CCP SoniClover: "The bounty payout is based on a percentage of the Total Loss, so the bounty received will always be considerably less than the actual Total Loss value. The base number we’re going for right now is 20%. This means that if you blow something up worth 100 million, then 20 million is paid out in bounty (or whatever is left in the bounty pool if less than 20 million)."
The new form is better but I'd like it to be tweaked some.  The 20% is fantastic for restricting abuse. It is not so fantastic for paying people out for killing someone with a bounty.

I have posted my own bounty payments before. The other night, while doing the holy work of clensing Bosena, I looked at the bounty payments that I was receiving.

Bounty payment
From: CONCORD
Sent: 2013.04.10 03:39
For your termination of Jashoua Vee we have paid you 5,568.31 ISK from their bounty pool.
Bounty payment
From: CONCORD
Sent: 2013.04.10 03:39
For your termination of Jashoua Vee we have paid you 480.20 ISK from their bounty pool.

None of these people had large bounties. We had a sizable fleet that came straight out of the kitchen sink. It was full of drunk people running around shooting things. We did not deserve mountains of ISK. I'm not saying that we should have received showers of wealth for our labor of love.

What it did do is make me roll my eyes. After I rolled my eyes at the payments I got to thinking that the system should not make me roll my eyes. If it did, it should be because people did something silly like when they make my kill rights public. I even wrote someone to explain why making my kill right public would probably not cause someone to come after me and take the 100k bounty he also placed on my head.

In that, I saw the problem.

Bounties need to scale somewhat. I am not saying that they need to scale to the full sum of the bounty or the ship. However, they need to scale more. Ueberlisk received a 240m bounty because he destroyed a blinged out Paladin. This is not every ship. This is not most ships.

I for instance fly ships that tend to be worth under 100m isk. That means the max bounty someone could get would be 20 million for killing me. That sounds not so bad but it is very bad. For one, they have to come to low sec and find me. For two, I'm a fleet bunny so there is more than one person to kill (I hope they don't just trip me and leave me...). The point is that there are trials and tribulations. It is not press F1 and receive 20 million ISK if I am in the system.

This is where my thoughts start to sputter out. Should it scale off of the ship or the bounty amount? If I have a 2 billion ISK bounty should you receive closer to my complete cost of ship in some type of complex math? If I have a more expensive ship should the bounty pay out more to the person killing me as it kind of currently does?

I am not sure. It just needs to be a bit more in my eyes.  Add in changes for low sec or null sec vs high sec. I know the goal is to make it simple and I am not trying to make it complex. It is easier to make it complex then to scale it simply while trying to avoid abuse.

It is just my opinion that 20% needs some review.

Comments

  1. Concord LP. Or Bounty office LP. Similar rewards to FW militia LP, or perhaps better given the extra work involved. And give everything a suitably fearsome name.

    I'm not sure about the ratio of LP given. Perhaps just keep it equal to the isk you get for the bounty. 20% isk and same amount of LP.

    You can exploit it to get access to the new rare items, but that's going to cost you an awful lot of isk.

    ReplyDelete
  2. 20% is because of insurance. If you kill your alt, you get the insurance and the bounty and it shouldn't be above 100%.

    To increase bounties, you must decrease the damn welfare named insurance.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Easiest thing would be if 20% is the base in 1.0 space, and you added a flat percentage to the payout, based on the sec status of the system where the kill took place.

    In short, you get paid more for engaging in more dangerous space.

    1.0 - 20%
    0.9 - 23%
    0.8 - 26%
    0.7 - 29%
    0.6 - 32%
    0.5 - 35%
    0.4 - 38%
    0.3 - 41%
    0.2 - 44%
    0.1 - 47%
    0.0 - 50%

    You run into the same problems with payout + insurance that Gev mentioned, though. That doesn't go away.

    I think insurance is pointless. I'm with him: drop it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The payout system is based off the bounty on the target and ship flown. Of those targets you killed, did any of them have a bounty over 1m? What type of ship were they flying?

    I think the system is at a good spot right now, and encourages payouts for PvP rather than the abuse seen in the old system. I don't know if a better system is possible that doesn't limit rewards, as mechanics such as bounties will always be abused by EVE players as possible.

    ReplyDelete

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