so tell me how you want to solve it? you think you can't buy all abbadons in the area as an alliance and make it to a big bounty payout event once a month? Or with much easier to manipulate items. It has been done already with FW LP which uses the same system.

the only defense are low payouts. Otherwise you will just kill yourself to get rid of the bounty or make even profit from it if you do it right.

IF it would be sovleable you would not need your formula. Just set the payout to 70%... done

CCP has already said they are willing to look at modifications to the payout numbers. They started at a pretty modest point to let it run for awhile and make sure they hadn't overlooked ways to game the system... so your proposal isn't out of line.

Although, no matter how you look at it, you are still going to run into the hard cap of loss value that cannot be exceeded. Under the current system people with higher bounties really aren't "More Wanted" (unless they fly very expensive ships, in which case that higher bounty does make them worth more than someone with a low bounty), it is more the fact that they remain wanted for a much longer period of time than people with low bounties.

Being an actually Interesting and intelligent post, I read all of it.

This idea is what I imagined when CCP introduced the new bounty system, and I was actuallly excited. to find out that the bounty system was just a base 20% really disappointed me.

+1 Signed etc etc,
Make it happen CCP.
It will be ace! :D

What this bounty program incentivises is 'not dying'.

If you are stalking a large alliance with a large bounty, 10 kills and no deaths is laughing all the way to the bank.
If you are stalking one dude with a 5 million isk bounty and you die 5 times before you gank him while he is afk, you're going to have a bad time.

I don't see any compelling reason to change the system to favour your style of play over the other.

Bounties are somewhat underwhelming at present - for example I got 8 bounty payouts at the weekend and they didn't even cover the cost of (small hybrid) ammo used on the roam

While its nice to get some iskies its still not enough to create a functional bounty system.

Something needs to change.

Not necessarily. What about a % value lower than the ship price and a lotto like calculation on a 'bonus' for characters with high bounty amounts?

Would not be worth to try and exploit for the individual with the bounty but would, at the same time, make it more lucrative for the bounty hunter professional.

Riedle

While its not going to happen due to the number of people with trivial bounties on their heads I think it'd simplify matters a lot if you simply couldn't insure yourself when you had a bounty.

Hindsight is a fine thing but the decision to allow placing bounties on anyone for no reason has seriously restricted what "tweaks" CCP can make.

Might have been better to restrict bounty placement to global criminals (-5 to -10) and on people who have killed your ship/pod.

Having insurance in the mix means less bounty per kill to ensure no exploiting can take place.

Too late now anyway.

What does the insurance-system have to do with anything?

It's mainly targeted at the DEVs but i'm trying to make it readable for everybody.
Hope it's better now (:

There's very little way to manage this system without a good system upon which to base values. CCP has some trouble with that and it's pretty much all that's causing the issues with bounty payouts. Even a contract-based system would only cover some of the cases. It would work for 'professional' bounty hunters who are known to not be someone's alt, though public contracts of that type would be exploitable as all hell. (Theoretical criteria would be similar to "Minimum ISK Lost" "Number of kills" "Pod?" and payouts held in escrow until failure or successfully completed.)

If its targetted at devs why post it here?

The proposed idea centres too much on a 1v1 scenario and is therefore bad, because many fights are not 1v1 fights.

The purpose of a bounty is not to pay just a bounty hunter, but to put the bountied player into more fights. With higher payouts does the balance shift more towards a gratification of the bounty hunter and relieves the bountied player too fast of the bounty. Corporation and alliance bounties of several billions, which are meant to place a bounty onto many players will then get paid out too fast.

I see no reason why bounty hunters need a higher gratification. If you are bad at your job then you won't get better by going after higher bounties and your greed will likely only cause you more losses than you can currently imagine.

I made a thread just after the expansion about the top bounties not being worthwhile to hunt down because of the way the bounty system works.

A dev responded that they intended to make the payout on bounties scale in some way based on the top 10 list, but that they didn't have time to do it prior to retributions release.


At some point the top bounties will pay out more than 20%.
That is the only thing I personally feel needs to be done with the bounty system.

I think this is a good idea. We had a similar story, but didn't have time to do anything with it for Retribution. I think there should be leverage to increase the payout up to around 30%, for kills on people with high bounty. Killing someone in the top 10 most wanted should definitely count for more.

10 people from 400.000?
And nobody cares aslong as you'r number 11 from 400.000?
hmmmmm (:

Did you even read my post?
It solves that dynamic payout in a much better fassion.

With your "top 10 or not" system it wouldnt matter if someone has 1mil or 5mil. neither one will be top10 (:
Actually there would just be 10 funny rich people that put extreme bounties on their inactive alts and you have changed a whole lot of nothing (:

There is no problem in getting a save low value.
If the current save value isnt enough, take the lowest save value in the last 6 months.
That would be pretty impossible to manipulate, as you would need to buy all items of one type for 6 months to make this happen.
And when u take the cheapest of the prices those items were sold for you lost all meaning of manipulating anything.
It would still be billions for officer modules though.
It's not a matter of beeing possible or not, it's just a matter of the right formula and savety messures.

This thread made me sad (again) about fact EVE players have much better ideas than devs.

Right now those 20% flat bounties seems like wasting of development resources.

I understand that you want more ISKs, everyone wants more all the time, but why do you think you deserve them?

I very much like the way it works for several reasons:

- My bounties require the bountied player to make a 5 times higher loss before he loses the "Wanted" sign.
- My bounties stay less important than the victory itself and so the victory stays the main motivator for a fight.
- I do not want my bounties to be paid out to players who try to get lucky.
- Nor do I want my bounties to be paid out to those who only look at the ISKs, then fail and thereby give the bountied player several victories before the actual loss.

Higher payouts defeat these points.

If you then cannot win 5 times, and you do get loot each time as well, then why would you deserve a higher payout?

I understand that you want more ISKs, everyone wants more all the time, but why do you think you deserve them?

I very much like the way it works for several reasons:

- My bounties require the bountied player to make a 5 times higher loss before he loses the "Wanted" sign.
- My bounties stay less important than the victory itself and so the victory stays the main motivator for a fight.
- I do not want my bounties to be paid out to players who try to get lucky.
- Nor do I want my bounties to be paid out to those who only look at the ISKs, then fail and thereby give the bountied player several victories before the actual loss.

Higher payouts defeat these points.

If you then cannot win 5 times, and you do get loot each time as well, then why would you deserve a higher payout?

Because expecting a player to be 5 times better than anyone else is an unreasonable expectation. Anyways, in terms of calculating the costs, is there any particular reason that it can't be calculated from the market data directly in somewhat real time or recalculated at each downtime?

Why all the greed on the bounty? What has changed since Retribution that this is suddenly not enough ISKs when before you got nothing?

Who shall take your demands serious? It is like you are being given a piece of chocolate cake and then start yelling you want the whole cake, ALL CAKE, MOOOAARRR CAKE!, CAKE NOW NOW NOW!!1!11!, ...

How about this:

- Reduce the bounty payout down to 5%.
- Add a Bounty Negotiation skill to increase it by 4% per level to a maximum of 25%.

Those who don't train the skill will get less and it leaves more to those who do.