Boutny hunting does not take that much: just get a mission and/or go SC in some system, wanted ships are all around. The thing is that you won't be able to farm anymore, but the fun is still here!
The Bounty Hunting & Bounties tips, and general discussion thread
- Thread starter Sir.Tj
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Boutny hunting does not take that much: just get a mission and/or go SC in some system, wanted ships are all around. The thing is that you won't be able to farm anymore, but the fun is still here!
Pulling sidewinders and vipers out of supercruise every ten minutes or so is so boring that by the end of last night I was ready to pull my own eyeballs out in frustration. I have no problem with working harder for larger targets if they are worth the effort either financially or in terms of a challenge but right now it's shooting fish in a barrel for next to nothing in terms of reward. Moan about the RES sites as they were all you like, but when I wanted to have a laugh and do something other than trading they were good fun. Now what's left is just a long, boring grind.
It always seemed odd to me that RESs were always a bloodbath. Why would a pirate pick on miners when they could hunt down something more lucrative, like a trader of high-tech goods? And why would a miner go somewhere that has so much carnage happening only kilometres away?
I do love asteroid belts as a place to fight but they need to invent more reasons for players/NPCs to be there.
Anyway, the mission-oriented bounty hunting is a lot better now. I have much more fun chasing the big score, getting sent to different systems, than sitting around shooting someone already getting melted by the police.
Well RES farming is still do-able, it's just been nerfed. I'm convinced High-Intensity RES sites are bugged, because while standard sits are okay, High sites are usually flat-out empty, which makes no sense at all.
The problem is, they nuked a gameplay alternative for casual players, but utterly failed to implement another option. Running missions pays jack and we all know it.
Sounds like a good improvement.
Exactly this. I agree RES sites were a strange place for a bloodbath, something more contextual would have been great. However, to just have that option wiped out with no alternative (at least not a profitable one) seems a bit short-sighted.
Nerfing RES farming didn't hurt casual players. It hurted lazy players expecting easy income
Ah, and running quick 1-10 jump trade routes and making millions while half-zoned out and listening to a podcast isn't lazy?
I'm not here to knock trading. Some people want to play Space Euro Trucker and power to them, I'm happy they're having fun. But Bounty Hunting isn't as fun as it could be and that's what concerns me. It's a higher-risk, higher-difficulty gameplay option that confusingly pays WORSE than lower-risk alternatives, with the only disincentive to playing a trader being that it's boring.
This is backwards game design. The higher risk, higher-activity and higher-engagement playstyles should reward appropriately. RES farming was an okay stop-gap for casual players without much time to kill, but it was not a good solution because people with lots of time to kill could farm money too easily. But they didn't replace what they destroyed, meaning all they did overall was hurt the profession.
If all you have is a junker and you trash it but get a new car to replace it, hay hooray. If you smash up your junker and you don't get a new car, well, now you're walking, and even though the junker sucked, this is worse.
That's such a massively condescending post that it's not even funny. Elite for me is my game I go to to try and 'switch off' from more serious stuff. I like the backstories and the idea of the powerplay stuff as I think it adds to making it more interesting, however, if I want to spend time grinding away at things looking for small margins I can go back to my main hobby which is iracing. I appreciate the hardcore on the forums probably disagree with that, but elite was fun with a serious side you could occasionally immerse yourself in if you wanted. It catered for the long-term players and the more casual. Now, it's gone for those with five or six hours of playtime a day and everyone else be damned.Nerfing RES farming didn't hurt casual players. It hurted lazy players expecting easy income
I like the bounty hunting as it is.. went on a hunt yesterday, spotted target in SC.. looked aside for a moment to check the bounty award looked back to find I had lost him. Next moment was interdicted by said target in his FDL and viper friends.. one hectic fight later and I'm whistling my way over to the next one. Found him, pulled him out of SC, failed to note he was not wanted, managed to take him down in his conda, while being beaten up by his courier buddies bugged out ASAP directly into a interdiction by the local feds.. ran like away like the wind nursing a damaged canopy and hull at 50% through a couple of anarchy system, looking desperately for a station that could handle the repair work.. all in the space of 30 mins..
Sorry this is complete and utter rubbish. I just picked up 7 missions in one zone, 3 wanted assassin, 2 pirate, 2 combat zone. All the targets were pretty easy to find, killed the 6 pirates in one go at a strong signal, two of the three assassination were easy to find and interdict, found the last one in a USS. One of which was a novice conda with my largest ever bounty nearly 350k. Then headed into the combat zone to kill 12 military ship in total. Took me about 1 hour, loads of fun and netted something like 4mil. If you think that is more grindy than sitting in the same place farming the same old easy mode ships then we must agree to differ.
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What you're missing is that you were lucky. Lucky to get those primo missions, all of which were easy to locate and handle. I spent about 1.5 hours trying to do the same exact thing last night and netted maybe half that amount because the missions on offer at the various stations all sucked for what I wanted to do.
This creates a major issue if you're a guy who has, say, an hour to play, every day or every other day. The expectation is, I want to log in, get the experience I'm looking to have, and then get out so I can take care of other things in my life. If the game cannot provide that, it will lose all but its most dedicated and time-rich players, and be relegated to the rear of the pack when it comes to multiplayer space games. I don't think anyone with any real love for the game would wish for it to not succeed.
To stay competitive in the marketplace, you must provide a quality experience for casuals as well as "whales". Games that fail to recognize this die early deaths, and later people can all stand around and wring their hands and wonder, where did it all go wrong?
The future of bounty hunting in ED
So far, I've played almost exclusively as a bounty hunter, because what I like in ED is fighting, and the thrill of getting a lot of money from one kill. One of my most memorable experiences so far was back in pre-release beta, when I took a contract to kill an Anaconda, and fought him in my humble Viper, winning only by the skin of my teeth, with no shield cells left, only a few percent hull and a couple of rounds. Sadly, most of the time bounty hunting means simply sweeping extraction sites, waiting for big bounties to spawn, and killing them easily. With powerplay, the bounty hunting missions have become more interesting, with the ability to find your target in suprcruise, possibly surrounded by wingmen. This, I believe, is a step in the right direction, which is actually hunting your target, meaning : tracking, finding, intercepting and THEN fighting your target. And also taking risks.
So I've been thinking about how I imagine bounty hunting to be far in the future, once the game is more developped, paid expansions are released, etc. I hope that eventually, taking a bounty hunting mission will mean taking on a quest to find your target, which would potentially let you earn very big rewards (proportional on the difficulty to find your target, not only to kill it). This is the direction I'd like this profession to take.
Here are some tools we could use in the future to find our target:
- Use pre-made text comms with NPCs to ask them where the target is. Depending on the target, you could ask local police, traders, miners, or even pirates if you beat them up and threaten them for information on their colleague. You could pay for info.
- Frameshift wake scanner would allow you to follow criminals to secret stations, for example within planetary rings, and find your target there, or gather info about it.
- Once walking on stations is implemented, talking to people in bars could help you learn more about your target.
- Examining wreckages of the target's victims could give more info on them.
- A target sheet in the ship UI could display all the information you'd have gathered on your target : what ship they use, what weapons/modules, if they fly solo or in wings, their last known location (time stamped), their usual area of activity, their "personnality" (combat style)...
- You could use a tracking device on your target if you encounter it and it manages to escape. Once their shield is down, you could fire one that would stick on the target's hull, showing you their current system on the galaxy map, and making them appear directly in your contacts panel once you're in the same system.
What would make such a system interesting and deep is that you would need knowledge, and thus experience, to know where to look and who to ask to get your info. Just asking the first NPC ship you'd come across wouldn't help. A good bounty hunter would know in what kind of systems to look for certain types of NPCs who will be relevant ; they'll need to work on their reputation with the local factions if they want their questions answered, unless they're ready to get fines for bullying innocent people to squeeze info out of them.
Also, pirates don't need to be the only kind of target. You could be tasked to kill a former member of your power who defected, a war criminal, a rival merchant... From pirate bases, you could get contracts on high authorities, rival gang leaders, snitches... Each of these would involve looking in different kinds of places, asking different kinds of people, using different tools...
Here is an example of how I imagine a more involved bounty hunting mission in ED, featuring walking on stations expansion (assuming it could let us do this sort of things):
- Get a contract for killing a pirate at a station. The bounty is issued by a rich merchant who is tired of getting his employed pilots mugged. All you know from the contract is that the target operates in 2-3 named systems and belongs to a certain criminal faction.
- You decide to leave your ship and go to the station's bar, hoping to find some info on your target. You talk to a patron who happens to be a contracted trader who's recently been pirated by your target. He tells you the target flies a red Imperial Clipper, and exclusively uses laser weapons. He warns you that when he tried to shoot back, the pirate fired some chaffs. He gives you the location where he was attacked, but it was a while ago, and the info is no longer useful.
- You get back in your ship and fly to one of the systems on your list. Once there, you notice on your radar a Vulture belonging to the same pirate faction as your target. You interdict it and start firing. Once your enemy is at 20% hull, he starts spooling up his FSD as you had planned, and you conveniently let him jump away.
- Using your wake scanner, you analyze his destination, and jump behind him.
- You follow him from a distance, until you see him drop in the middle of a planetary ring. You drop behind him, finding yourself near a secret pirate base. You turn off all your unnecessary systems, engage silent running, and start drifting silently towards the station. You pop a heat sink and completely disappear from the scanners, avoiding attention from pirates flying around. Unlike normal stations, there is little to no security, and very little docking management once inside the station, so you fly in without clearance.
- You land your ship at a discreet location, change your pilot outfit for something more "pirate-y" and walk out. Once inside the station, no one suspects you're not a fellow privateer, and you go in the bar. You ask around about your target, and learn he is currently leading a wing of four ships assaulting miners at a nearby extraction site in the system.
- You go back to your ship, leave the pirate base, and go to the designated location, where you find your target and claim your bounty.
You could have played it differently, for example shooting the pirate Vulture's thrusters and threatening to blow them up if they didn't give you your target's location. Or asking local traders if they had come across the pirate...
I hope the people at FD plan on further developping bounty hunting as a profession, to make it a more interesting process. It would be really cool to actually investigate your target before you could find it.
So far, I've played almost exclusively as a bounty hunter, because what I like in ED is fighting, and the thrill of getting a lot of money from one kill. One of my most memorable experiences so far was back in pre-release beta, when I took a contract to kill an Anaconda, and fought him in my humble Viper, winning only by the skin of my teeth, with no shield cells left, only a few percent hull and a couple of rounds. Sadly, most of the time bounty hunting means simply sweeping extraction sites, waiting for big bounties to spawn, and killing them easily. With powerplay, the bounty hunting missions have become more interesting, with the ability to find your target in suprcruise, possibly surrounded by wingmen. This, I believe, is a step in the right direction, which is actually hunting your target, meaning : tracking, finding, intercepting and THEN fighting your target. And also taking risks.
So I've been thinking about how I imagine bounty hunting to be far in the future, once the game is more developped, paid expansions are released, etc. I hope that eventually, taking a bounty hunting mission will mean taking on a quest to find your target, which would potentially let you earn very big rewards (proportional on the difficulty to find your target, not only to kill it). This is the direction I'd like this profession to take.
Here are some tools we could use in the future to find our target:
- Use pre-made text comms with NPCs to ask them where the target is. Depending on the target, you could ask local police, traders, miners, or even pirates if you beat them up and threaten them for information on their colleague. You could pay for info.
- Frameshift wake scanner would allow you to follow criminals to secret stations, for example within planetary rings, and find your target there, or gather info about it.
- Once walking on stations is implemented, talking to people in bars could help you learn more about your target.
- Examining wreckages of the target's victims could give more info on them.
- A target sheet in the ship UI could display all the information you'd have gathered on your target : what ship they use, what weapons/modules, if they fly solo or in wings, their last known location (time stamped), their usual area of activity, their "personnality" (combat style)...
- You could use a tracking device on your target if you encounter it and it manages to escape. Once their shield is down, you could fire one that would stick on the target's hull, showing you their current system on the galaxy map, and making them appear directly in your contacts panel once you're in the same system.
What would make such a system interesting and deep is that you would need knowledge, and thus experience, to know where to look and who to ask to get your info. Just asking the first NPC ship you'd come across wouldn't help. A good bounty hunter would know in what kind of systems to look for certain types of NPCs who will be relevant ; they'll need to work on their reputation with the local factions if they want their questions answered, unless they're ready to get fines for bullying innocent people to squeeze info out of them.
Also, pirates don't need to be the only kind of target. You could be tasked to kill a former member of your power who defected, a war criminal, a rival merchant... From pirate bases, you could get contracts on high authorities, rival gang leaders, snitches... Each of these would involve looking in different kinds of places, asking different kinds of people, using different tools...
Here is an example of how I imagine a more involved bounty hunting mission in ED, featuring walking on stations expansion (assuming it could let us do this sort of things):
- Get a contract for killing a pirate at a station. The bounty is issued by a rich merchant who is tired of getting his employed pilots mugged. All you know from the contract is that the target operates in 2-3 named systems and belongs to a certain criminal faction.
- You decide to leave your ship and go to the station's bar, hoping to find some info on your target. You talk to a patron who happens to be a contracted trader who's recently been pirated by your target. He tells you the target flies a red Imperial Clipper, and exclusively uses laser weapons. He warns you that when he tried to shoot back, the pirate fired some chaffs. He gives you the location where he was attacked, but it was a while ago, and the info is no longer useful.
- You get back in your ship and fly to one of the systems on your list. Once there, you notice on your radar a Vulture belonging to the same pirate faction as your target. You interdict it and start firing. Once your enemy is at 20% hull, he starts spooling up his FSD as you had planned, and you conveniently let him jump away.
- Using your wake scanner, you analyze his destination, and jump behind him.
- You follow him from a distance, until you see him drop in the middle of a planetary ring. You drop behind him, finding yourself near a secret pirate base. You turn off all your unnecessary systems, engage silent running, and start drifting silently towards the station. You pop a heat sink and completely disappear from the scanners, avoiding attention from pirates flying around. Unlike normal stations, there is little to no security, and very little docking management once inside the station, so you fly in without clearance.
- You land your ship at a discreet location, change your pilot outfit for something more "pirate-y" and walk out. Once inside the station, no one suspects you're not a fellow privateer, and you go in the bar. You ask around about your target, and learn he is currently leading a wing of four ships assaulting miners at a nearby extraction site in the system.
- You go back to your ship, leave the pirate base, and go to the designated location, where you find your target and claim your bounty.
You could have played it differently, for example shooting the pirate Vulture's thrusters and threatening to blow them up if they didn't give you your target's location. Or asking local traders if they had come across the pirate...
I hope the people at FD plan on further developping bounty hunting as a profession, to make it a more interesting process. It would be really cool to actually investigate your target before you could find it.
The new bounty hunting is nice if the... rewards weren't bugged to hell and back. I took a ~212k contract to kill pirates (yeah, sometimes we're cannibals and this time against AI so whatever) and was only paid 80k when I completed the mission. Totally ripped off!
I then took another mission to smuggle slaves for 136k and it only paid me 100k.
But, I will admit, the new bounty hunting missions are fun. Well, more fun than jumping into and outta RES sites over and over. Those are a grind. The new system--it adds a refreshing change between hunting marks. Damn traders are nearly extinct in open. *shakes fist at ED*
I then took another mission to smuggle slaves for 136k and it only paid me 100k.
But, I will admit, the new bounty hunting missions are fun. Well, more fun than jumping into and outta RES sites over and over. Those are a grind. The new system--it adds a refreshing change between hunting marks. Damn traders are nearly extinct in open. *shakes fist at ED*
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With respect, I wouldn't mind that kind of mission but everything I've come across so far that's bounty-hunting (assassination missions aren't bounty-hunting, they earn you fines and rep you might not actually want), the rewards are nowhere near that high and the 'kill pirate' missions seem to be flying around in SC looking for sidewinders or vipers that take about ten seconds to kill with my Python. Hardly challenging stuff.
Trading is lazy biznes. You know how much money you can invest, hoe much profit you can get, sometimes even more if you will be lucky with extra missions. It's stable and almost risk free job. Bounty hunting is risky in terms of loosing your life and income. You can't guarantee that you will find reliable source of Pirates to grind and gain stable income. Sometimes you will earn 400k sometimes you will earn 4 minions in hour. It is, and it should be dependent of luck. That's nature of bounty hunting. I agree that missions should be fixed, and there should be more pirates with higher bounties, and more dangerous in that matter... But remember you just can't hunt anywhere,like in 1.2
Now you will have to find good low security system, (not anarchy you want someone to give you those mission) best refinery/extraction and you will find good missions. Do some hunting, do some research, use some brains.
Now you will have to find good low security system, (not anarchy you want someone to give you those mission) best refinery/extraction and you will find good missions. Do some hunting, do some research, use some brains.
Assassinations dont always earn fines, many are for wanted npcs.
I must just be in a good zone then (I do have good rep in most location nearby and an ok combat rating) but my CURRENT mission list is;
Kill Pirate Lord - 157k + 278k bounty (finished)
Kill Pirate Lord - 104k + 324k bounty (finished)
Kill 7 pirates - 210k
Kill 5 pirates - 147k
All these are in the same location. For the pirates I dont always just go for interdicting small ships, I normally look for strong signals, these are often high ranking condas with 5-6 other pirates in support.
On a side note if you want a single site where you can group up and fight try combat zones, they are giving a pretty good return now.
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Nerfing RES farming didn't hurt casual players. It hurted lazy players expecting easy income
Not so, friend
I spent ages trying to figure out the pattern to RES spawns, trawling low sec, anarchy systems, with pristine belt reserves and high influence anarchy factions. So, not lazy. What casual players want is for mechanics like this to make sense and to not be obfuscated by the game design. We want to be able to figure out where to go quickly and easily, for an appropriate challenge. We don't want the game to be easy, we just want it to be transparent. A confusing, nonsensical ruleset is not a good stand-in for genuine gameplay difficulty.