A murder bounty when there is no murder?

[dementia]

Something just occured to me.

When you destroy a ship (NPC or otherwise) that is clean (outside of an Anarchy system) why do you get a bounty for 'Murder' when we all know that no one really dies in ED as everyone has the magic escape pod?

At most all you've committed is criminal vandalism/wanted destruction of space vehicle. Surely a lesser crime.

 

[SquidgyB]

you're quite right, but on the other hand the bounties are "criminally" low at the moment in any case - there's simply no way you can class bounty Hunting as a career, unless you're happy earning less than 500k per hour.

Personally I think bounties should be equal or just under the rebuy value of the ship destroyed, although that in itself would need balancing quite vigorously.

 

[Dr Wookie]

I honestly think that people who rate their gameplay experience in terms of credits per hour are doing it wrong . There's more to life than money, and a heck of a lot more to ED than money! I've JUST got hold of a basic Asp (6 million credits) after about 5 or 6 weeks' playtime. It will take another few weeks to kit out properly. Some people grinding their life away could do it in a day or two but I bet I enjoy myself more.

 

[DaggerSnake]

Rating balance or gameplay as broken by using credits/hour as a metric is pretty shallow and really just falls short of the spirit of getting lost in this amazing virtual world.

I love bounty hunting for any price. The thrill is the hunt, the chase, the kill. Money is a bonus but certainly not the fun.

 

[SquidgyB]

Oh I get the fun, and I'm having plenty of it - but when bounty hunting (and mining for that matter) is set out as a career, I'd expect to be able to progress through ships in a reasonable amount of time - and I wouldn't expect to be able to leap frog forward (and I'm not talking about shaving 5% or 10% here and there, we're talking factors here) by deciding to take up another career to subsidise the bounty hunting.

I don't consider using credits/hour as the metric for a game whose core concept is making profit to be particularly wrong, and assuming that this is all I care about in the game is just incorrect...

Bounties and mining should be profitable in their own right, and should at least scale as you progress to more powerful ships - right now I'd think it would take weeks if not months of pew pew to get anywhere near a Python or higher... I decided to trade for a week and here I am, sitting pretty in a grade A Python - I just don't think that's right somehow.

An idea I had to remedy the situation would be to offer ships/modules cheap/free as part of mission rewards, so that you begin your bounty hunting career as taking missions from, say, the military, or dodgy factions etc. The rewards should scale as you progress through up the ranks/gain rep and would allow for upgrades to be made without too much of a financial outlay, keeping the player interested over the long term.

I dunno, a lot of people don't see it as an issue, evidently even those who do nothing but bounty hunting - I guess I'm just all for equality, me

 

[Janichsan]

The escape pod is a player's prerogative. The AI is playing the Iron Man mode we are missing.