Currently, player bounties cap at 2,000,000 credits, which is pretty silly. You kill an enemy with a 1b bounty and get 2m credits? Makes it absolutely not worth it.
Of course, the reason it was changed was to prevent players from farming up billions in bounties and then dying with no credits on them to generate cash out of thin air.
To fix this, I'd like to see a series of changes to bounties to avoid exploits and bad behavior.
1. All bounties cap out at the criminal's credit total.
If they have a 1b bounty but only have 200m credits, the bounty hunter gets 200m credits; no more. No credits are generated from the void.
This fixes the problem of players generating credits from thin air, but raises its own problem; pirates could just fly without any credits, and never need to pay off any bounties.
Which leads to the second part:
2. Unpaid bounties are converted into the temporary removal of all permit locks, as well as the systems where the crimes took place.
The above curve(with accompanying formula) shows how this would function; the X-axis is the unpaid bounty, in hundreds of millions of credits. The Y-axis is the number of days the offending player would be permit locked from the systems in question.
For the purposes of clarity, I'll say this again; this would be the temporary removal of all permit locks, as well as the generation of new permit locks(exclusively for that player) for the systems where crimes took place. In a worst case scenario, a player who had an unpaid bounty of 1 billion credits would have their permits revoked for 10 days. By contrast, a player with between 0 and 200 million credits in unpaid bounties would be banned for up to about 8 hours.
This should, hopefully, encourage players to have enough credits to pay off any bounties they may have, without excessively punishing them if they fail to do so, and not significantly punishing accidental cases.
This does, however, still leave the problem of players just killing their friends to claim their bounties, essentially removing the bounties at the cost of a rebuy. Credits would be transferred from one player to the other, but if they're friends or alternate accounts, that doesn't matter. I would fix this potential problem with two changes.
3a. All player bounties, when claimed, automatically deduct a 25% surcharge from the total, which is lost permanently.
This way, even if the system is exploited, the criminal player still loses a minimum of 25% of the total credit value.
3b. Player bounties are not immediately removed, and instead are changed to an 'inactive' state, where they decay by 50% per day.
Any new crimes committed will instantly re-activate the inactive bounty. This way, it doesn't matter if their friend kills them; continuing to commit crimes and being killed will give them just as much of a bounty as before.
The bounty would have its first 50% reduction instantly on death, but the next 50% reduction could not happen until the next day, even if the player is killed again.
Hopefully these changes would close any loopholes in the player bounty system, allowing them to actually provide meaningful payouts to prospective bounty hunters.
Of course, the reason it was changed was to prevent players from farming up billions in bounties and then dying with no credits on them to generate cash out of thin air.
To fix this, I'd like to see a series of changes to bounties to avoid exploits and bad behavior.
1. All bounties cap out at the criminal's credit total.
If they have a 1b bounty but only have 200m credits, the bounty hunter gets 200m credits; no more. No credits are generated from the void.
This fixes the problem of players generating credits from thin air, but raises its own problem; pirates could just fly without any credits, and never need to pay off any bounties.
Which leads to the second part:
2. Unpaid bounties are converted into the temporary removal of all permit locks, as well as the systems where the crimes took place.
The above curve(with accompanying formula) shows how this would function; the X-axis is the unpaid bounty, in hundreds of millions of credits. The Y-axis is the number of days the offending player would be permit locked from the systems in question.
For the purposes of clarity, I'll say this again; this would be the temporary removal of all permit locks, as well as the generation of new permit locks(exclusively for that player) for the systems where crimes took place. In a worst case scenario, a player who had an unpaid bounty of 1 billion credits would have their permits revoked for 10 days. By contrast, a player with between 0 and 200 million credits in unpaid bounties would be banned for up to about 8 hours.
This should, hopefully, encourage players to have enough credits to pay off any bounties they may have, without excessively punishing them if they fail to do so, and not significantly punishing accidental cases.
This does, however, still leave the problem of players just killing their friends to claim their bounties, essentially removing the bounties at the cost of a rebuy. Credits would be transferred from one player to the other, but if they're friends or alternate accounts, that doesn't matter. I would fix this potential problem with two changes.
3a. All player bounties, when claimed, automatically deduct a 25% surcharge from the total, which is lost permanently.
This way, even if the system is exploited, the criminal player still loses a minimum of 25% of the total credit value.
3b. Player bounties are not immediately removed, and instead are changed to an 'inactive' state, where they decay by 50% per day.
Any new crimes committed will instantly re-activate the inactive bounty. This way, it doesn't matter if their friend kills them; continuing to commit crimes and being killed will give them just as much of a bounty as before.
The bounty would have its first 50% reduction instantly on death, but the next 50% reduction could not happen until the next day, even if the player is killed again.
Hopefully these changes would close any loopholes in the player bounty system, allowing them to actually provide meaningful payouts to prospective bounty hunters.
