Thanks for the suggestion! For PvP payouts specifically, how would you account for players gaming the system with friends and alt accounts?
A bit late to the party, sorry
As long as the bounty payout is paid out of the target's pocket, it will always be a net
negative sum game, as the target will also have to pay a rebuy or lose their ship entirely when they are killed. If they can't cover the bounty on their head, they will need to start selling ships. Afaik, that mechanic is already in the game for that reason.
There are a couple of outlier situations. The biggest one is wing bounty hunting. It has never made sense that
all wingmembers get the full bounty. This mechanic quadruples the bounty value on
all targets, which is non-sensical. The total bounty should always be divided by wing members who have "tagged" (ie. fired a shot at) the target. That actually goes for both PvP and NPC combat, and will be even more important if you're balancing bounty payouts for NPCs.
Then there is the issue of someone going on a killing spree in a cheap ship and racks up a bounty of hundreds of million credits. As long as they are always
forced to pay off the bounty they had on their head, including selling ships and/or modules, this is only an issue for those who don't own other ships. They however go bankrupt and end up in a starter Sidewinder. This part can be gamed to a certain extent, but the work involved in racking up high bounties on a low-end ship, going back to a starter Sidey and then do it all over again, is more than it's worth when there are easier ways of making money in the game. The time spent on an Alt-account to game this is more than it would take to just do other activities with your main account imho.
TL;DR in numbered list form:
1. PvP bounty claims increased up to the current bounty on the target's ship
2. Target has to pay all bounties claimed out of own pocket.
3. Target has to pay the rebuy of their ship or abandon it, either way they are paying for the loss of it.
4. If the target cannot cover the amount in credits, they will be forced to sell assets to cover the cost, regardless of whether they abandon their current ship or not.
5. If the target cannot cover the amount after selling all assets, they will go bankrupt and be reset to a loaner Sidewinder equivalent to what new players start with.
6.
ALL combat bounties claimed in a wing get divided between the wing members having a valid hit on the target in the instance it was killed in.
Perhaps I am missing something, but this makes sense to me atleast.
PS: A bigger issue in PvP bounty hunting is how a player with over 1b in bounties can either a)swap ships and be clean as a whistle, despite having committed the equivalent of genocide in the system and/or b)clean their status by removing modules and just cleaning them at a fraction of the cost of cleaning their hull.
a) is really non-sensical right up there with "anonymous docking" when wanted.
b) will need a change in how ships are cleaned, and perhaps a compele re-assesment of the ability to clean a ship at all
