Overwatch design philosophy and genre are different to the point of being incomparable.
How could players be encouraged to put themselves into dangerous pvp scenarios, even when they don't have to?
- Thread starter DemiserofD
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Your proposal doesn't really avoid the bounties, tbh. If you kill someone, you get a bounty. Then if a bounty hunter kills you, they claim that bounty. Unless you're planning to stop using an account every single time you get any sort of bounty, there will be no way to avoid it. The best you could do is pay it off each time, but since even that would instantly be restored whenever you committed a new crime, it wouldn't matter. The bounty hunters would just need to follow and wait.
The only way to bypass it would be to have dozens of accounts, and swap to each new one each time you commit a crime, but for obvious reasons that's not a very practical choice. Worst case you could abuse it, but you'd end up paying Fdev a few hundred bucks for that right, so I'm sure they wouldn't argue.
The benefits of this system is that, currently bounty hunting is not a viable activity for players, due to the low payouts. This makes playing a defensive role when entering low-sec non-viable, which means the haulers will usually be defenseless, which pushes them away from Open and into Solo.
By making defense a more viable activity with significant payouts, it opens the door for bounty hunters, and through that door, the haulers can follow.
Yep. My favorite PvP is when there's no risk. Most FPS games don't have any risk, World of Warships and World of Tanks don't, PvP in many if not most MMORPGs don't.
You don't lose any experience, gear, or anything at all when you PvP. That to me makes it fun. I play games for fun.
The PvP games where there is risk involved, I don't play.
Sure, but with 10+ minute travel times via supercruise, that ship has sailed.
You've gotta balance any wait times on the rest of the game, and the game already doesn't respect player time. You could go either way; reduce supercruise/etc times, or increase respawn times. But you can't have a disparity between the two or things break down.
Your proposal stated that if the bounty holding player is killed the bounty goes inactive and decays over 7 days till gone. With a single alt you can even control where that goes then just use the alt to do more killing while the first is on cooldown. You don't need a half dozen unless there was something you left out in the proposal you initially described. Especially if the bounties only become prohibitive over a significant period of time and activity.
Also, this is still no benefit to haulers. In PG/Solo they are safe. In open they may not be. The addition of defense is implausible as a behavior because:
- given the infrequency in which people are actually attacked outside of hotspots payouts will be infrequent
- target selection on the part of attackers means not going after escorted ships further reducing likelihood of a payout
- which means most defenders aren't actually getting paid for their babysitting
- which in turn means it's on the haulers to pay for those escorts or people just really wanting to bounty hunt
- If it's the latter the payout situation solves nothing and the only people doing it with be the same people already doing it
- Or there will be a cost added to to hauling through low security in hiring guards that isn't present in other modes
- And in either of the above solo remains a safer and/or cheaper choice
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You're forgetting the fact that the bounty instantly reactivates if they commit another crime.
So you COULD kill the criminal account every single time, and temporarily remove the bounty, yes. But the instant that account goes back out and commits another crime, they instantly reactivate the bounty, and make themselves a target.
So, for example, say you go out and kill 5 players and get a 5m bounty. You then go back and get killed by your alt, transferring 5m credits from the criminal to the alt. Then you go back out again and kill another player; bam, your bounty is now 6m(5m from before + 1m new); if a bounty hunter then arrives and kills the criminal, they get that 6m credit bounty.
The only way to avoid this entirely would be to commit a single crime, then retire the character for a week, switching to a new one. If you wanted to kill 10 people, you'd need 10 accounts. 100 people? 100 accounts. And even then, you could still end up paying the bounty if you get attacked by a bounty hunter in the middle of the crime.
Yes, but we've already recognized this. It's not about making them safe; it's about making them safe enough they'd rather stay in Open and enjoy the social benefits.
Having a significant population of bounty hunters would have ripple effects; you could contact a bounty hunter and have them escort you to your destination and back, because again, they're actively looking for a fight. Following haulers is what they'll be doing anyway, looking for pirates trying to attack them. This falls under the 'social benefits' I spoke of.
There's no way to get 100% of players to play in open, but that's impossible no matter what. What you can do is make the game fair and enjoyable enough that people who are already leaning that direction feel allowed to indulge themselves without sacrificing any hope of efficiency.
From what I've read here and my own view, I think it would actually be the other way around; lowering the risk would increase the likelihood of a player being prepared to be shot at.
It would prolly be a better idea to turn the ship. Next best would be to not use lengthy respawn timers to exacerbate the problem.
The only people who would be affected by these long respawn timers would be bad PVPers who keep dying. A good PVPer is gonna pick their targets well and try to keep their KD ratio 1:0. In such a world, ganking would be the preferred form of PVP, because of the low risk.
Increasing the bounty payout on PCs would be easily exploitable, as a bounty hunter does not earn a bounty when they kill. The system already has caps for bounty payouts to avoid such exploit. Further increasing the bounty would make this even more attractive for trading bounties.
Forcing the killer to pay their parking ticket isn't a real penalty, because the galaxy is filled with bored billionaires with nothing to spend their money on.
You stated the bounty would decay then disappear in 7 days. If the bounty doesn't actually disappear on cooldown as described then your statements following this only hold true if you do this within 7 days of the cooldown starting. Otherwise it drops and you have a fresh start. So before going forward I need you to specify which it is.
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I see that the thread has circled back to the same suggestions that have already been discussed that really only benefit PvP players and would be of no interest to the rest of the community.
The rewards suggestion wouldn't work. The additional reward necessary to make risk worthwhile would have to be of such a magnitude that it would break how levelling up works in the game. Otherwise it's not worth it. Sorry, but we know the difference between reward and bait.
The principle problem is that the security model in ED is a joke. The consequences of attacking another player in a high security system are pretty much what they'd be in an anarchy system - limited to none. Of course, it would make sense to beef these up to reflect the security level of the system, but then those same PvP players would start whinging that they can't go around with impunity making others go boom.
But sure, keep on coming out with these same tired suggestions that are oblivious to what those players you claim to want to convince actually would be tempted by, if it makes you all happy. These discussions genuinely just go round in pointless circles, TBH.
The rewards suggestion wouldn't work. The additional reward necessary to make risk worthwhile would have to be of such a magnitude that it would break how levelling up works in the game. Otherwise it's not worth it. Sorry, but we know the difference between reward and bait.
The principle problem is that the security model in ED is a joke. The consequences of attacking another player in a high security system are pretty much what they'd be in an anarchy system - limited to none. Of course, it would make sense to beef these up to reflect the security level of the system, but then those same PvP players would start whinging that they can't go around with impunity making others go boom.
But sure, keep on coming out with these same tired suggestions that are oblivious to what those players you claim to want to convince actually would be tempted by, if it makes you all happy. These discussions genuinely just go round in pointless circles, TBH.
There are a lot of assumptions regarding social benefits being a draw for people playing asocially. Or at the very least temporarily seeking to avoid interruption.
Also I pointed out why there very likely wouldn't be an explosion in bounty hunters so those knock on effects will likely never occur, thus there are no social benefits.
I'm not really sure what exactly is unclear. If you commit a crime, you get a bounty. If you die, you pay that Bounty and the Bounty goes on standby. If you commit another crime before that standby bounty decays, it immediately reactivates.
So, yes, absolutely, if you are willing to wait 7 days between committing crimes, you don't have to worry about it. But that's working as intended.
Ok, so my point stands, this is easily bypassable and you don't need a dozen accounts to move your piracy to another character for a week.
If the goal is for this to basically cost a second account and a cheap rebuy to deny bounty hunters any decent payouts and that's working as intended I don't really know what you're trying to accomplish other than a more convoluted version of exactly what we have now.
I don't think you're quite thinking this through. Remember; the bounty reactivates the instant you commit another crime. Which means the instant you go back out to continue doing whatever it is you were doing, the Bounty comes back in full, and bounty hunters are free to attack you again.
Which essentially means, if you mean to do any significant amount of criminal activity, there's not really any point in transferring the bounty. It will just come back immediately, as well as costing you the re-buy for no reason.
The only time what you were talking about would be beneficial is if you intend to stop being a criminal and do legal activities, but I don't see a problem with that.
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Within 7 days. And only within 7 days. Day 8 you are free with 0 bounty and start over. And per what you said this would build somewhat slowly so as to not be intrusive to most PvPers. So if it doesn't become intrusively costly in 7 days but would later, all it takes is one alt and for the next 7 days I kill people with that. I don't need any downtime. I jusat do the same thing under another name.
Immediately yes, 7 days from the death no. All I have to do is just shoot people with another account for 7 days.
This is factually wrong. I only have to stop with 1 character for a week at a time.
So if there was less of a threat in Open (lower risk) then more people would engage in Open.
Can't really argue with that. This game has non existent PVE PVP Open partitioning; pvp ship builds (via FDEV design) are optimized to snare, cripple and burst down targets; and there is completely ineffective C&P.
You could either completely redesign how Open is structured, or incentivize participating in the whole sketchy mess.
Not saying a Point to Point reward enhanced mission will fix Open, but it might add a few more players...
I mean...okay?
I'm still not seeing the problem here. The active account would still gain bounties, which could then be paid in full to any bounty hunters. That's working exactly as intended.
Heck, you wouldn't even need to switch accounts; you could just go to a different system. I've got no problem with that, either.
The problem with the current system is that a caps out at 2 million credits, no matter how high the actual Bounty is. This would fix that problem. If people choose to play around these new restrictions, that's absolutely fine, and in fact expected.
So none of what you are saying is in any way a problem.
Disregard.
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Ok, so you're fine with the maximum payout being potentially capped to 7 days worth of bounties while aggressors may kill weeks or months worth of bounties that they basically get to keep cycling off and never have to pay out?
Simply increasing the response time would be inadequate, because a good gank is over before security would even have a chance to respond, even if it was near immediate. Noteritity would need to be a long-lasting statistic for a player, and it would have to have a meaningful impact on a player outside of being randomly interdicted by incompetent NPCs occasionally.
I think the conversation is getting derailed when we try to punish criminals by giving them fines. Fines are a laughable punishment in this game. Plus, the life of a criminal is supposed to be a viable route to play the game. the game requires a C&P system that involves more than wrist slaps. And, no I don't mean more stern wrist slaps.
To achieve what is desired, it will be necessary that a C&P system exist which would protect players and simultaneously allow players to perpetrate crime. Common sense would suggest that the security state would do this, but in practice this system is not capable of doing this.
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