So recent changes have reinvigorated the game, and brought players back, myself included. Mining is now more engaging, fun, and pays a lot more, making it a totally viable career choice that won't handicap your progress. Let's do the same for bounty hunting in order to make it more interesting and engaging.
First off, I just want to sort of clarify that I never felt like bounty hunting in E
was really actually bounty hunting. Rather than doing what actual bounty hunters do (capturing and transporting their targets), you're really more like a mercenary police force, taking down criminals and getting paid for it. So my suggestions reflect that sort of gameplay.
1. Mining ships in resource extraction sites reward you for saving them
Pretty self-explanatory. When the innocent mining ships in an RES come under attack, they'll send out a comm message requesting help, just like all other NPC chatter. You figure out who and where they are, and kill the ship(s) attacking them. When you save them, they'll thank you, and gift you a voucher that has to be redeemed at a station, just like any bounty or combat bond. So if you die, you'll lose it. I'm imagining the amount they give you to scale depending on their ship, with a Type-9 giving the biggest bonus (bigger ship means a richer NPC, right?). You could also scale the reward based on how much hull the ship has left. If you save them without them suffering a scratch, the bigger the payout. This isn't intended to be a huge reward, but rather to be something that supplements the regular bounty hunting experience. It's something you'll be doing anyway, so this offers a way to increase the gains of bounty hunting while adding a little bit of flavor.
2. Distress calls while in supercruise
Yeah, distress calls can show up as signal sources, but does anyone really actively seek those out? This suggestion would turn distress calls into active messages, just like how pop-up missions come to you ("Incoming mission critical message!"). Make them have a higher chance of happening in anarchy or low security systems (places where pirates would frequent). These encounters would have variety in their difficulty and thus, payout. Payment would be redeemable vouchers like everything else.
3. Pirate Hideouts
This is the activity I see as the main thing that pays really well, akin to how core-mining void opals in hotspots can make you tens of millions. These are areas that would be really difficult, intended to be done in a wing or in a powerful, engineered ship. I'm sort of envisioning a progression of bounty hunting for a new player, from hunting at nav beacons, to the varying degrees of RES's, to this. Pirate hideouts would be in rings, and discovered by shooting a probe from a surface scanner into the rings, just like mining hotspots. Once located, you'd drop into the ring to find an asteroid base hidden within the ring. It wouldn't be a named, permanent station that you could dock at, just something to indicate this is the base of operations for the pirates. There you'd find powerful ships around the base, but no more than 3 at a time. As you destroy them, more pirates would come at you in waves, coming out of the asteroid base. This should be a really tough fight, but I'm imagining every ship you destroy netting you 200-300k cR, and leaving you with about 8 mil by the end of the fight. (Cracking a single void opal core asteroid can net you 20 mil, so I think this is more than fair for a payout)
Once the fight is completed and you exit to supercruise, that area effectively disappears and the hideout is destroyed. I think there should only be 1, maybe 2 hideouts per ringed planet, forcing the player to move around to seek out pirates. The hideouts would be on a respawn timer. Long enough to force the player to system hop to keep finding hideouts, but short enough so that the player doesn't need to completely travel the bubble before they respawn.
First off, I just want to sort of clarify that I never felt like bounty hunting in E
was really actually bounty hunting. Rather than doing what actual bounty hunters do (capturing and transporting their targets), you're really more like a mercenary police force, taking down criminals and getting paid for it. So my suggestions reflect that sort of gameplay.1. Mining ships in resource extraction sites reward you for saving them
Pretty self-explanatory. When the innocent mining ships in an RES come under attack, they'll send out a comm message requesting help, just like all other NPC chatter. You figure out who and where they are, and kill the ship(s) attacking them. When you save them, they'll thank you, and gift you a voucher that has to be redeemed at a station, just like any bounty or combat bond. So if you die, you'll lose it. I'm imagining the amount they give you to scale depending on their ship, with a Type-9 giving the biggest bonus (bigger ship means a richer NPC, right?). You could also scale the reward based on how much hull the ship has left. If you save them without them suffering a scratch, the bigger the payout. This isn't intended to be a huge reward, but rather to be something that supplements the regular bounty hunting experience. It's something you'll be doing anyway, so this offers a way to increase the gains of bounty hunting while adding a little bit of flavor.
2. Distress calls while in supercruise
Yeah, distress calls can show up as signal sources, but does anyone really actively seek those out? This suggestion would turn distress calls into active messages, just like how pop-up missions come to you ("Incoming mission critical message!"). Make them have a higher chance of happening in anarchy or low security systems (places where pirates would frequent). These encounters would have variety in their difficulty and thus, payout. Payment would be redeemable vouchers like everything else.
3. Pirate Hideouts
This is the activity I see as the main thing that pays really well, akin to how core-mining void opals in hotspots can make you tens of millions. These are areas that would be really difficult, intended to be done in a wing or in a powerful, engineered ship. I'm sort of envisioning a progression of bounty hunting for a new player, from hunting at nav beacons, to the varying degrees of RES's, to this. Pirate hideouts would be in rings, and discovered by shooting a probe from a surface scanner into the rings, just like mining hotspots. Once located, you'd drop into the ring to find an asteroid base hidden within the ring. It wouldn't be a named, permanent station that you could dock at, just something to indicate this is the base of operations for the pirates. There you'd find powerful ships around the base, but no more than 3 at a time. As you destroy them, more pirates would come at you in waves, coming out of the asteroid base. This should be a really tough fight, but I'm imagining every ship you destroy netting you 200-300k cR, and leaving you with about 8 mil by the end of the fight. (Cracking a single void opal core asteroid can net you 20 mil, so I think this is more than fair for a payout)
Once the fight is completed and you exit to supercruise, that area effectively disappears and the hideout is destroyed. I think there should only be 1, maybe 2 hideouts per ringed planet, forcing the player to move around to seek out pirates. The hideouts would be on a respawn timer. Long enough to force the player to system hop to keep finding hideouts, but short enough so that the player doesn't need to completely travel the bubble before they respawn.
