Player bounties are weak and are in desperate need of a buff

[Serrathen]

Currently the rates for bounties on player criminals is incredibly underwhelming and weak. Some of these SpecOps/wetwork missions have a maximum payout of 50 million credits, where they send you off to go kill 25-30 civilians, and by the end of the mission the maximum bounty you accrue is 150,000 credits. What? I was just sent off to go kill civilians, and was paid 50 million, and my bounty is just mere pennies? What's worse about this system is that you can pay off your own bounty through Interstellar Factors, meaning you can literally pay to kill innocent people and suffer almost no consequences for your actions. When you kill innocent people, you should face the consequences no matter how well off you are in game. I'm sitting on 2 billion credits, and having to pay 150,000 CR after committing intergalactic terrorism is just a drop in the bucket for me. I obviously am no developer, so I can't talk hard numbers here, but the system should punish players way harder and make you feel more than just mild discomfort, and maybe even make it so that players can't pay off their own bounties? This should be for PvP and PvE, though I guess notoriety already kind of stings a little having to avoid a system for 2 hours, but even that I could make an argument for to be buffed.

There's another positive to be looked at here; if player bounties go up even higher and space murder hobos are worth more than just a few hundred thousand credits, then player bounty hunting could even see a rise in popularity. Killing gankers could actually be worth someone's time, even. Anyways that's the end of my rant, how does everyone else feel about the current state of player bounties?

 

[Chorda]

Yeah. Human life is still cheap in Elite, but in the original game you could convert slaves into fertilizer. Baby steps here.

 

[Serrathen]

Wait what, you could do that? How could Frontier not add that to this game, this is priceless. In that case, I would rather not pay off my bounty and turn slaves into fertilizer than the other way around

 

[Sir.Tj]

Title edited as req.

 

[chesdj]

IMRC They used to be much higher, but it was being exploited, hence the Nerf. (And notoriety being added.)

A player could rack up an enormous bounty, then allow a friend to kill them and claim the bounty, when you've massive bounties 2 people doing this together swapping over role, enormous amounts could be made by both...

 

[Bashy81]

The problem with high player bounties is its hard to be a legit PvP bounty hunter, but very easy to game it. In the process, for best effect your negative actor would want the highest bounty possible, so theyre incentivised to be even more of a than they would be currently.

let me regail you with a Cool Story for allegorical elucidation;

Ganker has high bounty. Ganker finds new player, ganker promises bounty to that player. New player joins ganker in their instance. Ganker then either a) kills new player for giggles. or b) drops shields & lets new player kill them. New player suddenly has enormous wealth for zero effort. New player appreciates ganker. new player goes off & uses free money to buy bigger ship to join gankers cabal. New ganker is born.

 

[Danieros]

IMRC They used to be much higher, but it was being exploited, hence the Nerf. (And notoriety being added.)

A player could rack up an enormous bounty, then allow a friend to kill them and claim the bounty, when you've massive bounties 2 people doing this together swapping over role, enormous amounts could be made by both...

Yes, it was abusable. But capping the bounties fixed the abuse by completely severing the feature. There's also the change to make bounty being put on ships instead of commanders, so you can simply do all the crime in the universe using one dedicated ship, then change to another and no one knows you're a billion bounty criminal anymore. You can simply be a criminal in solo/PG aswell so the player bounty hunting thing may never materialize itself even if you can track their location through station news... having a bounty for crimes on other players should force you into an open only restriction.

As long as you can just choose not to rebuy your ship and have all debt forgiven or other similar holes, abuses like these will exist.

If you're a criminal and you get arrested, the debt collection should go after everything you have, no free sidewinder way out available. Current ship and credit balance isn't enough? Then you have to select other stored ships and modules to pay it off. Still not enough? You'll be running in negative "loaned" balance with a lot of restrictions. Having this kind of consequence would allow Frontier to also go the way of making crime high risk, high reward as it's supposed to be.

 

[The Wallet Inspector]

you can literally pay to kill innocent people and suffer almost no consequences for your actions.

Yeah almost too real isn't it? Billionaires just getting away with anything. But seriously I think this is a valid point, I always felt the massacre missions were not implemented very well, they just sit there on the main board asking you to kill x number of civilians for money and it has very little impact on anything beyond your credit balance and some faction rep changes you may not care about. It's an almost pure corporate fantasy realised, where there is one desk recruiting for both sides of a war, where all of the bad energy can just be smoothed over with a credit transfer.

 

[DemiserofD]

The real problem isn't billionaires who can do whatever they want, it's criminals with no credits generating money from thin air just by getting killed.

I think the best solution might be, if you die without enough credits to pay off your bounty, it just gives the killing player however many credits you had, and then punishes the criminal in other ways. Off the top of my head, it might suspend all of your system permits for a Time depending on the credits owed, Plus permit lock you from the system where the crime was committed.

That way, you can't generate credits out of thin air, but the criminals are still punished, just in a different way.

 

[GoldenSilver484]

When you take a massacre mission you don't gain notoriety for any mission target kills, right up until the mission objective is completed.

Go on a PvE murder spree without a mission and you'll soon be getting several million credits added to your bounty for every kill, as your notoriety will be rising and it acts as a bounty multiplier.

I've gotten a 20 million credit bounty on my head in as little as 5 minutes popping NPC miners in a Haz Res.

Other players are unable to claim the full bounty due to reasons explained in previous posts, I think the amount is capped at 2 million.

 

[Mrat13]

Player bounties should pay big bucks, it would encourage many "griefers" to target players that are wanted instead of innocent.

After 1500 hours I was itching for this kind of gameplay but I felt guilty destroying random people for no reason.

Also the actual griefers would have a literal price on their head, so win win.

 

[rrobes]

When all of this was originally discussed, the number of comments in the discussion, prior to implementing the process, rivaled Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” for length.

Very much doubt that FD will revisit C&P, in fact, as much of a chance of me getting through the above novel anytime soon.

FD doesn’t revisit settled efforts often.

 

[bladebss]

No player who knows what they are doing will die unless they choose to or make a big mistake. Bounty hunting players is a foolish/ pointless endeavour.

'Griefers' almost always do have a price on there head, and it means nothing cus you cant kill them unless they dont care if you do.

Also, a new player can multi crew with me an a haz res and gain 20+ million in an hour or so. Completely risk free, they can go make a sandwich and watch netflix for a bit and come back and boom! Multi Millionaire. Rinse and repeat a few times and they are in a pythem or a conda in a day or so..Or..

I can share a wing mission reward with them and even get them to share one with me and they can go watch netflix again until im done and boom! So much money for nothing.
Way easier than the whole gank, bounty, noob thing people are worried about. Not to mention that when that noob kills you for the X million bounty you have, you have to then pay rebye AND the BOUNTY so you will loose the money they gain. Rather than getting the same money i gave to the noob thrugh non criminal actions as a reward.

Money comes fast if you have a friend or two who knows the game, gankers have alot of money in the bank by the time they have a ship reddy to gank. Like 2/3 hundred million in the bank, easy. Just what kind of murder spree would they need to go on, to get to the point, that the free sidewinder and loose your gank ship option would be even considered? Let alone, the need a loan and sell my ships scinario.

Personaly i think they could do away with the cap or massively increse it and almost nothing would change, exept in the very rare case that some one with a massive bounty on them let you kill them/made a big mistake and dies.

The mission thing is so that criminal game play is a viable thing. If the bounty for killing the civs for the mission is more than you could make from the mission or from one killing pirates no one would do it. But killing with no mission actualy acrues quite the penalty, granted its trivial cus money is trivial after a week or so in game. Notoriety curbs exessive off script crime, so that you get ATR come and hassel you.

They could buff the bountys by 4x to balance the 4x buff to hunting and this misght add a bit of balance to the situation but... minimal realy.

The whole crime and punishment thing has been some what perverted over the years and is not that great. But people wanted easy street and they want safe no risk big rewards. And they got it! That comes with a cost to hi risk, hi reward game play and meaningfull crime and punishment.

 

[CMDR Harada]

As said, it's subject to abuse. Two gankers could work together, and then kill each other for the respective bounties after a night of laughs. Each made a bundle. It turns what is NOT a credit making venture into one. Then there is also the fact that they probably have enough in the bank that 20, 30, even 50 or 100 million bounties aren't a big deal. I can make 100 million in an evening. If I had that mentality, I wouldn't care. I have literally billions in the bank.

I think the ONLY thing that might work is denying docking permissions in systems that the faction controls, and constant harassment by SysAuth ships. But, with fleet carriers for R+R, that would not really be a big deal, unless they refused the FC entering the system as well. At most you'd make them jump one system over. Net result = Nothing.

C+P is what it is. FDev hasn't shown an inclination to change things. It's either apathy or "working as intended". Take your pick.

The ONLY thing I am against is seal clubbing. Beating up on new players should be severely discouraged. They're the new money for FD, and excited new players will encourage their friends to join ( and purchase ) Elite. New player money pays for improvements we all want. Conversely, annoyed new players will DISCOURAGE their friends from purchasing. I know a dozen people who refuse to even try EVE because of the perceived cut-throat player environment. Getting a reputation like that for ED would be a BAD thing. But, you know, Carebears/Gankers, my rights and immersion, and "playing the game my way".. Until FD isn't making money from new sales and pulls the plug.

Anyway, posterior sphincters and opinions....

{edit for word filters}

 

[DemiserofD]

As said, it's subject to abuse. Two gankers could work together, and then kill each other for the respective bounties after a night of laughs. Each made a bundle. It turns what is NOT a credit making venture into one. Then there is also the fact that they probably have enough in the bank that 20, 30, even 50 or 100 million bounties aren't a big deal. I can make 100 million in an evening. If I had that mentality, I wouldn't care. I have literally billions in the bank.

While this is true, it still means time not spent breaking the law, which is the ultimate goal.

The best solution in my mind remains that the bounty hunter gets all the credits the criminal has, and then the criminal has any further bounty converted into a ban on entering any permit-locked systems/the superpower's systems for a certain length of time.

Ideally, this would resemble an s-curve, so very small bounties would result in minimal additional punishment, larger bounties would result in increasing punishment, but extremely large bounties wouldn't ban players from parts of the game for millions of years.

Where the X column is their excess bounty, in hundreds of millions of credits, while the Y axis is the duration of their revoked permits, in days. So a player with just a few million credits they're unable to pay would only have their permits revoked for minutes or hours, while someone with 200m+ in bounty they can't pay off would be banned upwards of a day, and it would cap out at about 1b in unpayable bounty, with a 10 day permit revocation.

So players are heavily incentivized to have enough credits to pay off their bounty, or they won't be able to go back to the system in question at minimum, and if it took place in the Federation, Empire, or an independent Power's area, those areas would be closed off to them.

---

Of course, that does still leave the issue of friendly players killing their friends just to remove the bounties; probably the best solution to that would be that a portion of any bounty automatically is confiscated for processing fees and whatnot. So no matter what, the criminal at least loses ~25% of the bounty.

Alternatively, you could make death just set the bounty 'inactive', and it would then decay by, say, 50%, per day until it disappears entirely. But if they commit crimes in that area again, the remaining bounty is reactivated and they might need to pay it again.

 

[CMDR Harada]

Revoking system permits might be an idea. I have no idea of the overhead or what it might take on the backend to implement.

Getting FDev to actually do it, however, would probably be monumental in nature. This is a 5+ year discussion.

 

[Bortas]

Yeah. Human life is still cheap in Elite, but in the original game you could convert slaves into fertilizer. Baby steps here.

Really a shame they didn't implement that in ED

 

[myothershipisacobraiv]

Probably don't want to stack pvp on people for playing the pve.

Big pvp bounties should only come from pvp activities. Otherwise badboy pve missions will probably be a wasteland or will give rise to a meta to game them somehow.

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

Currently the rates for bounties on player criminals is incredibly underwhelming and weak. Some of these SpecOps/wetwork missions have a maximum payout of 50 million credits, where they send you off to go kill 25-30 civilians, and by the end of the mission the maximum bounty you accrue is 150,000 credits. What? I was just sent off to go kill civilians, and was paid 50 million, and my bounty is just mere pennies? What's worse about this system is that you can pay off your own bounty through Interstellar Factors, meaning you can literally pay to kill innocent people and suffer almost no consequences for your actions. When you kill innocent people, you should face the consequences no matter how well off you are in game. I'm sitting on 2 billion credits, and having to pay 150,000 CR after committing intergalactic terrorism is just a drop in the bucket for me. I obviously am no developer, so I can't talk hard numbers here, but the system should punish players way harder and make you feel more than just mild discomfort, and maybe even make it so that players can't pay off their own bounties? This should be for PvP and PvE, though I guess notoriety already kind of stings a little having to avoid a system for 2 hours, but even that I could make an argument for to be buffed.

There's another positive to be looked at here; if player bounties go up even higher and space murder hobos are worth more than just a few hundred thousand credits, then player bounty hunting could even see a rise in popularity. Killing gankers could actually be worth someone's time, even. Anyways that's the end of my rant, how does everyone else feel about the current state of player bounties?

Yeah... your right.... lets force every criminal into doing some meaningless repetitive game loop over and over again, like mining rocks over and over and over and over and over again until their brain turns to cheese and they're fully rehabilitated... wait...

 

[Bashy81]

The best solution in my mind remains that the bounty hunter gets all the credits the criminal has, and then the criminal has any further bounty converted into a ban on entering any permit-locked systems/the superpower's systems for a certain length of time.

So if you get shoved over 100m/s while approaching a station, and then rammed by a suicidey, you wouldnt post on the forums about the rank injustice of them taking all your credits?

As with the current C&P, its law abiding & inexperienced players who innevitably incur the occasional bounty, who are inconvenienced the most.

Players who are more used to living on the other side of the law, are the ones who know all its foibles and how best to exploit them. Increase the jeapordy to ludicrous as you suggest, and you simply increase the salt-mining potential accordingly.