General Rework Current Bounty System (with proposed solution)

[peturparkur]

First of all let me acknowledge the difficulty of this task that the devs have to do. In the current system it's too easy to make money with bounties as a low ranking player and it falls of very quickly as you get better and better ships.

I would like to start this discussion by pointing out how the current system works and what it promotes as a playstyle. In the current system you receive the FULL bounty from a "kill" even if you haven't contributed much if any to the actual killing of the pirate, this results in a very passive playstyle where RISK is not promoted and encouraged. Currently the easiest way to get money bounty hunting is at the high safety spots in Res Sites rather than at the actual difficult hazardous ones.

I propose a new system where the game tracks how much you CONTRIBUTED to each actual kill. This way people relying on the "police" to kill of most of the enemies is not rewarded. This way going 1v1 against pirates and taking RISKS of killing them without help is rewarded. With this new system bounty prices could actually be increased and it could still be balanced for new players and veterans. With a highly equiped ship you would be doing most of the damage/contribution to killing each enemy so you would receive higher reward, while smaller/not well equiped ships would receive less.

With this new system bounties could be increased 2x-4x at least from current values as you would receive reward based on contributions. It would promote HIGH RISK -> HIGH REWARD playstyle by lowering bounty rewards for kills where the "police" is helping out.

I would appreciate feedback and discussing about changing the current bounty reward system not just increasing the reward.

TLDR: Current bounty system promotes SAFE and LOW RISK playstyle. We need new system where HIGH RISK is encouraged with HIGH REWARDS. New proposed system where REWARDS SCALE WITH "CONTRIBUTION" for each bounty (with increased bounty values of course). This new system would promote bounty hunting without help from NPCs. This would encourage HIGH RISK playstyle and discourage SAFE bounties. Altough this proposed system would require an increase in bounties again.

 

[Danieros]

I question why kills in which the police participated award any bounty values at all.

 

[iiMStevo]

Altering the current system to contribution only means that players starting out, or even in the early stages of the game, are unable to bounty hunt with the vast majority of ships being better than theirs, combat skills being better than theirs, and components on their ships being potentially engineered.

In a lot of respects, these new players bounty hunting would be unable to make any money, while simultaneously taking a lot of risk by potentially losing their ships. I’ve often found that AI pirates will target player ships, over NPC...
So new player receives 75% of the damage output from the pirate, and barely manages to contribute more than 5% damage to the pirate ship, leads to no money to pay for their ship being repaired - even while the cops are there.
In the scenario where no cops are present, the bounty hunter dies, and realises there’s no money to be had in bounty hunting, and it’s an area of the game they can’t do yet (which isn’t the idea that FDev have).

TL;DR: in my opinion, the system is fine as it is.

 

[Vahnkiljoy]

I question why kills in which the police participated award any bounty values at all.

That's because, the police don't care about the bounty, they just knocked a wanted person off the list, meanwhile, you claimed the bounty which you turn in to get paid with, from the assistance of the systems police.

I mean eventually, you grow up and move onto hazrez, at least, the good pilots do, where you don't have to worry about the airspace being clogged by police and not having to worry about stray shots giving you a fine or peeving off the police.

 

[Just Paul]

I would just change how bounties are counted for bgs inf. Instead of cr it should be a weighted kill count. Noob Sidewinder is the base value and any higher rank and/or better ship gives more points. Hunt in a wing and you get the appropriate fraction of points. PvP bounties don't give points to prevent farming, which is heavily used by some groups right now.
I would leave bounty cr values and how they are paid out as is, the noob can start as a bounty hunter and make an ok living and wings still have the advantage of a better payout.