Bounty Hunting Overhaul
Here is a compilation of ideas I would like to see, largely which improve the viability of player pirating.
The first thing is something which might already be in the game, not too sure, but other ideas build upon it, so it should be stated regardless. Similar to the way players are hunted if they defect from a power, they should be hunted by bounty hunters if their bounty gets high enough from a specific area.
Additionally, these npcs hunting a player should make a little bit of comms chatter, explaining their intentions to anyone around. This means any player bounty hunters who happen to be in the area will hear about a player criminal in the system, and join in on the hunt as well.
The next idea is to have faction specific top bounties. These could be viewed in the contacts tab of any station with that faction in control, and maybe only after the player has gotten sufficient rep with the faction. This would also display the last known location of the bounty and how long ago that was. The importance of time is to indicate the probability a player target being online. If the last sighting was recent, then it is a high chance the player is still online. This list could be filled with npcs as well, both to ensure the player always has targets, and so someone who gets some small bounty for a minor infraction never shows up on this top bounty list.
There needs to be some kind of detection system for the previous idea. This could be the same system for determining whether a player criminal gets npcs spawned to hunt him. Could be guaranteed if the minor faction has a presence in that system. If the faction is allied with major faction, anywhere in that major faction's space would have a high chance to detect the player and spawn ships. Other systems would have a moderate to low chance of detection, varying on system type. Every once and a while, if the player stays in the same system, and has not been detected, there will be a repeat chance, probably on the same interval it spawns new waves of npcs into supercruise.
Taking things a step further, maybe add another section to the contacts area in stations for information gathering. Here, a player could gather various information for a small fee on things like whether a certain player was found in the current system and so forth. To make this worth, maybe the player could collect a wanted poster when they want to hunt someone, as a pseudo mission. That poster could be used to gather information on the target at stations, or perhaps npc encounters might mention it. Since there isn't a way to communicate with npcs yet, it might be possible to generate a USS if it is present where an npc gives out some information on the target.
All of these ideas should be fairly feasible, and I feel make the bounty hunting profession involve far more of the hunting side of things. This also makes these kinds of hunt missions a bit more freeform, as opposed to the current mission system, as well as improving the viability of player hunting.
