The hunt for Theta-7 would be a perfect opportunity to bring in a "deck of 52" system for bounty hunting.

Tyrit Shadowstalker

Tyrit Shadowstalker
Had this idea at work after the game Mercenaries Playground of destruction came up in my musings on the ground game of odyssey.

What I'm thinking is that each month Fdev should generate a group of NPCs with an array of bounties (Large bounties mind you, multi million into the billions of credits), and general locations of where they can be found and then... just release them into the wild of the game, and at the start of each month post to galnet the names, rank on the bounty roster they are, and the last known system location.

Obviously, the higher up on the deck one is, the harder it will be to claim the bounty, and more importantly they aren't mission NPCs.

For example, Theta Seven would most definitely be this month's Ace of spades, last known location is R CrA Sector AF-A d42 (but could be anywhere in the galaxy at this point) and since he seems to be the mastermind of the attacks, I'd hazard he should probably be worth something north of a couple billion credits (after napkin mathing an estimate of how much a corilois starport probably costs to construct based off the rough average value of all the goods used to upgrade those outposts into tritium stations last september), and arguably would be the most well protected person in the NMLA, ergo the hardest to kill/capture.
 

space voyager

space voyager
Der Zeitgeist said:
Why NPCs? Make it Gankers.
Click to expand...
Kinda agree - it could be a form of crime&punishment.

But more than that - I'm sure a lot of regulars, non-ganker type, would be willing to take the role of a villain for a short period of time. The game would have to disable the tracking of PvE characters for this wild bunch and allow PvP people to see where these targets are (or it could be a system known in advance).

Perhaps no wings allowed or something.

Damn, my mind is racing but I'm at work, I better stop thinking about this.
 

Edelgard von Rhein

E
It is a great idea, to have a list of the Most Wanted criminals and the Deck of Cards works well too.

Just as Galnet can display, hourly, the Powerplay status, so it could display the last known locations and status of the 'Deck'. If someone has claimed the bounty, then their name could be shown there. Last known locations would constitute a scan by another player. A Kill Warrant Scan would be needed to show the value of the latest bounty exactly, otherwise only an estimate should be shown.

I'm not sure about bounties in the billions but considering the risk/reward, I would certainly think 100+ million might be possible, however there is another form of reward well-suited to the idea: decals of playing cards. e.g. If you are the one who shoots down the Ace of Spades criminal, then you get an Ace of Spades decal to put on any of your ships. This might be better than just having ever-bigger bounties.

The hard part is generating activities for the Deck criminals to be engaged in and ensuring reliable instancing. I would want there to be something predictable about the activities of each Deck criminal so that it would not be totally random where they are and what they're doing. Maybe they could favour particular signal sources, attacking clean ships at signal sources that appear in certain BGS states. Maybe they will come after you if you have a hold full of Void Opals. Their bounties should increase in line with their activities but they need to earn their notoriety by doing this in the presence of players, meaning they would have to appear across all game modes. There are certainly a few challenges to getting this to work well but it would certainly give bounty hunting a shake up!
 
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