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+--- Thread: Bounty hunting - why it doesn't work? (/showthread.php?tid=109473)
RE: Bounty hunting - why it doesn't work? - Curios - 12-31-2013
Leaving combat = pvp death rule pls back (
RE: Bounty hunting - why it doesn't work? - Jack_Henderson - 12-31-2013
Adding my 2 cents:
I think Bounty Hunters were heavily depending on activity hubs, places that are teeming with activity for most of the time. Those are gone. That reduces hunting to "scanning player list for known target", "flying there", just to see that the target logged off when you got there.
Money is not the issue. The IMG pays insane amounts, yet no one claims.
Another problem is, that pretty much everybody is in every faction.
Meaning: you can offer 10 mils / kill to a merc group, but they will never help you because if they log on, they are e.g. on your side on faction ships or on the other side on enemy ships. We are just a small community.
Restoring hubs might make hunting more attractive again because more random activity is centered there.
RE: Bounty hunting - why it doesn't work? - Vrabcek - 12-31-2013
(12-31-2013, 01:16 PM)Curios Wrote: Leaving combat = pvp death rule pls back (
<3
Aside from that, I would say its pretty complicated with the bounty. If you buff it too much you can easily cause the player loss on the "faction" side which is supposed to pew the bountied targets without any reward.
RE: Bounty hunting - why it doesn't work? - Haste - 12-31-2013
Not enough targets. I usually don't care much for the bulk of indies around - neither shooting nor chatting with them is very exciting. Piss-poor community-wide attitude: "You're beating me and you're a bounty hunter so I'm going to dock while I can so you can't claim me, ha-ha" is but one of many examples any merc or bunter has to deal with on a day to day basis. Generally it seems that more and more people are playing to win and take great issue with dying, and will do anything in their power to prevent it, rather than looking for interesting encounters. That is to say, both enjoyable text-based roleplay and enjoyable combat (the kind where both sides have a comparable chance to win).
And, to be perfectly fair, it also simply gets old. Doing more elaborate (text) roleplay as a bounty hunter both lawful and unlawful is, in my experience, more difficult than doing so as any other faction. Roleplay that's more than just "foreplay for PvP" often feels fake and awkward, as if both sides (hunter and target) are desperately looking for things to say, but can't come up with anything.
Edit: Bolded the part that's most important so it's not missed in my random gibberish.
RE: Bounty hunting - why it doesn't work? - Lythrilux - 12-31-2013
There are also a gazillion more lawful targets than unlawful targets in house space.
RE: Bounty hunting - why it doesn't work? - Ursus - 12-31-2013
I'm not active on Disco server for a while, so take what I say with that in mind. But some of the reasons why it is difficult
Most of the big fights that happen are gang warfare with groups of unlawful and/or groups of lawful. Pirates dont want to lose so they bring a friend or three or they group up spontaneously. Bounty hunters tend to fly as solo operator, which puts them at an immediate disadvantage unless you have a bigger ship and even then it is questionable. I could beat 3-4 snubs in my GB but not a group of 6-8 like you'd get from CGS, and I was usually the only BHG on the character list, so ... eff that and logout. Reavers would hunt in groups too, so they would come kill me while I was stalking another group. If I see that I just logout so I can re-enter the fight later when odds are better, if I die I cant come back later.
Related to that, sideways, if you as BHG join up with a lawful group, you are basically going OORP, because you are highly unlikely to get the final kill shot, and that is the only way you get a bounty. You dont get anything worthwhile for doing 99% of the damage and having a labc fire a cruiser missile at the end and kills all the targets at once. The best BHG RP is to stay away from lawful groups, which exaggerates the problem above.
Paperwork is beyond irritating. On a good night you might spend an hour editing and uploading pics and then doing forum RP, claiming the kills you got earlier. That is a lot ot ask of somebody who just wanted to jump in for some quick combat. TBH it never stopped me from doing it, but I can see how it would stop a lot of people. A lot of people look at that and say they CBA to do an hour of forum "work" for 30 min of gametime, eff that.
Lack of payment, slow payment, was irritating but it didnt stop me either. There were times when I didnt do any more bounties for a house because they hadnt paid out in months, and I considered the bounties to be unreliable. Usually I could figure out another way of processing a claim, like finding a corporate bounty for the same target, so it didnt stop me, but casual players who just want to jump in and pew would not be signed up for all the boards so they would not be able to do this. Sometimes you sit down and think about this stuff and the target leaves the area before you can do anything.
I dont know how to fix it. I suspect it could be done with some kind of "contract" mechanic (special cargo that disappears on death), but I havent really thought about it in detail, and it would require some kind of code to be functional anyway.
In all cases its easiest to just play a pirate. You can start a fight with anybody for no reason at all and there are always others around.
RE: Bounty hunting - why it doesn't work? - Luke. - 01-01-2014
Basically what Haste said. Being in both BHG and the Reavers is great and all as I love PvP but it's never worth logging because there's rarely any confirmed targets (tagged factions etc) to shoot. Then those on the receiving end just get spiteful and run away. It takes a certain attitude to hunt and be hunted and the playerbase is lacking such.
Personally don't care about the evidence needed for BB's. Otherwise anyone could claim anything and it is a player's bank you are claiming from.
RE: Bounty hunting - why it doesn't work? - Coin - 01-04-2014
(12-30-2013, 11:41 AM)McNeo Wrote: All the screenshots are necessary for a bounty board to function well enough to eliminate overlapping claims and he-said-she-said cases. The problem with bounties is that the prices are low, but you have to understand why those prices are low.
Firstly, bounties are expensive. Even the cheap ones cost boards a lot of money, since pirates still fly a lot and in some cases, die a lot. It's a big problem that dying costs only a few hundred k at most, significantly less if you only partially buy ammo, whereas even the cheapest bounty costs the board more.
Some wide bounties are cheap to limit the expenditure on them. This is because, even though it may be in the name of, for example, the Republic of Liberty, people still have to trade for that money - it doesn't appear out of nowhere from "taxes". This keeps the bounty amount low for wide, easily collectible bounties.
The other issue is with high priority single target bounties. These are just as cheap as wide, low paying bounties because these players dont log on all the time and when they do, its very very rare that they die. As a basically privately funded bounty board (all of which currently are), both of these are acceptable low cost bounties.
I would love it if, for example, the Lib BB could multiply its payouts by 5-10x, but its not possible because it receives no additional funding from other sources. If bounties are to be viable for the non-PvP pro's among us, then you need to be one of two things:
Reaver like: Kill moderate amounts of things but dont take damage, and have wide hunting grounds with large volumes of players available to hunt (some will run, some wont)
or
BB's need to be significantly better funded to allow hunters to claim the same proportion of wealth from a much larger pot.
To be honest, I see the problem with bounties as one of funding. No trader is going to pay actual taxes to governments to fund bounties when traders can get spaced by pirates before a response can even materialise. Unless that changes, the only other way to solve the funding problem is to get extra funding, probably from the admins, to inject into the bounty hunting economy. I don't think such a measure would be popular with people though, nor do I think the admins want to do that or design a plugin that allows official factions a monthly budget for bounties.
This kind of solution creates other problems - it makes bounties profitable enough for good PvPers to avoid trading all together - they can sacrifice a bit of income/unit time in order to have fun while earning cash, since they can fight instead of trade, the latter of which is currently kinda boring and tedious. So trading needs to become more fun, or you lose a large proportion of the trader population to bounty hunting. Pirates dont get their prey, and would maybe get hunted to extinction since it's not fun to be chased everywhere by everybody.
So, the current bounty system doesn't really work because of a multitude of other systems that would change, should the bounty system become more profitable.
what if it was a scripted thing?
LN places bounty on LR, shooting npcs gets you a small amount of cash, but killing players tagged with LR gets you more cash.
bountied players' ids could turn into credit cards
RE: Bounty hunting - why it doesn't work? - McNeo - 01-04-2014
If it were scripted in such a way that it was not linked to a bank account character somewhere, then the opposite problem would be the case. Every person capable of using such a system would bounty everything that even looked at them funny. If you mean scripted to a player bank account somewhere, for example a bank ship, then you remove the primary barrier to claiming bounties, which is the tedious claims system. Sounds like a good thing right?
Wrong. Without other changes, it will damage bounties more because people just don't have the finance to keep most bounties going. The fact that they currently aren't claimed much actually allows them to exist. You might argue that it would be fine, since now everyone will have to choose who they bounty carefully. However, given the respawn system that FL and disco use, the cost of dying in credit terms tends to be minimal. Setting bounties already costs more to the person setting them, than they do to the person on the receiving end. Bounties would either get even smaller, or if rules prevented it, the selection of people bountied would slim down. End result is still lots of hunters clamouring for a few credits.
To be honest, people already consider large bounties to be medals of honour. Now while that's fine in itself, it would probably be less the case if they were to actually lose their ship if the bounty was claimed, for example. Right now, large bounties only serve to enlarge egos. And they're expensive. Now, some people's egos do deserve a bit of stroking for their combat prowess, but that's not the original intention of a bounty.
I personally do not see the death system changing to penalise death more, not least because it would add to the "I don't want to die so Im going to waste your time forever" issue. Instead, a balance needs to be found where people still pay for the bounties they set, but the buying power of the bounties are increased beyond their means alone as well.
I would suggest a system where every credit spent on the bounty is mirrored by an addition by the admins. A 2 million bounty becomes 4 million, 50% of which is an admin subsidy. How such a system would be programmed, managed or handled I don't know. That's mostly because I dont know how FLhook works, and I don't know what the admins' preferences are.
It probably wont solve the issue entirely, but I think it would be a step in the right direction.
RE: Bounty hunting - why it doesn't work? - Ursus - 01-04-2014
Most automated systems can be abused one way or another. Another game I played had automatic bounty board, where everytime you got killed you were given a prompt to add cash to a bounty against the killer. Once the bounties got big enough, the killer would always get a bud to kill them and split the bounty. So they got you twice, once for your loot, second time for the cash you put into the bounty.