I Want Your Bounty
Well as I mentioned in my post on Hulkageddon Day I mentioned that I would go into detail on how I got the ISK to buy the ships I utilised during this event. I believe the following mail will explain it:
For your termination of Prometheus09 we have paid you the bounty that was set to his head: 133,000,000.00 ISK
That’s right I had a bounty of 133 mill on my head, which I acquired from my first Hulk killing rampage. I was originally going to leave the bounty alone when it was only 33 mill, however I couldn’t resist 133 mill, especially when I could use it to buy more ships to gank more hulks with. So, thanks to all the Carebares out there who supported me with their donations to kill more Hulks. A lot of people don’t realise how broken the bounty mechanic is and that a bounty does not deter a pirate, they wear it as a symbol of pride. Now my actions here indicate that the bounty mechanic is hopelessly broken and needs fixing, so here are my ideas on this.
The ship not the Pod.
The first thing that can be done is to not hand out the full bounty placed on a person’s head. Instead the payout a person gets should be based on the ISK loss of the ship (plus fittings) that the target was flying. This would then prevent the target from using an alt to kill himself to collect the bounty, as he would only be gaining as much bounty as he was destroying. It would also mean that bounty placer knows that the target is going to be hurt to the degree they want. ie they know that if they put a bounty of 133 mill on a person head, the target will lose a 133 mill worth of ships.
Kill rights
As we know when a hostile action is performed on an individual, then that individual gets kill rights on the aggressor. However, not everyone can act on these kill rights as they do not have skills necessary to combat the aggressor or the knowledge on how to do so (such as XxBlack PearlxX). Therefore, a person should be able to contract out there kill rights to a Bounty Hunter. Anyone is still able to kill the aggressor and collect the bounty placed on them, however the bounty hunter is able to gain all the benfits of kill rights and they will not have a kill right placed on them when they engage the target. Once one of the targets ships has being destroyed the kill rights are lost, irrespective of the ship destroyed and bounty hunter collects the bounty equivalent to the destroyed ships worth. Naturally, contracts should have set time limits so that if that bounty hunter does not act on it fast enough it can be contracted out to some else who will act on it. Naturally, there should be fee associated with accepting a bounty contract.
I would also like to see a better way of tracking people down other than locator agents, such as homing beacons which can be fired onto a person’s ship.
Example
Fishy Night (bounty placer) places losses a Hulk to Prometheus09 (target) so he places a bounty of 170 million ISK on Prometheus09. Fishy Night then contracts his kill right out to Caladan09 (bounty hunter), who pays a small for fee to accept it. Caladan09 then manages to destroy Prometheus09’s Drake in Jita, which fully fitted, was worth 100 million ISK. Caladan09 acquires 100 million ISK and loses the kill rights on Prometheus09. A few days later a random person destroys Prometheus09’s Raven, worth 190 million ISK and gets 70 million ISK in bounty. There is no more bounty on Prometheus09’s head.
I think this would be a simple and eloquent solution to fix bounties.
