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There is no open PVP because nobody has come up with an unexploitable bounty system
Nerf09
Member CommonPosts: 2,953
The Bounty System has been exploitable since UO (probably earlier, but that's the first online game i've played).
In UO I put a bounty on another player once for PK'ing me. A couple weeks later I was reading their forums and understood how it would be exploited:
-A fellow guildie could kill the PK'er and collect the bounty and give or split the money with the PK'er, basically the bounty I put on the PK'er is given to the PK'er. Basically it's like being robbed twice.
-A PK'er could have a 2nd account, they could kill themself and collect the bounty. Same thing, being robbed twice.
This is why all these games have carebear rules, not because players don't like PVP'ing, not because players don't like getting killed, but because there is no way to strike back against griefers or lowbie gankers. See, even in 2011 any game with a bounty system is still exploitable. http://www.eve-search.com/thread/99402
Create an unexploitable Bounty System, and you can bring back open PVP to the mainstream, and it just won't be for anti-social wierdos.
Come up with an unexploitable bounty system, brainstorm.
____________________________________________________________
Scenario A) You come across a bridge and another player is dressed in black armor, the player says, "None shall pass!" *trumphet music* You try to pass anyways and get PK'ed. You tell other players about the black knight and a crowd forms around him, the black night kills 20 more players the next 2 hours until 3 players gang up and kill the black knight.
Scenario 
You're in Eve Online traveling through gates, get webbed and PK'ed. Nobody says anything to you, you just get PKed.
Scenario C) Your grinding mobs, you're down to 1/4th health, you're about to kill the last mob in a group and someone comes up from behind and PK's you.
What bounty would you, the victim, place on A,B,C? For me it would be:
A) none
medium
C) high
Only a player can determine what's griefing and what's viable PK'ing, and only a working unexploitable Bounty System can provide that.
Comments
You are somewhat correct as far as bounty system explots but I fail to see your logic how that relates to the lack of pvp games.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
well the player made ones work quite well,
my corp pays a mercenary corp to wage war on a 3rd corp
you can pay them a fix ammount or offer them like 10 million per ship they kill
thats some sort of working bounty system.
the only one i can think that can work is a personal contract trade. you look for your bounty hunter that will hunt for you. or put a contract on the market, this way you have at least some chance that someone legit will take the contract and hunt them
its not perfect as only 1 person can take the bounty (unless you make multiple) but its better than to have them as anyone can collect it upon death.
It's easy. Just make the bounty worth slightly less than the penalty for that person dying.
That way if they get themselves killed and claim the bounty. They still lose out.
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
-The bounty hunter could make a deal with the target and split the bounty with them.
-The target could have a 2nd character as a bounty hunter, or 2nd account.
-In Eve Online the death penalty is insurance for your ship, the victim gets in one of those small ships that are practically free, gets a corp member to PK them, and they lose very little but get their bounty removed.
-In fantasay games the death penalty is what you carry (like darkfall), so you remove all your equipment and get a guild member to PK you, lose very little but get bounty removed.
I am going to have to disagree. It is not some rules issue that keeps PvP a small minority, it is the simple fact that most people want to play a relaxing, controlled game, with risks evaluated and decided upon. Most people do not want to play an open PvP game, with uncontrolled death.
Carebear rules exist because the majority of players want to have fun, not live in fear of the assasin.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
If UO had an unexploitable bounty system Trammel (non-consensual PVP) wouldn't have existed, Everquest which followed UO's example wouldn't have consensual PVP either, and WOW which followed Everquest's example wouldn't have consensual PVP either, and neither would all the wow-clones.
yes that is possible but you didnt read properly
"this way you have at least some chance that someone legit will take the contract and hunt them"
and i would do the same thing if a bounty hunter would come to kill me, i would say ill pay you double, to kill him... its up to the bounty hunter to be honorable or greedy. i would go for that, and since its a personal contract, and not simply anyone that pods him gets the bounty.
also i would probably choose a bounty hunter. say i know a friend who lives in 0.0 space and hes really good pvper. and i am a miner in high sec and get ganked, i would private contract my friend in 0.0 a bounty contract to his corp to kill the can flipper. (the corp wallet gets the bounty) or personal private contract, where if he is on the Killmail he gets the bounty.
like i said before, its not perfect but it gives some chances of being legit rather than the current 0%
You know, one of the funnest things about this F2P game i used to play called Rohan...
They had a fun vengeance system. If someone killed you in open PvP which you did not initiate / werent flagged for, they were added to a hit list of sorts for your character. You could then gather up some friends (or do it solo if you were capable) and use that hit list to teleport your party to their location and try to get revenge. 1 time use, unless they ganked you again.
It made for some extremely fun times on both sides of the game. The gankers always had to worry that someone was going to teleport into them while in the middle of fighting mobs (or PvPing someone else) and they would potentially get their asses kicked and lose items (if they were a murderer).
On the other hand, those seeking revenge always had to worry that they were just sending themselves and their party right into an ambush. There was a lot of this that happened between warring guilds. You would have a few people going out on some fast ganking runs killing as many a sthey could a sfast as they could, then returning back to the rest of their guild while they waited for all the friends/guild sof the ones they ganked to start teleporting right into their waiting ambush.
It was a blast sometimes watching multiple guilds try to take down some of the larger zerg guild sthat were always starting trouble by coordinating to teleport into a specific high priority target (such as their leaders or strongest players/healers) and trying to FF them down before they could wipe them out.
Its a shame more games dont make use of things like this to encourage some fun pvp with group coordination and smart tactics (like sending scouts to get a fix on targets and wether or not they were vulnerable before teleporting in on them).
I think perma-death, coupled with a time-intensive training system would solve the problem, but here's hoping a developer has the balls to try something that risky. Model your skill/level system on a 24 hour day, 12 month year and that would eliminate the 30 day, new character griefers. By the time a character reaches a respectable level of proficiency, they'll be too wrapped up in keeping their char alive to risk losing everything on impulse. And if you do die, well maybe there's a character vault that you at least get to keep.
Right! Because killing the same PvE static npc over and over and over has proven to be the hallmark of unexploitable PvE gaming.
Huh?
You didn't read me properly either. The bounty hunter would kill the TARGET (not you) and split the bounty with your TARGET you put the bounty on. So basically you're being robbed twice.
How are you suppose to put a bounty on someone if you're perma-dead?
-In fantasay games the death penalty is what you carry (like darkfall), so you remove all your equipment and get a guild member to PK you, lose very little but get bounty removed.
That's a problem with the game itself.
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
this x 100
this is why the games comming out these days follow the carebear rules. because the majority want it.
i dont want to call them carebears since... well its not cool anymore, instead i call them
playing for entertainment, like going to a movies, most of the time is a happy ending
about 90% of the population
and
playing for gaming, games with a challenge, something that doesnt always end with a happy ending unless you worked for it. about 10% of the population
as investor that wants money, i would also go for making games for entertainment, 11 million people will pay for easy god mode? 300k wont, HAH ! make it easy god mode, i dont have to think twice about it
as a gamer that wants quality in depth games, it is a sad future i see. we will have to feed our gaming thirst on pac-man and pong, since everything else is to easy to even be called a game.
food for thought: can it still be called a game when you can't loose?
Maybe you're right but I consider myself part of the majority, average. I wanted to play in a free and open PVP environment but when I saw the bounty system I left those games or switched to PVE.
yes that might happen, but there is also the chance that you ADD!!! that someone legit will come along and NOT split the money, currently, right now, this instant, its 100 sure that he gets a friend to kill him in an empty clone. but by making it a contract there is a CHANCE that someone legit will come and collect the bounty himself, i know i would, i would be all over the bounty contracts killing anyone for a few hundred million isk WITHOUT splitting it, and im sure full corps would form just for that, and hell i would even see myself telling the dude hey lets split it and then kill him and not split it, so instead of getting robbed twice, your bH 1 kills him and 2 scams him
but yes there is also the chance that his friend gets the contract and splits it, it is a risk that is worth taking.
That kind of exploit does not work if there are factions, and they can not trade with each other.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
Yep, but make sure the criminal has no control over the penalty structure.
If the bounty says "50 cents on the dollar for any assets belonging to Criminal Bob that you destroy" then Criminal Bob can get a friend to destroy his stolen stuff, effectively getting 50 cents on the dollar for it. It's a great way to fence stolen goods. That applies to the character as well. If character gear is destroyed when the character is killed, then Criminal Bob can load up on stolen gear, get killed by a buddy and they split the profits from the bounty. Obviously, that's all dependent on the character death system.
A better system is to have the bounty issuer identify the exact assets that he wants destroyed. "Kill the character and I'll pay 1 gold." The assumption there is that a character kill is pretty meaningless. "Kill his favorite dragon pet and I'll pay 30 gold." The assumption there is that the dragon is far more valuable than 30 gold. Doing things that way, the bounty issuer has careful control over what's going to be paid out. The criminal cannot simply steal somebody's dragon, kill it, and get 30 gold.
Naturally, only one bounty can be paid out per destroyed item or killed creature. If bounties stacked, you'd end up with the typical bounty problem of the destroyed stuff being worth less than the bounty on it.
It's not a risk worth taking. You know how gamers are, they will min/max everything, in fact that's how most games are designed to cater to, and that means if anyone is going to go on a PK'ing rampage they will have a 2nd character to kill themselves to collect/remove the bounty.
In UO players eventually just put 1 copper bounty on another PK'er, this was before Trammel, I didn't play long enough to see Trammel but I know exactly what it was.
That's how pvp has devolved into: the WOW model where there are no bounty hunters (real ones), pirates, highwaymen.
I'd like to roleplay a highwayman or pirate, but without a working penalty system it would just be ganking lowbies and no real risk. I tried ganking lowbies a couple times in a WOW PVP server and it wasn't fun.
I want this to be a brainstorming topic, see if anyone can come up with an ingenious unexploitable bounty system so some players can roleplay bounty hunting, thieves, highwaymen, pirates in a mainstream setting where most players aren't sadistic griefers out for kicks.
All I can think of is
-1 particular character cannot collect bounty on 1 particular character more than one time. But this might be exploited depending on how many characters you can make per account, how many characters there are per server, etc.
C'mon we're all min/maxers, can't we think of anything better?
I liked pre-launch AoC's idea. You get jailed, publicly, and have to do a "quest" like moving rocks or some such or pay a fine before you can get out.
If it's instantaneous, server side, and the penalty is higher then reward then nobody would roleplay the bad guy.
In my opinion, pvp shouldnt be the developers' responsibility. It should be allowed to the fullest extent, and then left with the players to deal with how they will, this allows for anyone to find their own solution to anything, it brings communities together, and makes the pvp have great consequences, and thus gives you more of a thrill when you experience it.
The game that had the most amazing pvp in my experience is Tibia. It wasn't full loot pvp, and there was an item that prevented item loss, but you lost experience when you died none the less, thus the death penalty was rough. This forced people to find a good guild to help protect them, or have friends in high places. It also brought forth quite a few amazing wars. Good times.
I'm not a huge Tibia fanboy, in fact I haven't played it in quite some time, but I have to admit, I'm surprised at how little it is talked about on this site.