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Author Topic: Making bounty hunting work in MMOs  (Read 7018 times)
DarkSign
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Posts: 698


on: November 19, 2007, 03:51:52 AM

Ok guys. This issue has been brought up before, but I thought Id try to tie up a few loose ends.

With griefing being one of the main "barriers to entry" for PvP games, I believe that a bounty hunting system would not only be interesting, but serve a purpose.

If you are griefed...and you dont have a friend or a guild who can back you up...or simply the friend or guild doesnt want to...you'd place a bounty on another player's head.

Player A goes to the Bounty Hunting guild and signs up to be a BH. Player C griefs Player B, so Player B , in turn, goes to the BH NPC, drops money in an escrow of sorts, and selects Player C as the target. Death or capture may be chosen. Mere death results in an inventory item proving death which can be redeemed for the bounty. Capture would be somewhat like immobilizing someone then dragging them (like a corpse in EQ1) to the specified location.

For the sake of argument, lets say that:

a) guilds and cities had jails that bountyhunters could bring bounties to
b) jail itself could be fun...in that it would be like another level/building/environment to escape from (City of Heroes does this already minimally)
c) if the bounty logged off they would be wherever the BH took them in the end.

If you're worried about this actually increasing griefing, perhaps some controls are in order...

Perhaps you could only put up a bounty after you had been killed by the same person 4 times lets say. You get an inventory item on the nth kill, which you turn into the BH NPC.  Let's be clear, the goal isnt to stop all PKing. In the game Im speaking of PKing in general isnt wrong..it's fun! Griefing, on the other hand, would be.

So what criteria would make sure that the selection of griefer target was more surgical?

X # of kills by the same person
X # of kills by the same person within Y amt of time
X # of kills by player in the same group/guild as any other of your killers

What else could you come up with so that PKing wasnt discouraged necessarily, but griefing was?

How does this strike everyone? Thoughts on making it better? Could this be used to reduce (not totally stop) griefing?
I know EvE has something similar, how does it compare?

I'm interested in other people's thoughts.
Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23611


Reply #1 on: November 19, 2007, 05:32:28 AM

How do you distinguish between PKing and griefing? E.g. why is killing somebody 4 times considered griefing? Maybe they were dueling or even fights every time?

Also this is the sort of thing that's been tried and rehashed before many many times in the past. They never work.
DarkSign
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Posts: 698


Reply #2 on: November 19, 2007, 07:39:55 AM

Well that's part of the question isn't it. To "real" PvPers there is no griefing. You get what you sign up for. But the pain to be avoided is in the eye of the beholder. 

In SB, some high-level guy would sub to the tree of some merchant town out in the middle of nowhere and kill everyone over and over until he got dispatched or grew bored. I can see both sides of the fence...since I did this myself from mid-levels on. But there is the pain of a whole group of people not getting to use the town. My answer would be they need to gather some friends and kick the idiot out...that's the purpose of playing a PvP game.

I suppose the underlying issue is can there be a method like Bounty Hunting which can, for a price, help stop those who dont want to PvP to get some sort of retribution on those interrupting their experience?

Put another way, do designers just have to make a game PvP or PvE?
Morat20
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Reply #3 on: November 19, 2007, 09:39:48 AM

Until you can solve THIS particular problem, Bounty Hunting is a pipedream.

1) Player A goes and pisses off Player B, until Player B puts up a GIANT bounty on his ass.
2) Unknown to player B, Player A is the friend or other account of Bounty Hunter C.
3) Bounty Hunter C meets up with Player A (or just dual boxes) and shoots him, collecting the bounty. Splitting it with Player A if A is another person, or keeping it for himself if he's dual-boxing.

The net result? Player A has been repeatedly fucked with, and then he paid the fucker for doing it.
Stephen Zepp
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InstantAction


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Reply #4 on: November 19, 2007, 09:46:34 AM

Until you can solve THIS particular problem, Bounty Hunting is a pipedream.

1) Player A goes and pisses off Player B, until Player B puts up a GIANT bounty on his ass.
2) Unknown to player B, Player A is the friend or other account of Bounty Hunter C.
3) Bounty Hunter C meets up with Player A (or just dual boxes) and shoots him, collecting the bounty. Splitting it with Player A if A is another person, or keeping it for himself if he's dual-boxing.

The net result? Player A has been repeatedly fucked with, and then he paid the fucker for doing it.

Morat hit on the fundamental flaw of bounty hunting as a player "service".

Unless you track actual account ownership, and not allow bounties to be carried out with that taken into account (same real user behind two accounts) it's hugely flawed, and even that doesn't track the "hey, kill me and we'll split the money" support from a friend.

Rumors of War
geldonyetich2
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Reply #5 on: November 19, 2007, 05:09:40 PM

Been here before.

Another potential loophole is people who want to use the bounty hunting system for grief potential.  Player A is bored but has bottomless gold because he has a lot of money to throw at IGE.  He goes to the Bounty Hunter, puts out a piddling small amount of gold on a bunch of easy-to-gank newbies, taking the time to renew the bounty every time it's collected.  Cancellations result.

Stepping back from the box a bit, what are we trying to solve here?  Grief play?  In that case, an "accountability" system might get more accomplished.  Player A ganks newbies regularly, in time the NPC guards kill him on site and storekeepers refuse to deal with him.  He has to make up for it somehow, perhaps by leaving players alone for awhile, serving jail time, or paying large amounts of blood retribution money.
Kail
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Reply #6 on: November 19, 2007, 06:51:39 PM

I know EvE has something similar, how does it compare?

I was interested in EVE's bounty hunting system, but I was never really able to do anything with it.  Someone more experienced than me can probably offer some more insight here, but my n00bish "five minutes looking at the bounty list" observations are:

  • It's either trivial or extremely difficult to find a player in most MMOs.  In something like WoW, you can /who them and find out where they are (if they're in the same faction), which makes it impossible for them to hide.  In EVE, or in WoW for players of the opposing faction, you have no idea where they are, and your "job" is to wander aimlessly around trying to find out their location, because it's not like they leave some kind of trail or anything.  A griefer doesn't care about their targets; they'll kill whoever's in front of them, but a Bounty Hunter needs to have some way of finding a specific player, and ideally that would be a mechanic a bit more involving than looking them up in a player list.
  • It's hard to catch these guys once you've found them.  Most games have some kind of escape ability or item.  Anyone who's any good at PvP knows how to use these.  WoW has the hearthstone (as well as abilites like vanish and polymorph), EVE has warping and NPC stations, that kind of thing.  Assuming you track down your bounty, what is there to stop him from going "Oh crap," and hitting the escape button?  You've spent an our trekking out there, he jumps away, now you've got to find him AGAIN, and there's no guarantee that he won't do the same thing the next time.  In EVE, it's rare to find a single ship that can act as both a tackler and a decent combat vessel.
  • In EVE, players with high bounties generally have high bounties because they don't get caught.  They're powerful players who fly with groups of their buddies in heavily armed ships, and if you want to fight them, you'll have to bring your own group, equal to or greater than them in badassery.  At that point, it's less about bounty hunting (because the reward for killing this guy looks a lot less impressive after being split between your ten buddies, waiting an hour for you to all get together, tracking this guy down, et cetera) and more about squad warfare and local politics (being anti-PK or whatever the reason you're after this guy is, since it's almost certainly not going to be money).
  • It still doesn't discourage griefing, because griefing is generally the more powerful players screwing over the weaker ones.  Weaker players are not going to have the money they need to entice a powerful bounty hunter to go after a badass in a Star Destroyer.  And even if they did, I'm not convinced that this would either be a strong disincentive to griefers (who generally enjoy PvP anyway, so what do they care if someone's "hunting them down") or a reasonable consolation to the guy who keeps getting his ass kicked to such a degree that he's willing to pay someone else to please make it stop.  I can think of a lot of ways that Bounty Hunting could be cool, but I don't see it being a cure for griefing.

In short, the problem is that Bounty Hunting is harder than griefing, or most PvP in general, because it's so specialized.  You've somehow got to find one specific guy (or a small subset of guys), get over to where he is, and somehow kick his butt in a style of combat which he is likely quite good at.  And you do this (generally) for a fairly small amount of money.  I love the idea of bounty hunting, but I've never seen it really work very well.
lamaros
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Reply #7 on: November 28, 2007, 08:19:50 PM

I've seen Bounty Hunting work in some small 'roleplaying' PvP muds. But for more popular games the problems pile up.

Besides, if you set up your PvP system well enough then a bounty hunting service will rise of its own accord without it needing to be coded into the system. I remain of the opinion than a PvP environment is move balanced when the system is self-corrective because of social economic and political consequences.

Otherwise you're better of building a different type of player combat system and moving away from open pvp.
Sutro
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Reply #8 on: November 28, 2007, 11:08:40 PM

Bounty hunting only works when there's a severe penalty for death, thus creating a motivation for someone to up the gold to off someone.

Severe penalties for death in MMOs suck.

DarkSign
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Reply #9 on: November 30, 2007, 07:34:44 AM

Bounty hunting only works when there's a severe penalty for death, thus creating a motivation for someone to up the gold to off someone.

You know that rings true. If all you do is kill someone and 3 seconds later they respawn like nothing happened, the kill means nothing.

Severe penalties for death in MMOs suck.

Yes, but is the suckage part of a larger game that is worth it? I guess what Im trying to say is that you cant always have the easy way.
With no risk vs. reward (and therefore penalty for failure) it's all just like going to Staples and hitting the easy button.

Penalties have to matter within the larger scheme.


Lightstalker
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Reply #10 on: November 30, 2007, 12:28:33 PM

Customers pay for the easy button in their recreational activities.

Severe consequence for death prompts players to initiate only lopsided encounters.
The best encounter (most lopsided and greatest reward) in most games is to prey on newbie/lowbie players.
This often leads to a slow death by attrition as new blood is mercilessly stomped out while veteran players eventually move on.

A successful bounty system should counteract this tendency, but any system that allows collecting the bounty to exceed the cost of death will be gamed by two or more killers in collusion.  The bounty system needs to be meaningless to bounty head, or else the bounty heads will be the best and most prolific bounty hunters.  The real issue is that every change made to encourage the good guy is also available to the bad guy, the only people negatively impacted by a bounty system are the good guys since the bad guys can play both sides of the fence either directly, or indirectly (other accounts, teammates). 

Maybe we're addressing the problem in the wrong way?  Instead of a reward for a bounty perhaps the bounty is the cost to the bounty target instead - a world of total resource denial.  One still has the issue of grief play where the wealthy destroy the resources of the poor, but at least the bounty targets won't be eager to harvest their own bounties (especially if the destruction was unpredictable, outside player control, and targeted rare/costly items first).  Then the problem falls back to managing the economy in the steady state, something games are notoriously poor at. 
DarkSign
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Reply #11 on: November 30, 2007, 02:59:27 PM

They pay for a thrilling / challenging / fun experience.

Now I dont doubt that easy = fun and that suck = not fun ... sometimes.

Koster apparently thought that too much challenge = fun, but I dont disagree that achievement over difficulty = fun too.
geldonyetich2
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Reply #12 on: November 30, 2007, 03:13:09 PM

It's an interesting line of logic, really.

People play games to have fun.
Well, what if people's developed characters are the fun?
In that case, maybe that just indicates that the game itself isn't fun.

Permadeath suddenly emerges as an oddly liberating force.
Viin
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Reply #13 on: November 30, 2007, 08:07:37 PM

Is this about perma death or bounty hunting? Just wondering.


If you want bounty hunting (specifically PvP bounty hunting) you have to set the tone of the game correctly. Maybe it's the type of game where folks use throw-away characters and can actually pick a different path after their current character dies. Who knows.

But there is also the option of making bounty hunting an actual part of the game as a player police force - not mission spawning crap, but rather, Player Y steals from Player X, Player X reports it to the police, the police post a bounty for Player Y that is inline with value of the item stolen for X days. If he's caught in X days, he has to pay a fine (the bounty + value of item or whatever) or sit the game out a day or two. Wouldn't that add some thrill to stealing? Moving hot items around?

There's no reason it has to be a show stopper for the captured/bountied, or driven by player posted bounties. The most successful bounty systems I've seen are governed by specific game rules that trigger bounties, and even those rules can sometimes be defined by a player council (though within the bounds of the rules setting tool).

I think it'd be fun to be an assassin and know that someone is always after me, it's part of the thrill.

- Viin
Ghambit
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Reply #14 on: November 30, 2007, 11:45:09 PM

You could also eliminate bounty hunting altogether and just formulate a player ran police force.  One of the big mistakes I saw with EVE is not getting players involved with the Concord police, they were a totally separate entity ran by NPCs. 

Any Guardian/Police class would be charged with protecting the innocent.  If they receive a complaint, they go about investigating it and eliminating or capturing the perpetrator.

Any Bounty placed on any player's head would be above the law and considered a "hit" and logically illegal in most cases.  Once the hit was carried out, the hitman of course can come under scrutiny of the law - making the bounty itself more valuable, but also with the threat of payback.  However, LEGAL bounty hunters working in league with police and/or "bond" agencies would also be the norm... albeit logically paid much less because they're hunting without risk of lawful retribution, and much LESS risk of unlawful retribution.

And again, throw in permadeath and you've got a worthwhile system.  Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

"See, the beauty of webgames is that I can play them on my phone while I'm plowing your mom."  -Samwise
Fordel
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Reply #15 on: December 01, 2007, 03:52:06 AM

Until you can solve THIS particular problem, Bounty Hunting is a pipedream.

1) Player A goes and pisses off Player B, until Player B puts up a GIANT bounty on his ass.
2) Unknown to player B, Player A is the friend or other account of Bounty Hunter C.
3) Bounty Hunter C meets up with Player A (or just dual boxes) and shoots him, collecting the bounty. Splitting it with Player A if A is another person, or keeping it for himself if he's dual-boxing.

The net result? Player A has been repeatedly fucked with, and then he paid the fucker for doing it.

I came here to basically write this out, appears I'm a few weeks late  tongue . Any Kind of ideal of using Bounty Hunting to punish the 'bad guys' or police the player base is doomed to failure because of this. (Outside of the mythical permadeath game no one will ever fucking play and even then, the 'bad guys' will ultimately use the system to their own benefit anyways).


I think bounty system should just be a mechanical option for guilds, to streamline what many do anyways. The Guild Leader or Bounty Officer can post up bounties and flag mobs/players/objectives that when killed/completed will automagically divvy out the bounty reward... or in other words, I want a Guild based player initiated quest system.

Make it so the Guild Lead can put out a "When we kill the Dragon, everyone gets cake!" quest through mechanics, so he doesn't have to manually send out 25 cakes etc.

and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
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