A Bounty System Hypothesis

[guyver1 70]

The Bounty System

Radio system known as ‘The Voice’

Radio speaker ‘assets’ could be added to the world to telegraph poles, pylons, etc to broadcast bounty messages

Various locations could house ‘Bounty Boards’ with lists of bandit names and last known location, and last known time seen at that location.

The bounty boards could be ‘paper’ lists pinned to notice boards, or a digital readout style display type device.

for the ‘realism’ folks who want the ‘but who updates the boards’ you could essentially have a never seen NPC unit who work for ‘The Voice’ who maintain the bounty lists.

The Bounty

Every time you kill another player ‘The Voice’ somehow gets wind of it through his network of informants.

A bounty reward is attached to the killer

Bounty Amount and bounty determination:

Bounty and whether you are marked as a wanted bandit on the bounty list is determined as follows:

All items have a ‘cost’

whether a player is armed has a ‘cost’

Player location has a ‘cost’

All these costs are added together to create, a ‘live’ bounty assessment score.

Sliding Scale Bounty Score

If your bounty assessment score is within a determined threshold to the player you kill, you get a minimal bounty score meaning you do not get added to the ‘Wanted Dead’ Bounty board. If your Bounty assessment score is outside a determined threshold, you get a higher bounty score.

The Bounty Board has a set score, (say 500) if you get a bounty Score of 500 or above, you immediately get added to the Bounty Board and 'The Voice' announces that a new bandit is on the wanted list and was last seen at X location and his/her bounty reward is currently set at Y

Example 1.

2 players, closely matched in gear, in one of the big towns or military installations who get involved in a firefight are simply in a firefight, their Bounty Scores are closely matched and so the ‘killer’ get a minimal Bounty Score that doesnt hit the Bounty Board Threshold.

Example 2.

Your typical camping/spawn camping bandit KOS killer. Has lots of gear (sniper rifle), = high cost, Is camping a hill, = medium to high cost, kills a player who has recently spawned and has no gear and is scavenging for essentials.

This player is immediately marked with a bounty due to the large discrepancy in bounty assessment score between the two players. This player gets a large bounty score that puts him above the threshold required to get them added to the Bounty Board.

Bounty rewards.

Bounty has to be collected from predetermined locations, if you get killed before you collect, tough, thats life.

Bounty rewards can be any in-game items, weapons, food, clothing etc (almost like a shop), maybe some special items only available through bounty reward collection.

Successful Bounty collection gets you added to the Bounty Board as a Bounty Hunter stating who you killed, and how much the bounty reward was.

This in turn can allow players to develop reputations as bounty hunters, who in turn could end up being hunted down by bandits who want revenge.

The bandit dies, loses all their gear and has to create a new character and start from scratch with nothing.

The Bounty Hunter gets to collect the bounty reward and trade that reward in for in-game items to the value of the reward amount.

‘But the bandit will simply respawn, and get geared up by his mates’

Its essentially a different person in the game (regardless of whether the player behind the mouse and keyboard is the same), gangs in real life, if they lose a member, will simply recruit a new member to fill the void, this is the same.

if the player is a lone gunman, then as in real life, he’s dead, and the new player joining the game is simply another lone gunman to be taken out when he makes a name for himself as a killer.

Thoughts??

[Charb 298]

How would you know who has a bounty? playing on a server with tags to see their name?

I don't play on servers with tags enabled because hovering over the bushes to find people is practically cheating.

Bounties have been brought up before and there just isn't a practical way to implement them. Not to mention... if you are playing on a tagless server.

(edit) your font is super small... did you paste from notepad?

Edited December 21, 2012 by Charb

[guyver1 70]

yeah i did paste from google docs sorry

[guyver1 70]

in terms of tags, wouldn't the bandit skin be enough of a identifier, if the bandit skin was tied to the bounty board?

[Charb 298]

in terms of tags, wouldn't the bandit skin be enough of a identifier, if the bandit skin was tied to the bounty board?

if your running around and you are getting shot at by another survivor are you going to freely let him shoot you or kill him? have this happen a few times and then... your a bandit. It is possible for someone not wanting to be a bandit to become a bandit. I think the bounty system is just something we can't really implement for too many reasons at this time.