Bounty Hunters: Essential or Afterthought?
TheHiddenDaggerInn
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
While I believe that during the early alpha many players will engage in corruption to test the system and find potential loopholes, I am confident that Intrepid Studios will refine the corruption penalties to meet their intended goals before the official launch. If this happens, much like in Lineage 2, corruption might not be a significant issue. Players are likely to prefer other forms of PvP, especially since the seas offer penalty-free opportunities. However, do you think there will be enough work for bounty hunters in this context? If not, what ideas can you suggest to prevent bounty hunting from becoming an afterthought?
I apologize , I just saw there is a similar post below, at least I know someone else is thinking the same thing lol.
I apologize , I just saw there is a similar post below, at least I know someone else is thinking the same thing lol.
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Imagine You farm some rare mats in some cave, and other green player try to farm next to you. You have 2 options - split the farm, or kill him and take all mats. I would deff kill him even tho i may become target for bounty hunters.
Other situation - your group of 8 players trying to do some world boss. Another group comes that are all greens, and want to kill the boss also. As we know only the group with biggest contribution will get the boss reward. while all other groups get nothing. Will you kill the other group to make sure they dont do more dmg to the boss than you? or will you risk them taking away all the rewards?
Now include players killing bots that farm. Also include Killing of players that are trying to harm the eco system in your node
All i can say with full Conviction, is :
When the Game is live and here, since let's say several Weeks to Months - > You will definitely have some Servers where "Gankers" will not be able to terrorise People as much or often, so that some or many People want to become Bountyhunters.
While on the other Hand - > You can be equally as sure, that there will also be Servers where several Bountyhunters, maybe whole GROUPS of Bountyhunters up to Five to Fifteen People/Bountyhunters at once, can have their Hands full hunting those People who made it their Goal in Life to pester as much other People as possible.
Maybe even more Bountyhunters than Groups of "just" Fifteen People. But i think this is already approaching Node-War Circumstances of so many People should gank and kill simple Ressource Gatherers around certain Areas between Nodes.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Kinda starting to look for a Guild right now. (German)
I've proposed an alternative in various discussions, and even created a thread outlining my idea:
This system brings more benefits:
WDYM by "lacks meaningful gameplay,"? The bounty hunting system provides you the location of the Red players, Also reward for killing them.
which is nothing, boring and anyone will barely get any kill ever since the corruption system is also uninteresting and overly punitive
the so called "bounty hunters" will be so numerous and will almost never get any target for them
the bounty hunter today is closer to a witch hunter for the corrupted and not a bounty hunter in any means
There will be corrupted players for sure. Tho probably not to extreme corruption where your stats drop by a lot. But defending some boss/mob from being stolen, securing farm spot, preventing other team from entering non instanced dungeon. This will all make corrupted players
When you step back and look at the Bounty Hunter vs Red Player interaction, that is basically a way to declare yourself willing to do some PvP against whoever wants to come to you.
You can prepare yourself, chose gear, chose the favorite place and then kill a green volunteer and wait.
The fact that other green players can interfere might be the weak part of this kind of game-play.
Those green players should act as bounty hunters too when they attack a random RED player.
Or the Bounty Hunting should be possible for a longer time, even after the Red is not Red anymore.
I don't think this will happen because the people going to farm dungeons and bosses will go in their best gear and rush to nuke the bosses and secure the loot, nobody will waste time and risk getting corrupted and lose any pice of good gear
like most systems, people usually do them for what they offer you, if there is an immersive enough progression path to becoming a bounty hunter, then rare kills might be okay, and even desirable to make top tier bounty hunters more rare, i think there will be rewards for choosing this system that are most likely based around pvp.
with thousands of active players i don't think there will be a big problem finding corrupted players to progress but time will tell and it will have to be tested.
Sidenote, this may also be affected due to how easy/hard it is to remove corruption, from what i understand corruption can be removed due to Exp gain, if you can kill a player and then remove the corruption in around 10 minutes it may be more difficult. But if the time to remove corruption is upwards of 30+ minutes then it will make leveling bounty hunting alot easier, i know it all depends on how corrupt you are too. My guess is people that want to gank will kill 1-2 people and then work off the corruption before going further
And i hope Intrepid dont make the PVE side of the game a walk in the park. When the boss can wipe you alone, you wouldnt want any other players party to sabotage you while you fight the boss.
If you can "nuke the boss and go out" - then this means the pve in the game sucks. And i doubt intrepid will make such a joke.
If there are enough reds that you can make it an entire night of play by itself, something has gone wrong with the corruption punishment.
I also think it would be cool if bountyhunters coul track people that have been corrupted in the last 24 hours or so and kill them to get a reward.
As for how you get the quest, I guess bounty buildings are the answer. As you level your node, you can unlock and build the bounty building in military nodes where you can talk to an NPC that lets you enter bounty hunting mode.
I think, like most activities we saw so far, that bounty hunting should be something you dedicate yourself to doing and plan and prepare before you do it instead of it being a mode that you can just switch on like PK mode, for example. Higher level hunters and higher level bounty buildings could include things like prisons where captured corrupted players get a timeout when killed by a bounty hunter. Their friends could try to break them out earlier, but the bounty hunters can apply to protect the prison.
I think the system has a lot of potential in a PvX game.
I think this is going too far - i mean you are literally restricting the other player from playing the game that he paid subscription for.
BUT i think the idea is great, and instead of prison for the person - you can for example lock his equipment, and this is not just their items they wear atm, but also weapons and armor from their inventory.
As we know bounty hunters wont get the corrupted player items, but instead you can lock them. This way the corrupted player will need to either use some weaker items for X amount of time, or try to get their items back.
dont think the bounty works this way...
You need to accept the bounty quest from a military node. This means your friend should first get corrupted (maybe he needs to kill 3-4 players before he gets a bounty reward put for his head), then you need to accept the quest, and then you need to reach your friend. Till then there might be more bounty hunters there already, or some random may see your friend being red flagged and kill him
If the BH system works like that, it sounds like something no one would do.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Bounty_hunters
Bounty hunters can activate their Pathfinding ability to reveal corrupted player locations on their map.[3][4]
This will flag the bounty hunter for combat only to corrupted players for a period of one hour from the time of activation.[3]
The pathfinding ability can be toggled on or off.[3][5]
It is possible that bounty hunters will be permanently flagged versus corrupted players with the pathfinding ability toggled off. This design change will be decided based on testing.[6]
Add corruption to all PvP in the open world, and suddenly the bounty hunter system becomes important again.
Corruption doesn't loop back into the game, is half the problem with the Bounty Hunter system.
Once they address that loop, Bounty Hunting may have a chance.
agreed, in fact we agree more often than we disagree, and rethinking the whole BH system is a big priority in my book
lots of people will get corrupted over a farming spot.
And thus, was the Orange corruption status born. And there was much rejoicing amongst the peoples.
True, but the ability to deal with excessive ganking should prevent it from going overboard (stat reduction). At some point the ganker should be so gimped that they need to buzz off.
A green player will drop 20-30% of thier materials. A corrupted will drop 80-120%(guessing cap is actually 100%). Unless you are very sure that you can get it off very quickly there is no way it is worth it to kill for a farming spot.
It would make more sense to hire a body guard and get them to kill off the other gatherers.
LOL
as a bounty hunter i would rush there and join the attackers