[Request]

[Frostbane]

The request is bounty hunting in Epoch.

I have a couple of ideas how to take this out, but is there anyone around who can maybe make it happend, would benefit alot! :) 

The whole system evolves around the players who kill others.
For this to work what will be needed is a new trader, and maybe some new items.

• Trader: You can talk with him, put a bounty on someones head, collect bounties, or buy bounty hunter items. 
  New items:
  Dog Tags: This is the first item that is needed. How this works is: If a player kills someone else, he will drop his dog-   tags, but if killed by a Zombie or an AI it wont drop.
  That makes dog tags able to tell who killed who, then if there is a bounty on a persons head, you can return that         persons dog tags to the bounty trader, and recieve your reward (the bounty amount that is on the head of the person)
  The person who killed the individual with the bounty can collect the reward, but if he himself is killed while on the       way to the bounty trader, the dog tags of the bountied person can be picked up, and returned by their "new owner" -   However, efter the person who holds the dog tags dies to a Zombie or an AI then the dog tags will dissapear and bounty remain on the head of the bountied player. 
  
  Item's at the trader: If you kill several bountied players (4-6), without killing an "innocent" you will be rewarded         access to the traders armory, (For cash of course) - Where low, medium, and very few high caliber can be bought for gold.

          

You can either make a bounty on someones head, or it will come eventually if he kills enought people.
 

• Putting a bounty on someone: If you put a bounty on someones head, you will need to pay the trader money, the bounty put on the player, is half of the amount payed to the trader.
  Paying the trader 10oz gold = Player 5oz gold bounty.
  BUT! If the person you want to put a bounty on is already wanted, then the bounty rises with the amount you put on him. 
  (Example. He already has a bounty of 5oz gold, you pay trader 10oz gold, and now his bounty has risen to 10oz gold, because he already had a bounty of a certain amount)
   
• Naturally wanted: A naturally wanted person is a person wanted because he killed other players.
  After someone has killed 3 players, without dying to a another player, (as said, zombies and AI does not count!)
  - He recieves a bounty of 5oz gold, and will rise with 5 for every player he kills                                                         from here on and out, until bounty is collected! If a person while having 2 kills on his head, dies to another player, those two kills are erased!                                              
  - BUT! - If the bounty is awarded on his head, it wont be removed until someone has collected his dogtags and taken them to the bounty trader!

 

• I hope you liked the idea, and i hope someone can make this happend, i think the idea is great myself (but ya, don't we all when we come up with ideas?) - If you have ideas on how to improve please let me know. I would like to see the bounty system come online since it would enchance the way people think before killing someone, and actually give a worth to heroes, who normaly does not kill other players!
  
   
• Best Wishes: Frostbane :)!

​

[Triage]

 

 

Dog Tags: This is the first item that is needed. How this works is: If a player kills someone else, he will drop his dog-   tags, but if killed by a Zombie or an AI it wont drop.

 

Everyone isn't a solider though... 

[Mercules]

 

• Naturally wanted: A naturally wanted person is a person wanted because he killed other players.

  After someone has killed 3 players, without dying to a another player, (as said, zombies and AI does not count!)

  - He recieves a bounty of 5oz gold, and will rise with 5 for every player he kills                                                         from here on and out, until bounty is collected! If a person while having 2 kills on his head, dies to another player, those two kills are erased!                                              

  - BUT! - If the bounty is awarded on his head, it wont be removed until someone has collected his dogtags and taken them to the bounty trader!

 

​

 

So I get a couple friends to log in and alternate killing them until the bounty is high enough to buy whatever we want, then one of them kills me, collects the bounty, and we split it. This whole time we carefully tuck away any gear we don't want to lose before we are killed so we come out very far ahead. 

This is the sort of thing you have to think about with any system, "How will the players abuse it?"

[Frostbane]

So I get a couple friends to log in and alternate killing them until the bounty is high enough to buy whatever we want, then one of them kills me, collects the bounty, and we split it. This whole time we carefully tuck away any gear we don't want to lose before we are killed so we come out very far ahead. 

This is the sort of thing you have to think about with any system, "How will the players abuse it?"

That is exactly why i cannot figure it out alone :)! 

- If more people tag in and help with it, it may become "almost perfect" Eventually, where it cannot be abused :)!

[Mercules]

That is exactly why i cannot figure it out alone :)! 

- If more people tag in and help with it, it may become "almost perfect" Eventually, where it cannot be abused :)!

 

Well... that's not true. Any system that creates something of value from nothing will be abused without monitoring from reliable admins. Back in the late 80's and early 90's I used to be on MUSHes, MUX, and MUDs and even worked as staff for many of them. I learned long ago that automated systems for complex things like this are far too easily abused. Your best bet is to have an admin responsible for the tracking and paying out of contracts with some means outside the game for players to contact them. Then if they notice one player tends to camp NWAF or Elektro/Cherno killing newspawns they can set up a bounty on that player and pay it out of "admin" funds. 

Building a community is always better than automating some things.

[Frostbane]

Well... that's not true. Any system that creates something of value from nothing will be abused without monitoring from reliable admins. Back in the late 80's and early 90's I used to be on MUSHes, MUX, and MUDs and even worked as staff for many of them. I learned long ago that automated systems for complex things like this are far too easily abused. Your best bet is to have an admin responsible for the tracking and paying out of contracts with some means outside the game for players to contact them. Then if they notice one player tends to camp NWAF or Elektro/Cherno killing newspawns they can set up a bounty on that player and pay it out of "admin" funds. 

Building a community is always better than automating some things.

Thank you for the insight, the server i'am currently on, the admin staff is very reliable, and focused towards abusers, so if i in any way get a way to make this work, then they'll be paying attention.

- But to be honest i don't know how to make a system like this, is this the right place to post something like this with the hopes that some may create it, or am i truly wrong in being here?

[Frostbane]

Everyone isn't a solider though... 

I know that not everyone is a soldier, but DayZ is build on russia, as appocalypse, and the way the game appears, everyone looks like they've been something from a military, , just my opinion :D

[Mercules]

Thank you for the insight, the server i'am currently on, the admin staff is very reliable, and focused towards abusers, so if i in any way get a way to make this work, then they'll be paying attention.

- But to be honest i don't know how to make a system like this, is this the right place to post something like this with the hopes that some may create it, or am i truly wrong in being here?

 

I think my point is that if they are that involved then an automated system isn't needed and is they are not then the automated system is too easily abused. See what I mean? Why automate something that would have to be heavily supervised?

[Zapata]

Just remove automatique bounty but only manual so someone has to put money to get less money.

[Flosstradamus]

Can't this be abused? Friend kills friend collects bounty. over and over again

[Phyrstorm]

My thoughts on this is to have a trader that you can pay to put a bounty on someone say 2 briefcases of gold.  Whomever kills gathers the tags from the person with the bounty then has to collect it from the trader.  After the person with the bounty is killed by a player they no longer have the bounty on their head so he can't be farmed but the person that collected the tags can be killed to steal the tags from them. That way no gold is created from nothing, it has to come from someone who is placing the bounty.  Also maybe charge a service fee like 1 10oz gold per briefcase of bounty placed on someone.  I have no idea if this is actually possible or not but it would be an awesome system for those of us that do some sort of bounty system manually now.

[FJack]

I like this idea alot and i'm pretty sure bandits would love it too. I would like to see the humanity system more about consequences like a rising bounty. Some players would exploit it but that's for admins to deal with imo.

I wouldnt want a real-time bounty log. I think it would be best if players had to update the bounty list via the bounty trader or at least manually by radio... or reading a newspaper. Just so players don't magically know who's got a bounty unless they figure out for themselves. That would make it less like a gta style "red blip" hunt... know what I mean?

[Eegore]

  I don't think this has a place as a feature in Epoch due to the above mentioned ease of abusing it without reliable policing by server Admins.

 

  I do think however that a useable system ran by Admins is acceptable, just like AI missions are not "Epoch" but are scripts given to the community to use as needed.  This way if a server tosses out a crappy easily abused bounty system then its that servers problem and not Epochs.

 

  It is possible to make a system that is tracked in the database if the currency is not straight across gold-trade.  The idea of collecting Dog-tags or another non-Epoch item will assist in tracking behavior.  As for the actual process of "Hunting" a bounty there should perhaps be a trader that has "Connections" or tracking dogs that for a fee will give you a coordinate within 800m of your mark.

 

  The problem with this is the tracking and passing of information for a specific player may cause issues with anti-hack. 

[hogscraper]

While this sounds like an awesome idea, it would definitely have to be player driven and not automated. The other problem I see is that there isn't a way to save bounties after a restart. You could spawn a set of dogtags on a player's death and assign it a variable no problem. Assigning the dead player's charid to them and publishing the item could allow that data to be preserved after restart. The trader where you turn them in could check that variable against a list of offered bounties and pay out whatever was paid in no problem, but what happens when the server restarts in regard to bounties that have been offered to the trader? Without a custom table in your database or custom fields in the object_data, how could you preserve the data of what was paid out for the bounty? I ran into several issues like this while trying to come up with cool ideas. Arma2net was a no go as two server providers so far refused to put custom dll's of any type on the server and a custom hiveext.dll was a no go for the same reason. Everything was awesome until you needed that data again the next restart. You could try to save a combination of charid and money to the either the characterid or objectuid columns but how would you guarantee that no conflicts would arise with a duplicate entry or too large a value in the case of the characterid column?

Eegore, you made your post as I was typing so I would really be interested in how you would save that data?

[Eegore]

  Actually I'm not sure of he details as I haven't tried to pass the information over a restart.  I was just trying to exclaim that the system would need to be player/Admin controlled, and also that an argument about the realistic use of "dogtags" isn't as important as the fact that straight gold transaction would be easily abused.

[FJack]

From my experience playing with bounty systems there will always be ways to exploit it. Even if players don't exploit it by putting bounty's on friends over and over, which is easily fixed by charging a fee for the bounty (i.e. 10 gold bounty cost 12 gold). Players can still put bounties on buddies to lure in bounty hunters or put bounties over and over on the same player to "grief" / troll them.

I personally like to think the ArmA / Epoch community is more mature than that... as in they won't seep down to that level or that would be the minority of players. In any case, there's always more we can do to help make a working & fair bounty system to add an element that would greatly help players "unite" to try and keep the servers less hostile in a way that doesn't involve getting admin to referee a situation which can be solved "on the field".

I hate to bring up other games in case it sparks some kinda off topic debate... but here goes anyhow :P

when a player kills me or harasses my buddies an I (in GTAO). If we're not in the mood to PVP we just put a high priced bounty on them, as you may have done. It's like calling the plumber when the toilet breaks. You could get all dirty and fix it yourself... but instead you just pick up the phone and a trained professional comes to do the job for you.

It's really a solution to a problem many players have. We either don't want to get dirty or aren't prepared / experienced enough to fix the problem. So having a set bounty would help those players get the needed attention of other good players / Heroes.