Less Prime Money Maker, more Pod-killing Encourager

My recent proposal to modify the bounty system was met with some opposition that I had not expected.

"Problem is does even this fixed bounty system make bounty hunting viable? Or will it just be "Ooooo that guy I just podded had a bounty!". Is it possible to make bounty hunting as a profession viable, or will it always just be a way to give someone who just popped someone you don't like a small reward? As soon as you offer rewards that are worth doing something to get, the alt/corp mate collection becomes very viable."

Drackarn's comment, as well as a couple of posts in F&I (where game ideas go to die™), pointed out something that I missed; the desire of players to perform player vs player bounty hunting as their primary means of making money.

I do not think that making one's primary earnings from collecting pod bounties is a viable goal; there is an inherent problem with trying to make a living from PVP bounties in that any PVP mechanic will be competing with EVE's long standing PVE mechanics; PVE bounty hunting provides an extraordinary amount of ISK while being highly predictable, and thus relatively safe. PVP, conversely, can be extraordinarily dangerous and is considerably less predictable than PVE. Without turning PVP into an extraordinarily cash flow positive activity, I perceive this to be an irreconcilable problem.

PVP in Eve Online is already great fun in and of itself. While it would be very neat to make one's living solely off of PVP activity, it is not a viable design goal without performing considerable, massive overhauls to the nature of Eve Online's economy and PVE systems. To me, bounty hunting mechanics would better serve as a secondary money maker in Eve Online. To that end, modifying the bounty system and allowing it to serve its originally intended function, albeit while not being the chief breadwinner, looks like the best solution available to this long standing design issue.

Fixing the Bounty system

It occurred to me the other day that everything that is wrong with the bounty system can be expressed in a single sentence:

"Bounties don't work because the payouts are worth more than the clones."

Now that implants are included in pod-mails, the market value of a destroyed clone is public knowledge; this has created an opportunity to implement a new bounty system. As the nature of the current problem is that a friend or an alt can claim an outstanding bounty, the fix is actually relatively straightforward; change the mechanics of bounty payment to only supply a portion of the value of each clone and treat the total bounty on a pilot's head as a payout pool.

With a proportional payout pool, pilots will no longer be able to take a bounty for themselves without suffering more in losses than payouts. By supplying small payments rather than a lump sum, a new incentive is created to keep podding a given pilot as long as there's money in the bounty pool.

Voila! The eternally broken bounty system is fixed!