Convincing Murderers to Fund Their Own Bounties in SWG

- Rimarath - 6 February 2002 -

[ Other SWG Commentary ]

[Version 1.0: Drafted from forum posts.]

The Problem

When you are murdered, you have three mutually exclusive options: (1) outcast, (2) forgive, or (3) call in the bounty hunters.

Let's say you're not happy about being PK'd and you want to punish the PK. Option 2 is out.

So, given that we know that option 1 is a pretty harsh punishment and may be more than your average PK really deserves, how can option 3 be encouraged? Especially since option 1 is free, easy, and guaranteed...

Option 3, the bounty, involves using player bounty hunters to kill your attacker (on a mission), so it might well involve money (not necessarily, mind you, but it could and probably will). In order to avoid exploits, that money must come from either the PK or the victim. (Even though the BH doesn't get to pick their target, if the money is generated by the game it's free money for the BH and the PK to share if they cooperate -- not desirable!)

Having the victim fund the bounty is the simplest and, for that matter, most realistic system, but this makes option 3 really unappealing for the victim, especially compared to (free) option 1, and is also vulnerable to BH-PK cooperation.

But if you have the PK fund the bounty, the PK can always screw over the BH by just keeping a small balance in their bank account, making PK bounty-hunting not worthwhile.

The Solution

So...I propose the following super-simple method for promoting option 3 using the PK's own money. When the victim is killed, the game prominently displays the PK's bank balance next to the 'bounty' option, and if the victim chooses to post a bounty, they can specify some amount of that balance for the bounty (*). That amount of the balance is then automatically locked in the account and saved for a BH. By displaying the amount of cash involved to the victim, the game ensures the victim that a certain amount of financial pain will come to the PK if/when they are caught, and that a BH will get sufficient reward to encourage them to complete their mission.

In this system, the PK has incentive to keep money in their bank account to dissuade victims from choosing option 1 and outcasting the PK, which obviously they want to avoid at all costs. By keeping a large balance, which they know will be displayed to their victims, they hope to entice the victims to choose option 3.

Notes

But...people mostly hate being PK'd, and would want to give the PK the worst possible punishment, which is clearly outcasting, no matter what is done to bounties. The goal of what I proposed is to make the bounty option more appealing to the victim -- by showing just how much it will cost the PK when you choose the bounty option, maybe you could convince some victims that that punishment is 'bad' enough to really hurt the PK -- but it does seem likely that outcasting will still be a very popular punishment.

To address that somewhat, it would be possible to extend this system to allow the PK to offer a 'bribe fund' from their bank account, which would be presented to the victim in exchange for forgiveness, although personally I'd rather have that sort of thing be negotiated, after the fact. That would show some direct positive benefit to the victim for not outcasting the murderer, which might encourage the victim not to choose option 1.

(*) Additional complexity here: the PK should be allowed to restrict how much of their bank account can be used for bounties posted on themselves; only the balance available for bounties is shown to the victim. Also, the victim could throw in some of their own money if they wanted.

Rim

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