Crime!

You can generate free gold in greater abundance by farming and adventuring with far less effort and much less of a risk of getting called out and hated in the PVP community for padding your numbers by killing a dummy over and over again.


The idea I proposed is that the player who was slain puts up the money for the bounty with some of it going to the NPC for facilitating the contract - so the money awarded is less than the money put into the system. The idea is that it would become profitable to cash in multiple contracts at once if they start building up, eventually reaching a point where a whole group working together would benefit from the rewards if the bounties stack up if a single person is not able to collect on the accumulating bounties.


As far as abuse of the PVP gameplay, I think the PVP community would have a collective answer real quick for a player padding their numbers. I wouldn't even buy cannibal stew or bone deco off a person who didn't earn the trophies, and the bones and leaderboard would be a very visible paper trail to anyone killing the same alt over and over again.

Speaking of which, there is already a huge exploit in the game for getting ingredients for cannibal stew and rare deco, but I don't hear anyone complaining about that.

 

OK so I am trying to think of how fun this could be, here is what I got :

Two systems need to be added here so this is not really super realistic but someone can dream

Npc thieving with bounty reward accumulated from a % of the loots value (with loots equal to killing mobs normal loot).

Bounty quest board with easy (small named mob), medium (strong named mob), Hard (Super boss for groups), PvP (a player with an accumulated bounty from thieving).

All the loot would be decent loot, going from boss type gold drop for the easy, to 4-8 artifact drops depending on the amount of players during the kill (could go to 12) for the hard, with a PvP artifact drop for the pvp one with gold from the accumulated bounty.

For the pvp one, maybe add a per player attenuation window, so it can't be farmed by the same player too much. If it's between friends, who cares, it's the equivalent of two people doing it non stop and getting each other often, but with less effort, if you get that person's bounty (since it's a quest probably your pvp bounty gets chosen add random). Add a (if dead) quest abandon choice where you get the easy reward instead if you can't kill the person you got, and put this pvp quest on a daily timer!

Why make the rewards this good? Because it's pretty much time invested doing PvE and an equivalent reward. Since you could put this on a daily repeat window, you avoid things being abused, and depending on the choice you make, taking the easy route should be the equivalent of turning in your siege quest when you have a few hundred or more accumulated already. And I think that is fair, the other options simply make both thieving rewarding, pvp rewarding, and adds a quest that is really cool and can generate group content!

 

Time has always been the cost of gold [or real money]. The key to a bounty system is to make the time/reward equivalent to the time/reward of the other faucets.

 

Even though I'm sure Elgarion reads every forum post, we didn't get a single dev "like" in any of the responses in this thread.
This makes me believe they don't have plans on fleshing out such systems anytime soon, and will avoid giving us any kind of hope.

PS: thanks for the like @Elgarion!