Bounties, Kill Rights, New Modules and War in Retribution

Hello Capsuleers. I’m CCP SoniClover from Team Super Friends here to tell you some more about what the team’s been working on for Retribution. This blog is a follow up on the first one I did, which covered our work on a high level. I recommend you skim over that one if you haven’t already, as this blog assumes the reader has at least rudimentary knowledge of what’s going on. But I’ll quickly summarize what the team has been working on – we’ve been re-doing the broken bounty system so that now bounty is paid out proportionally based on the loss inflicted in a kill. We’ve refactored the kill right system so that players can now get others to help in exacting revenge on their former assailants. We’re also continuing to iterate on the war system and adding and adjusting a few modules.

The team has used the time since the last dev blog to implement, refine and polish the features, taking into account feedback from various sources – the CSM, the forums, test servers and so on. This feedback has resulted in us making some adjustments to our work and priorities and will be discussed in more details below.

On the whole, we’re on track to deliver what we set out to deliver. A few items have fallen of the to-do-list, but there are a few new ones on it instead. We aim to continue working on these features post-Retribution, so expect further iteration down the road. We’ll keep you posted on the details here as the time comes.

So without further ado, let’s look at some of the stuff we’ve been doing.

It’s Full of Bounties!

In addition to the Most Wanted List, we’ve added a Bounty Hunter List to the Bounty Office. This lists the characters with the highest total bounties claimed in ISK, as well as the number of kill reports they’ve been on where a bounty was claimed. There is separate list for corporations and alliances, though those do not list number of kills.

There is also a tab where you can track all bounties you’ve placed (My Bounties).

When you have a bounty placed on you, the notification you get sent now also includes the name of the character that placed the bounty on you.

We’ve reduced the minimum amounts for placing a bounty on corporations and alliances, from 50 million and 500 million to 20 million and 100 million respectively.

It will not be possible to place bounties on NPC characters (like agents) or corporations (but you can place a bounty on a player character in a NPC corporation), nor on CCP developers or ISD people.

A final note on bounties, there have been a few misconceptions floating around regarding them that we want to clear up/restate:

• Having a bounty on you will never by itself make you a legal target anywhere.
• The 20% payout is based on the loss value of the kill report, not on the bounty pool itself. Example: If you have a 150 million bounty on you and the loss value of the kill report is 100 million, then 20 million will be paid out, leaving your remaining bounty at 130 million. If the bounty pool had been 15 million instead, then the entire 15 million would have been paid out on the kill.
• The total loss value includes both ship and lost modules.
• If you’re fighting a character that has bounty on him and he self-destructs or is killed by CONCORD, you still get the bounty. The bounty then goes to the player with the highest damage contribution.

License to Kill

As before, the kill right section under your character sheet is the place to go to view your kill rights. But now this is also the place where you manage the kill rights you have.

In the kill rights view, you can now make your kill rights (the kill rights you have on other characters) available to others. You do this through the utility menu at the right of the kill right entry.

We’ve added an option for people to limit who the kill right is available to. Now when you make a kill right available, you can choose to restrict access the kill right to a specific corporation, alliance or even character. You can still make it open to anyone if you wish. When you make a kill right available, a notification is sent to the target of the kill right informing him that the kill right has been made available (and to whom if that is specified).

You can also revert your choices here and cancel the availability of your kill rights, using the same menu. Currently there are no restrictions on how fast or frequently you can cancel kill right availability or make them available again.

To be able to spot better those you have kill rights available on, we’ve added a new icon to the overview and the chat channel. You can set these to show those in your vicinity (overview) or system (local chat channel) that you can activate kill rights on. Note that there is also a bounty icon already in existence that is now more viable to show than before.

To use a kill right (your own or one that another player has made available to you), you select the target’s ship in space. In the select window you can activate the kill right (for kill rights available to you from other players this might cost you ISK to activate). This makes the target a suspect for 15 minutes. If you have more than one kill right available on the target (for instance if two characters have made it available to you), the one costing less is always chosen as default.

The Suspect flag means that anyone in the vicinity can now attack the flagged player. Running through the scenarios of what this entails make this less of an issue than at first glance.

• If the kill right is made available to everyone, but at a low price, the targeted player can simply use an alt or a friend to get rid of the kill right. This is then just an extra hoop to jump through for those players frequently causing others to get kill rights on them.
• If the kill right is made available to everyone, but at a high price, then there is much less of a chance of it being activated constantly and thus less of a hassle. This is especially true when considering that players will likely be wary of kill right scams and thus not keen on paying to activate a kill right with a considerable cost.
• If the kill right is made available to a specific entity, then this is little different than being at war – you just need to remember whom to look out for as it is not as clearly shown as for war.

If a kill report is generated where a kill right was removed (i.e. the kill was a consequence of a kill right being activated on the victim), then the kill report shows this by stating that the victim was killed on behalf of the owner of the kill right.

The Rules of War

 We’ve done two iteration stories on the war system from the Inferno expansion. These are the stories we got to this time around, but there is more work to be done here.

The aggressor now has the option to retract a war that has been made mutual by the defender. This ends the war in 24 hours. The other option here was to give the aggressor a chance to accept or refuse making the war mutual, but we felt the retraction was a cleaner and simpler solution.

The other story is a bit of refactoring of the war declaration cost. We’ve removed the cost multiplier based on number of wars you’re in, as this was causing issues when wars are being copied around, plus it’s much more severe to be multiplying the base cost now compared to before (50 million and 2 million respectively).

Also, we’ve changed a little bit how the cost scales depending on number of characters in defender corp/alliance. The cost now starts ramping up faster than before and thus hits the ceiling of 500 million sooner. Before the cost started scaling up around the 128 character mark and hit the ceiling at ca. 7200. After the change, the cost starts ramping up with the 51^st character and hits the ceiling at the 2000 character mark.

Tools of the Trade

Here’s some more information on the two new modules we’re making for Retribution.

For the Micro Jump Drive, we will start by just doing a large version of this module (Large Micro Jump Drive), which only battleship size ships can fit (Battleships, Marauders and Black Ops). Here are a few pertinent points:

• The spool up time is 12 seconds; this is reduced by 5% per level of the Micro Jump Drive Operation skill (which you need at level 1 to fit the module).
• The Capacitor Need is 786 and the reactivation delay time is 180 seconds.
• The jump distance is 100 kilometers, the ship will maintain direction and velocity.
• The module is affected by warp scrambling effects, but not warp disruption effects (including bubbles and interdictor effects).
• The fitting requirements are: Mid slot, 77 CPU, 1375 PG.
• On activation, the ship’s sig radius is increased 150%.

For the salvage drone, we will start with only a tech I version.

• Small, 5 drone bandwidth use.
• Speed 900 m/s.
• Base salvage chance is 3%. This is increase by 2% per level for the Salvage Drone Operation skill.
• Cycle time is 10 seconds; same as for the salvaging modules.
• When you deploy the drones, they go to idle mode, but you can activate them to start to automatically salvage wrecks. In this automated mode, they will only salvage your own and neutral wrecks, not wrecks belonging to other characters. You can manually order the drones to salvage wrecks belonging to other players, though.
• Salvage drones never loot, they only salvage. Also, there is no difference in the quality of the loot received – salvage drones can salvage the same items as the salvage modules, the only difference being that because of lower chance they are much worse at salvaging difficult wrecks (and are incapable of salvaging the most difficult Sleeper wrecks).

One final note is that we’re also making a small adjustment to the Noctis. We’re giving it a drone bay of 25m³. Initially, this was limited to salvage drones only, but we decided to remove that restriction, so you can now put any drone type in there.

Finally, we’re also tweaking a few of the Inferno modules. Notably:

• Ancillary Shield Boosters – we’re reducing the capacity by 30%, increasing the capacitor need by 40% and increased the duration of the X-Large ASB to 5 seconds from 4. We’ve tested several other changes, but feel this is enough at this stage. We want to be cautious in not nerfing them too much, but if further changes are needed we have another batch ready (this would make the ASBs use a small amount of cap even when fueled by a cap booster). But we don’t want to do that unless it is obviously needed.
• Reactive Armor Hardener – this module is basically doing what it’s supposed to do, but we wanted to give it a bit more oomph, so we’ve increased how much the resistances shift every cycle. It is now 6% instead of 3%. Also, the skill Armor Resistance Phasing now also reduces capacitor need of using a RAH.
• Target Spectrum Breaker – We’ve reduced the activation time to 8 seconds and reduced the scan resolution penalty to 25%.

Quick note, the drone damage amplifiers are also being adjusted (their damage bonus is increased), but this is the work of Team Game of Drones, so I’ll only mention it in passing here. Also, Team Five-0 is also adding meta-variations of the drone damage amplifiers (and other drone modules). Check out the Game of Drones dev blog here and here for more info.

That’s it for Team Super Friends. We hope you enjoy what is coming and have a happy Retribution.

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