The Bounty Issue

jasonrohrer · 2014-04-14 09:58:26

Cullman has been doing some thinking and experimentation over the past few weeks, and it seems like bounties are a bit off in terms of what they're supposed to be measuring. This seems like it might be the last "free money" loophole in the game.

The first issue with bounties is that they are "sleeping money." No one in the game can see a huge bounty that has built up and is just waiting to drop (not even the person on which the bounty is riding). That bounty can rest forever on an account until the owner of that account decides to kill the character in someone else's house and drop the bounty there. When that happens, there can be a sudden, huge injection of money into the game. A low-level house can suddenly jump to the top of the list.

Obviously, someone wielding two accounts, one with a huge bounty riding, can wait for a great moment and dump that bounty into their other account. That money is hidden and protected from other players until they pull the trigger---this sets it apart from other dual-account money-building strategies, where the moneyball is always at risk of getting pinched by another player. If you're waiting to drop a bounty, you can wait out a chill or whatever else you need to wait out. There's no chance of another player stealing the pending bounty from you.

This is an unavoidable side-effect of bounties, and not something that should be corrected on its own. But, if bounties are "easy" to build up, their hidden nature makes them even more powerful.

They should NOT be easy to build up.

What bounties were supposed to represent was "good players." If you build a house that tricks someone who is rarely tricked, you should be rewarded with a big bounty. If you build a house that no one but a throw-away life will die in, you should get much less.

So, someone who has robbed a lot without dying is flagged as a "good player" who should be hard to kill. Of course, the current system doesn't determine how hard that string of successful robberies actually was. Hitting an empty house gives you just as much bounty as hitting the top house in the game. We currently count the number of successes and multiply it by a factor to compute the bounty.

But we could construct a better measure of what a "good player" is and only build up bounties on players that match the better, more strict measure.

Cullman was suggesting that it should be based on the amount of money stolen.... that's a start... but it won't help for the 2000 0 0 houses. Do enough of those, and you can still pump up your bounty without skill or risk. I mean, it could also be a formula where you do [(amountStolen - 2000) * factor], but that would eliminate bounties for "really hard houses" that have less than 2000 to steal. I mean, obviously if you break a 50K house, you should get a big bounty... well, unless it is a patsy house that just had money dumped into it. So, value stolen really isn't a good measure.

What about "number of people who died before you got through?" Is that a better measure of skill? So, for a "bait" house that only had 10 people try before 50K was dumped and then stolen, it wouldn't result in a huge bounty (even though 50K was stolen), because it wasn't actually a hard/tricky house.

So, with this system, you'd gain bounty for "tricking people who have not been tricked by other tricky houses." Well, that's what we'd be trying to approximate.

Something like: new_bounty = old_bounty + [number who died before you] * factor

That means that if you rob a house with 0 deaths, you'll get 0 added bounty for it, not matter how much you steal.

And the only way to "fake" a high bounty is to have a bunch of alt accounts go and die in the house first, which seems like it wouldn't be practical. With one alt, chills will only allow you to do this once every 24 hours.

The other issue is bounty for murders, which is thematically nice, but a real mess gameplay-wise. Yeah, we can measure how hard the vault was to reach (how many people died), and maybe how hard the wife was to reach (also how many people died trying before you killed her---but you can't really measure that, because it's mucked together with vault-reach deaths). But there's usually not gameplay motivation for killing kids... maybe no bounty for killing kids? That just seems thematically weird. Maybe no bounty for killing at all?

Thoughts on this? Am I missing something here? Will making "people who died before you got through" the bounty factor fix this?

(Also, there are still other things that can be done with two accounts, like sharing risk and information, that will never be fixed.... the money holes are the big problems).

Blip · 2014-04-14 10:06:15

I think that would work. Another idea that I considered is having the bounty of a player who dies based on their wealth at the time they die. i.e. the bounty on a player would be [wealth-2000]/factor. This would also fix the "bounty for family" thing - as killing and robbing wouldn't affect bounty.

Anyways, I think we can all see that the bounty system is a mess, but it seems very hard to fix without possibly messing with the cash balance in the game, which is already pretty delicate.

tigey101 · 2014-04-14 10:12:01

I think another factor for bounties should be the money spent building the house.

StefanLindskog · 2014-04-14 10:14:23

jasonrohrer wrote:

Thoughts on this? Am I missing something here? Will making "people who died before you got through" the bounty factor fix this?

I like your solution the best. It would reward good robbers and few others. I'm also for zero bounty increase for killing family members. Then they would only get offed if they have money, pose a threat in some way - or meet a sadistic robber. Come to think of it, the wife may need a scalable bounty boost as well - maybe tied to how leathal she has been (as a measure of how smart the robber was to off her).

Leveling the field on bounties will affect the game in a big way, positively. Looking forward to this.

cullman · 2014-04-14 10:45:36

I like your idea Jason, it's much better than just a percentage of money/tools stolen. Here's what I would suggest you do about bounties on family members. I get that it doesn't really totally track with the game world that killing a child wouldn't generate bounty, however, in terms of pure game play mechanics, children are really not much more critical than a cat, except when used to jam a wife up behind the door. What if you only gave a bounty on the wife, that is based on money taken from the wife * factor of how many people that particular wife has killed. Basically, the same proposal as the vault but applied to the wife. Children can be killed bounty free (I mean after all you, can always make more, that would be kinda funny if that was true in the game as well, man, sometimes just talking about this game makes me sound like the darkest of souls).

iceman · 2014-04-14 10:54:11

One major, major problem I see with this.

Patrick Victor Connell

Right now he's at 1029 deaths in his house- robbing him (which costs 4 meats) is going to give you around a 100k bounty, assuming it's $100 per kill. Obviously, that's quite a bit nicer for dual accounters than now

It's hard to think of a system that *doesn't* reward you by a skewed amount for robbing a broken house. Basing the bounty partly on the cost of the house won't work, because broken houses are still worth quite a bit, normally. Basing it partly on the money stolen has the same problem in your post: there isn't a way to tell the difference between a really hard (yet poor) house, a normal poor house, and a broken house, and reward the user accordingly.

I think having bounty partly based on how much money the robber had when he died is a good idea. I think a better formula would be to have a max based on how much his house is worth. That way, if you want to transfer $2k in tools to your main, you aren't going to get a bounty, since there's going to be nothing in the house. So, max(house value/factor, wealth/factor) or something.

I thing the best system is going to have several factors- base it on wealth to reward you for killing robbers with something to lose(Blip's idea), on how many kills previous houses that they've robbed have (Jason's idea), and on how much money they've stolen from previous houses. Or something similar.

Last edited by iceman (2014-04-14 10:58:00)

StefanLindskog · 2014-04-14 10:58:31

iceman wrote:

It's hard to think of a system that *doesn't* reward you by a skewed amount for robbing a broken house.

Possible solution: The state reposess broken houses after a predefined time without logins to the owner account. I haven't thought of possible ramifications, but it's an idea.

cullman · 2014-04-14 11:03:10

StefanLindskog wrote:

iceman wrote:
It's hard to think of a system that *doesn't* reward you by a skewed amount for robbing a broken house.
Possible solution: The state reposess broken houses after a predefined time without logins to the owner account. I haven't thought of possible ramifications, but it's an idea.

I like this idea. If someone is away from a house for a week or something it should probably just get repossessed by the city. Maybe the server sends you a warning 48 hours in advance.

Last edited by cullman (2014-04-14 11:10:46)

MMaster · 2014-04-14 11:04:50

iceman wrote:

One major, major problem I see with this.
Patrick Victor Connell
Right now he's at 1029 deaths in his house- robbing him (which costs 4 meats) is going to give you around a 100k bounty, assuming it's $100 per kill. Obviously, that's quite a bit nicer for dual accounters than now

How about you take number of successful robberies into account?

Something like new_bounty = old_bounty + [number who died before you / (number of times vault was robbed+1)] * factor

EDIT: Or if the vault was already robbed (the house is broken) there is no reason for you to get any bounty for robbing it as the "fame" already went to the first robber.

Last edited by MMaster (2014-04-14 11:15:16)

jasonrohrer · 2014-04-14 11:21:15

Yeah, so someone with an alt account would "waste" a lot of tools robbing a not-broken house because there are a lot of deaths built up there, to nab the bounty and dump it into the main account?

I wasn't saying +$100 per death on the house on the head of whoever gets through. Right now, hitting a vault increments your bounty by $500 no matter what. In the new system, the average should be about the same... you know, so maybe it's $5 per person who died before you. So by breaching a 1-death house, your bounty would go up by $5.... a 1000-death house would make the bounty go up by $5000.

Wait... so... what if I build up a lot of deaths in my house.... then that house because valuable to me to use with alt accounts, right? I can leave the house sitting there, and never fix it to clear the deaths. Then have one alt dump a $100 tool in there (so that the vault is robbable again). Then rob the house with the second alt to put a huge bounty on the second alt. Then have that second alt die to dump the bounty wherever I want. I can wait until tomorrow and do it again.

So... maybe it needs to be "number of people who died in the house since the last bounty was placed?" You know, so each time the vault is hit, the "bounty to be added" goes back to 0. Reaching the vault gives you whatever bounty increment is waiting there and then resets it back to 0 until more people die in there.

Maybe "money you had at home when you died" is a good way to measure it.... a good measure of "killing a good player." But it would also be rewarded for killing a good house-builder (I want it to measure good robbers, mostly, to fit with the thematics of a bounty---built up for crimes committed). Still, money at home can't be easily manipulated, and it's thrown away when you die, so you'd have to burn money to inflate a bounty (might as well direct transfer it instead, if that's what you're trying to do, right?). What if bounty is 40% of the value you have at home when you die? Then, if you're trying to exploit bounties with alt accounts, what you'll make will be less than just buying tools and dumping them in your main account.

Still, I'm not sure about this.... would be better to find a good measure of a "skilled robber somehow.... hmm... maybe when a robber dies in the house, the home-owner gets a bounty payment (as usual) AND the bounty-increment of the house is ticked up too. So if a bunch of "good robbers" die in that house, you must be a really good robber to get through, so a huge bounty should go on your head. If a bunch of bad robbers died there, it's not such an accomplishment to finally rob it, so very little bounty is put on your head for succeeding. It's like, robbing Fort Knox gets you a huge bounty (so many of the brightest minds have tried and failed)...

ANYWAY... just to get the ball rolling, I've turned off bounty increments for murders.

I agree about counting the number of people the wife has killed... that may work its way in there too at some point...

iceman · 2014-04-14 11:24:50

StefanLindskog wrote:

iceman wrote:
It's hard to think of a system that *doesn't* reward you by a skewed amount for robbing a broken house.
Possible solution: The state repossess broken houses after a predefined time without logins to the owner account. I haven't thought of possible ramifications, but it's an idea.

I like that- if a house has been robbed, and the owner hasn't logged in/self-tested in, say, 72 hours, his house is taken off the list, even if his wife is still alive. When he logs back on/self tests, his house goes back up.

It would definitely have to be self-tests, or else a patient robber could make a Connell-house with an alt, being sure to log in every day to keep the house up, and just keep robbing the house as the kills go slowly up. Self-testing would reset the kill count, meaning that wouldn't be feasible.

MMaster wrote:

How about you take number of successful robberies into account?
Something like new_bounty = old_bounty + [number who died before you / (number of times vault was robbed+1)] * factor

Ooooh, good idea!

So, here's possible equation for my system:
1. "Wanted" Level (measure of how successful a robber has been)
W = W + (house_deaths)*factor/(# times house was successfully robbed + 1)

2. Bounty Payout (what's actually payed to the owner)
B = W*max(robber's house value, robber's wealth (including robbery tools))*factor + W/factor

The combination of the two would reward you most for killing a good robber who has lots to lose. If, say, they're a really good robber (high "Wanted" level), but were just robbed (and don't have much to lose), the first part of B will give $0, but the second part will still give you money. So, you get rewarded for killing them, but not as much.

MMaster · 2014-04-14 11:42:17

jasonrohrer wrote:

So... maybe it needs to be "number of people who died in the house since the last bounty was placed?" You know, so each time the vault is hit, the "bounty to be added" goes back to 0. Reaching the vault gives you whatever bounty increment is waiting there and then resets it back to 0 until more people die in there.

I think this would work well.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Still, I'm not sure about this.... would be better to find a good measure of a "skilled robber somehow.... hmm... maybe when a robber dies in the house, the home-owner gets a bounty payment (as usual) AND the bounty-increment of the house is ticked up too. So if a bunch of "good robbers" die in that house, you must be a really good robber to get through, so a huge bounty should go on your head. If a bunch of bad robbers died there, it's not such an accomplishment to finally rob it, so very little bounty is put on your head for succeeding. It's like, robbing Fort Knox gets you a huge bounty (so many of the brightest minds have tried and failed)...

I think this is really good idea, but what if someone changes single thing in their house which resets counters? The good house will suddenly have bounty-increment like starter house. I can't think of a way how to abuse it. Does it make your house less attractive to robbers?
EDIT: Probably not. Robbers don't care about the bounty unless they have second account. So it would make it less attractive to dual account robbers which is a good thing

jasonrohrer wrote:

ANYWAY... just to get the ball rolling, I've turned off bounty increments for murders.
I agree about counting the number of people the wife has killed... that may work its way in there too at some point...

Maybe it would be possible to limit it on robbers side so he will get less and less bounty increment the more family he kills? For example he will get 200 for first killed wife, 100 for second, 50 for third .. etc. That will give hard limit on how much bounty you can get for family killing, but each kill would still give some bounty.

Last edited by MMaster (2014-04-14 12:05:17)

TheRealCheese · 2014-04-14 11:53:44

Shouldn't it be the true killcount of the house and not the visible one setting bounty value?

MMaster · 2014-04-14 11:56:46

TheRealCheese wrote:

Shouldn't it be the true killcount of the house and not the visible one setting bounty value?

That would make it possible to just move the vault in front of welcome mat in your killer house with lots of deaths and rob it with second account immediately after that and just move the vault back.

jasonrohrer · 2014-04-14 12:05:20

Hmm... or just "your bounty goes up by $X one time if you're a murderer"... but for now, this brutal game world doesn't care about murders.

I'm not so worried about bounty increments being lost when a house is fixed up by the owner. The people mainly concerned with bounties should not be the robbers looking at a house, but the owner looking at tapes. "Oh, my house is killing a lot of top robbers and getting me some huge bounty payments."

"Bounty" should never enter into a robber's decision to rob a given house (a robber having a huge bounty on his head is of no concern to the robber, really.... [except in a world with dual accounts]).

It could be as simple as this:

A robber with bounty B comes into a house and dies.

The owner of the house (the vault) gets a bounty payment of $B.

The "pending bounty increment" on the house, P, gets +B.

A bunch of robbers come through and die, and they have bounties on their heads of b1, b2, b3, etc.

The owner receives a total of $B + $b1 + $b2 + $b3 etc.

The pending bounty increment is raised by B + b1 + b2 + b3 etc. Call this P.

FINALLY, a robber gets through to the vault. That robber's bounty is increased by P, and the house's P goes back to $0.

Wherever that robber finally dies, the owner will get $P, and the bounty increment on that house will go up by P.

Obviously, there is a huge snowball effect here, so that won't work.

I think there needs to be a fraction factor, like q = 0.5, that is multiplied in.

P = q *( B + b1 + b2 + b3 )

So, while the owner gets the full bounty payment for each death, the house's pending bounty increment P only goes up by a fraction of that.

As the pending increment P is passed from house to house by a robber gaining it through success and then dropping it through death, it will shrink down to nothing. But the primary effects, at the first step in the chain, can be quite large. Thus, a huge reward for "killing a very smart robber," but less of a reward for "killing a robber who was successful immediately after that very smart robber died".

MMaster · 2014-04-14 12:15:44

jasonrohrer wrote:

I think there needs to be a fraction factor, like q = 0.5, that is multiplied in.
P = q *( B + b1 + b2 + b3 )
So, while the owner gets the full bounty payment for each death, the house's pending bounty increment P only goes up by a fraction of that.
As the pending increment P is passed from house to house by a robber gaining it through success and then dropping it through death, it will shrink down to nothing. But the primary effects, at the first step in the chain, can be quite large. Thus, a huge reward for "killing a very smart robber," but less of a reward for "killing a robber who was successful immediately after that very smart robber died".

This is exactly how I imagined it when you first wrote it. It would work really well even for broken houses that have 1000s of deaths.

42dustman · 2014-04-14 12:43:01

How about $100 bounty for everyone regardless of how good they were? How about changing the reward for killing skilled burglars into something that ain't money; something that's meaningful, but not of any advantage for anyone to accumulate?

xandalis · 2014-04-14 13:21:36

Since this seems to stem from the dual-account issue, here's a thought that's been bounced around before, but slightly tweaked: If possible, enable that IP-based chills/ignore on houses sharing the same IP, but only when more than one account is logged in. Going with the hypothetical players sharing one IP, their houses would be obscured from each other only while they were logged in at the same time. As soon as it goes down to one login from a given IP, they become visible to each other again. No, I don't imagine this would entirely prevent the problems that're driving the issue. But, given some of the gripe seems to be about lack of risk, it would drive the risk up when the logins are all from one player. Sure, they could still log out and back in with an alt account to do whatever it was they would've done before for wealth transfers directly between accounts. But then there would be a window of time (probably small in most cases admittedly) where a multi-account user would have to log out of one client, start the other up, and get back into the game. During that time, all other houses linked to that IP would be vulnerable and un-tended. If they complete the first step of a transfer, oh look, they have to log back into the account that just received the tools/cash. This would also eliminate house-sitting with an alt on the welcome mat.

No idea how hard any of that would be to implement though. Nor do I see it eliminating the other part of the gripe: your own house being used for someone else's wealth transfer. However with all the other things factored in (chills/force ignore), I do think it would add another obstacle/frequency reducer, making it harder to exploit.

But for the record, I'm not fond of changes to the bounty system. I thought the idea was to make it harder for dual-account exploiting to occur, not harder on everyone else as well.

edit: The broken house thing however, might have a "just waiting for the extra line(s) of code" fix: after a robbery/murder in a house, have the headless client compare the current house-state to the self-test (save the last self-test results for this check). If the current state has obstructions (dogs out of place, etc) that now require tools in order to reach the vault, the server could then pull the house off the list until it has a new and valid self-test.

Last edited by xandalis (2014-04-14 13:26:19)

cullman · 2014-04-14 13:29:04

xandalis wrote:

Since this seems to stem from the dual-account issue, here's a thought that's been bounced around before, but slightly tweaked: If possible, enable that IP-based chills/ignore on houses sharing the same IP, but only when more than one account is logged in. Going with the hypothetical players sharing one IP, their houses would be obscured from each other only while they were logged in at the same time. As soon as it goes down to one login from a given IP, they become visible to each other again. No, I don't imagine this would entirely prevent the problems that're driving the issue. But, given some of the gripe seems to be about lack of risk, it would drive the risk up when the logins are all from one player. Sure, they could still log out and back in with an alt account to do whatever it was they would've done before for wealth transfers directly between accounts. But then there would be a window of time (probably small in most cases admittedly) where a multi-account user would have to log out of one client, start the other up, and get back into the game. During that time, all other houses linked to that IP would be vulnerable and un-tended. If they complete the first step of a transfer, oh look, they have to log back into the account that just received the tools/cash. This would also eliminate house-sitting with an alt on the welcome mat.
No idea how hard any of that would be to implement though. Nor do I see it eliminating the other part of the gripe: your own house being used for someone else's wealth transfer. However with all the other things factored in (chills/force ignore), I do think it would add another obstacle/frequency reducer, making it harder to exploit.
But for the record, I'm not fond of changes to the bounty system. I thought the idea was to make it harder for dual-account exploiting to occur, not harder on everyone else as well.
edit: The broken house thing however, might have a "just waiting for the extra line(s) of code" fix: after a robbery/murder in a house, have the headless client compare the current house-state to the self-test (save the last self-test results for this check). If the current state has obstructions (dogs out of place, etc) that now require tools in order to reach the vault, the server could then pull the house off the list until it has a new and valid self-test.

The IP address thing won't work though it may slow people down. Too easy to change IP addresses, there is a similar solution that is much stronger, but I don't want to share it publicly. I can give it to Jason via email if he wants it.

Cylence · 2014-04-14 13:42:14

Robber skill is based on house difficulty. A difficult house is a house that has something that is worth being stolen and has had its defenses tested. Houses that don't attract attention (low value or painting less) have less testing of its defenses. It's when you've got a high house value or a high painting count that people want to get in and actually prove the houses difficulty. The difficulty of a house is only apparent after time.

Below is the formula trying to match my thoughts above.

Bounty Addition (B) is unique for each house.
B starts at $0.
B is awarded (added to the thief's bounty) upon theft or murder.
B is reset to $0 upon theft or murder.
B only increases when a house is in an Undamaged State (US).
US = 1 (true) after a self test.
US = 0 (false) after a theft or murder.
B Increases (BI) every Time Interval (TI) while in an Undamaged State (US).
For every TI, if US == 1 then B = B + BI
BI = ((X * number of paintings) + house listing value) * Y
X is the perceived value of a painting. Could be constant or based on how many are available in the auction house (more valuable when less paintings available).
Y should be a percentage of the total value that we want to add to the bounty
B should have a max limit (BX) (anything unbounded is dangerous).

TLDR: The longer a house holds valuable stuff without a murder or theft, the higher the bounty it will award to the the criminal who would commit murder or theft in this house. (Edits allowed)

Jason, you can plug in numbers to fit the bounty economy however you want.
This should address the goal in measuring "skill" or "house difficulty" while mitigating abuse since it is based on time. It also isn't based on edits or non edits since a well defended house can be one that is edited often to stop thieves. The fact that it only increases after a self test and before a robbery or theft means broken houses won't add bounty. Low value houses have to be around for a really really long time for them to add significant amounts to a bounty.

Additional thoughts.
1. Bounties on robbers should have a max limit as well.
2. It would be nice to have a 3 minute window where you are not on the listing after each visit. Any number of accounts can't lock you out for more than (20 mins) if you sat by and tried to get back in. Right now, you have to get lucky if two people are battling to get in your house. This may punish scouting and returning with tools during the 5 min start window but shouldn't be too bad. Welkin spoke of his frustration of not being able to enter his own house (he also had frustration on not being able to trace his attacker).

iceman · 2014-04-14 13:46:00

Xandalis, I don't think the proposed bounty changes will make it harder to play. Ideally (to me, at least), you'd still get around $100 for killing a starter account. After that, robbing "easy" houses (i.e., those that dual accounters can use to transfer money & build a bounty) gives very little increase in bounty, while robbing harder/trickier houses will give you much higher bounty increases than currently.

Jason: What do you think about my idea for basing the payout on both how good the robber is, and how much they have to lose? Obviously, the implementation for how you calculate then could be different than what I said, but it would be cool to reward you more for killing an established homeowner (who's going to be playing *very* carefully) than for killing one who was just robbed clean(and who will be robbing less carefully, and with very little tools) or a chain robber (who doesn't have a house he invested time in).

pagedMov · 2014-04-14 14:03:00

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yeah, so someone with an alt account would "waste" a lot of tools robbing a not-broken house because there are a lot of deaths built up there, to nab the bounty and dump it into the main account?
I wasn't saying +$100 per death on the house on the head of whoever gets through. Right now, hitting a vault increments your bounty by $500 no matter what. In the new system, the average should be about the same... you know, so maybe it's $5 per person who died before you. So by breaching a 1-death house, your bounty would go up by $5.... a 1000-death house would make the bounty go up by $5000.
Wait... so... what if I build up a lot of deaths in my house.... then that house because valuable to me to use with alt accounts, right? I can leave the house sitting there, and never fix it to clear the deaths. Then have one alt dump a $100 tool in there (so that the vault is robbable again). Then rob the house with the second alt to put a huge bounty on the second alt. Then have that second alt die to dump the bounty wherever I want. I can wait until tomorrow and do it again.
So... maybe it needs to be "number of people who died in the house since the last bounty was placed?" You know, so each time the vault is hit, the "bounty to be added" goes back to 0. Reaching the vault gives you whatever bounty increment is waiting there and then resets it back to 0 until more people die in there.
Maybe "money you had at home when you died" is a good way to measure it.... a good measure of "killing a good player." But it would also be rewarded for killing a good house-builder (I want it to measure good robbers, mostly, to fit with the thematics of a bounty---built up for crimes committed). Still, money at home can't be easily manipulated, and it's thrown away when you die, so you'd have to burn money to inflate a bounty (might as well direct transfer it instead, if that's what you're trying to do, right?). What if bounty is 40% of the value you have at home when you die? Then, if you're trying to exploit bounties with alt accounts, what you'll make will be less than just buying tools and dumping them in your main account.
Still, I'm not sure about this.... would be better to find a good measure of a "skilled robber somehow.... hmm... maybe when a robber dies in the house, the home-owner gets a bounty payment (as usual) AND the bounty-increment of the house is ticked up too. So if a bunch of "good robbers" die in that house, you must be a really good robber to get through, so a huge bounty should go on your head. If a bunch of bad robbers died there, it's not such an accomplishment to finally rob it, so very little bounty is put on your head for succeeding. It's like, robbing Fort Knox gets you a huge bounty (so many of the brightest minds have tried and failed)...
ANYWAY... just to get the ball rolling, I've turned off bounty increments for murders.
I agree about counting the number of people the wife has killed... that may work its way in there too at some point...

I've been thinking.. Maybe based on the value of all of the tiles in the house robbed, it would increase your bounty based on that. That would make $2000 0 0 houses be worthless for bounty boosting, and low level house worth a little bit, and high level houses increase your bounty a lot. And perhaps, if a house has been sitting for long enough (maybe 1-2 months, 3-4 weeks?) or after a certain number of attempts/deaths it would disappear off the house list? Like, be reclaimed by the state because it was abandoned. This way, people like Glenn Christopher Grant don't boost people's bounty to infinity and beyond for little to no effort.

Last edited by pagedMov (2014-04-14 14:08:34)

iceman · 2014-04-14 14:05:59

pagedMov wrote:

I've been thinking.. Maybe based on the value of all of the tiles in the house robbed, it would increase your bounty based on that. That would make $2000 0 0 houses be worthless for bounty boosting, and low level house worth a little bit, and high level houses increase your bounty a lot.

The problem with that is that then broken houses, like Connell's, would then give people *huge* bounties to potentially exploit.

pagedMov · 2014-04-14 14:06:43

iceman wrote:

pagedMov wrote:
I've been thinking.. Maybe based on the value of all of the tiles in the house robbed, it would increase your bounty based on that. That would make $2000 0 0 houses be worthless for bounty boosting, and low level house worth a little bit, and high level houses increase your bounty a lot.
The problem with that is that then broken houses, like Connell's, would then give people *huge* bounties to potentially exploit.

Just edited post :3

iceman · 2014-04-14 14:17:07

Yeah, Stefan and MMaster had the ideas of removing the house after a certain amount of time and reducing the bounty based on how many successful robberies there have been (respectively )

I still really, really like Jason's idea for calculating "skill"- your bounty increases by a fraction of how much bounty money has been payed to the vault last. That means that broken houses don't build up large "bounty values", and robbing a house that has killed the best robbers in the game will give you a bigger bounty than robbing a uninspired turtle that cost the same amount of money.

Last edited by iceman (2014-04-14 14:17:48)

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