[2020] Player Bounties & Killrights temporarily disabled

Intrepid Capsuleers,

With today’s release (13 October) we will be temporarily disabling both the player bounty and kill rights features on Tranquility. We are taking this action as part of an ongoing initiative at CCP into the exploration of server and client performance during large fleet fights. When these features are disabled for an extended amount of time, we will be able to take a different look at how both the server and client performs.

In regards to the performance load from these features, the primary load that comes from the player bounties is not the awarding of the bounties themselves but rather the client-side requests to know the bounty values placed on various characters. This is something that players may see during large fleet fights through “Outstanding calls”. This server-side load however does not manifest on the same process that is running the fleet fight, and in fact it is a process running on an entirely different machine and so does not directly contribute to the load on the process running the solar system simulation. Nevertheless we wish to do further analysis of server performance with these features disabled for the short term future.

Please note that this is a temporary action while we experiment and learn. We are currently aiming to have both features disabled for approximately one month until the next release in November, however we may choose to extend this duration if we require further analysis.

We have chosen this course of action based on yours and CSM’s feedback, and we will update this forum post when we have chosen a date to re-enable these two features.

Thank you.

FAQ

Does this affect NPC Bounties?

No, you will still receive bounty payouts from NPC kills as usual. The feature that is being temporarily disabled is the player-to-player bounties feature which only involves playable characters, corporations, and alliances.

Will I have any player bounty I have set on other capsuleers reimbursed?

We have chosen not to reimburse the money currently in the player bounty system at this time as this is a temporary measure and as such we are aiming to have this feature re-enabled in the near future.

Why are both features being disabled together?

The features are partially interconnected, with one way including when clients are requesting information from the server. Because of this we’ve chosen to disable both features together.

What happens to killrights while the feature is disabled?

You will be unable to earn killrights or activate/share them during this period when the feature is disabled. Killrights that were earned before today may or may not expire depending on when we re-enable these systems.

Can I have my money back from previously activating a killright?

No. This course of action of a temporary disabling of these features does not represent any outstanding issues with the features that would consider any reimbursement action.

Thanks goes to our development team and engineers internally who made it happen

If that does happen, I am sure we can think of an allternate actionto give some justice - again this is temporary - so no need to go full panic yet…

I didn’t argue that it was. But when part of the game that few people use is having a negative impact on a part of the game that a large number of people use, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Other than the fact that few people understand it or make use of it. My experience with it has largely been seeing people try to scam with it.

I was responding to someone who claimed that my stance on this issue would not be in line with my Alliance and my Corp. Context matters.

One of the primary things CCP has been working on for the last three years is fixing things that deter new players from continuing to play the game. The kill rights system isn’t well explained, it’s not something that’s gone over in the NPE (most PvP isn’t), and it negatively impacts new players more than anybody else.

When it comes to new players sticking with a game, yes - the slightest thing they don’t get can lead them to quit. This isn’t something that the vast majority of the players will miss and if it means a few new players won’t be annoyed by it for a few months, so be it.

Well, hey. I’ve only been playing this game for 14 years.

It didn’t go anywhere. They are just turning it off, but not doing anything with the isk for now.

This change has no effect on the Location Node in the EVE Cluster that is hosting the solarsystem in which the fleet fight is happening.

To explain in a bit more detail*: Thousands of EVE Clients connect to the EVE Proxy nodes and their calls get routed to the EVE Server. But the EVE Server is 280 nodes, each with their specific purpose. One such purpose is being a Location Node, which is a node hosting a solarsystem. Another such purpose is being a Cluster Singleton Node, which is a node hosting global / location-agnostic singleton services.

Fleet fights happen in solarsystems and are handled by a specific Location Node. In the case of large fleet fights then that solarsystem is solo on a node, but on average then for Empire there are 25 solarsystem per node, for Null it is 40 and for Wormholes it is 130.

Calls for Player Bounty information go from the EVE Client to the Cluster Singleton Node hosting the Player Bounty Service. They never arrive at or hop through the solarsystem’s Location Node.

*I’m leaving out a lot of specifics.

There’s no reason to do this.

You’re doing what that guy did and taking what I’m saying out of context. They didn’t turn the killrights system off for any reason other than they couldn’t turn the bounty system off without turning killrights off, too. The two systems are linked together. I personally don’t think the killright system is well explained and it’s something CCP should fix, which was the context of that conversation.

It’s the whole paying for/selling/activiating etc. that gets people confused. High sec PvP is littered with rules that apply nowhere else in EVE and don’t make any sense outside of high sec.

Most of PvP is poorly explained via the NPE, which is one of the reasons I’ve been suggesting there be more PvP focus in the NPE for a while.

As I already said, this isn’t why it was turned off.

Ok, boomer.

Yes, this is an assertion that we don’t need to nerf ganking anymore.

It is not true that this was not planned to be reversed. It was. The length of it was what was undetermined. But yes, when you see massive drops in player logins, that’s a good way to recognize that what you experimented with was a bad idea.

No, I’m voting for the NPE explaining more of this type of thing than it currently does. The rules don’t “perfectly” make sense, either. There are a bunch of rules, not all of them make sense together, and the side that knows the rules best are veterans, who also already have advantages in skillpoints, ships and fittings. This is one of the reasons why the game has such a steep learning curve.