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The bounty board arguments. Sigh.
We've been around this particular block a thousand times. But here we go again!
Get rid of counter bounty, keep the rest and it would be much improved in my opinion.
If you are interested in defending your guild mate from aggression you still can. Your guild mate gets hit and puts up a bounty - your guild punishes the original hitter. The story ends. Punishment administered. The person who made the attack has to think again about hitting your guildmate.
Counter bounty messes with that picture. Now the person who made the original hit and gets bountied, has the option of re-bountying everyone who administered punishment to him. They can now be punished for defending their guildmate. Seems a bit perverse, but legal within current game mechanics.
To torture a metaphor used above, someone who speeds in their car (makes a hit) can't complain about being punished by getting a ticket from a cop (being bountied and hit back). But in the counter bounty world, the cop can then be ticketed by 5 other cops, for doing his job in handing out a ticket for speeding and each of those 5 cops could theoretically also be ticketed, in an endless loop of cops ticketing each other. Real world metaphors are generally to be avoided, but this time I indulge. In the game of course it does not go on forever but becomes a matter of attrition, who wants or is prepared to keep the counter bounty cycle going longest. So it is no longer about punishing the original offender, but about wining a war of attrition between groups on the BB. I believe that over the course of the game it has become obvious to most players which teams tend to win these wars of attrition most often, and have learned simply not to bother with the BB at all, as it does not serve the purpose they desire, of punishing the original hitter. This is why, in my opinion, the BB is dead. Players who do not want to spend time and stam pursuing conflict on the board have chosen to avoid it and use their time and stam elsewhere. Activity on the board is avoided, the board becomes less active precisely because of the dominance and success of some groups of players at consistently winning wars of CB attrition. There are details obviously, but that is the gist.
If you want to preserve that system, then I think it needs to be accepted that it will remain poorly utilised by the community as a whole.
The question for HCS is: does this cycle of activity help the game overall? From this update it seems they value the idea of activity of any kind over the current system which is largely dormant.
The OP system is again, simple and streamlined. Perhaps too much so. But time has already been spent building and coding it. That system has no apparent place for CB in it either, as the bountying mechanism is automated, and no hint is given that players can bounty anymore. So it follows that HCS are in that proposed system doing away with counter bounty. Perhaps rather than having the entire BB reworked and all aspects of player choice in it removed by the new proposals, CB could simply be dropped and all other aspects of the BB remain the same and see what happens?
So, would a small change within the current system not be better? Drop CB and see what happens to BB activity? If it remains underutilised CB could be brought back as its presence makes no difference. If activity increases, then the desire of HCS to see that aspect of the game utilsed more fully has been met. Punishment is administered to hitters. Guilds can still defend their own. Guild wars can still happen - as guilds can choose to hit each other and put up bounties, but they need not escalate from one isolated hit into a war via CB.
I know losing CB is very unpopular in certain quarters, and I accept that. But I feel that the continued presence of CB is a strong part of why the BB is not very active. Initially CB adds more PvP by increasing the number of targets, but if after a while people refuse to get drawn onto the BB (by hitting back) because of the risk of CB then overall PvP activity on the BB drops, as has been seen over the years. This does feel like a derailment of the thread, and I'm sorry about that. But as so much time has been spent already in this thread arguing over what is the satus quo on the BB now, I thought I'd add this.
