• Gman5280 recently posted an interesting new idea for bot attrition. I’ve been working the following idea for a while but it could certainly complement the attrition idea.
• Qonqr has made a number of improvements over the years, but most of the major changes in recent years have been focused on Atlantis format, rules, and prizes changes. The last significant change to the regular game was Missile Monday/extended missile range and prior to that the advent of missions.
• Among the stated goals of the game developer (Silver) are: finding ways to overcome locked down areas in the game to enable new players, and enabling mechanisms for established players to support new players and show them the positive aspects of the game community. Among the unstated goals, but nonetheless obvious, are the inclusion of additional premium currency spending opportunities that should tend to increase overall revenues. A goal taught to me by my faction is to increase opportunities for team play.
• I’d like to share an idea that I believe aligns with all of the above goals and that would add a new gameplay wrinkle to reinvigorate players from novice to veteran. I call it zone bounties.
• The basic idea is that zones could carry a “bounty” or reward of some amount of cubes. This bounty would be contributed by any players who are willing and would be earned by the player who captures the bounty zone.
• I’ve posted this idea in some Legion and multi-faction chat rooms. I’ve received feedback both critical and otherwise that has helped to build a better concept.
• The Zones: target zones for a bounty should probably be above some threshold (recommend >1 million bots from the leading faction) such that bounty is never used against new players.
• Bounty limits: to avoid undue influence of ‘whales’ there should be individual bounty contribution limits per zone. Suggestion is for zone size 1M - 4.99M = 5 cubes/player/zone; 5M - 9.99M = 10 cubes/player/zone; every 5M bot increment thereafter the individual player bounty limit should increase by 5 cubes. But key to this idea would be that there is no total limit to the size of the bounty, meaning if enough players collectively decided to contribute it could become very lucrative and well worth the required effort to take down even quite large zones.
• Another, perhaps obvious, use of bounties could be to support new players. For example veteran players might all contribute to a bounty on a zone in local range for some new player to encourage her or him to keep at it, and reap the reward for being persistent and persevering. In addition to that important lesson the player can use the reward to progress with scope upgrades and continue to engage with the game.
• One aspect of bounties could be that a player who is confident in their ability to retain their zone might put a bounty on their own zone just as a means of kind of saying to their opponents “u can’t touch this”. The possibilities could be quite interesting.
• Ideally there would be an easy way to see bounty zones. Maybe zone bounties could have a type of leaderboard except where the zones are sorted from largest to smallest bounty size. It might also be fun to track players who have won the most cubes from bounties. This could be a leaderboard and/or even new medals for players. The daily zone updates file provided by Silver could have a column added for zone bounty amount.
• It was pointed out that giving the entire bounty to the single player who caps the zone could be a little unfair. While potentially true this also reflects real world bounties where the hunter who brings it in gets paid. More importantly I believe this makes the implementation much easier, for there is (almost) always a zone cap assigned when zones change factions. For instances where zone cap is assigned to none (such as when the third faction causes the second to cap by killing bots of the lead faction) I would suggest that the bounty could go toward a reward for the winning faction in the next Atlantis.
• In summary I think that zone bounties have the potential to make an improvement to the game that could align well with its goals including to help strengthen and grow the community. To do this while adding fun new elements, potentially growing new revenue streams, and incentivizing more gameplay seems to me to be a WIN-WIN-WIN scenario.

I like the idea. However I doubt anyone would actually bounty their own zone. Just look at tunnels for evidence of how often people are willing to be a target.

I also fear how this might be abused by multiscopers. Those with ten or more accounts would be able to raise a large bounty on their own and could potentially use this to bring in even more support against a player with just one account. I would recommend to not allow the bounty to be paid out to people who are sync locked.

As an alternate way to prevent bounties to be placed on new players I would let bounties be available regardless of size unless there is a new player (less than 60 days old) active in the zone. I would use use this as a way to entice people to attack and clear out the smaller zones of retired bots around the place. There are plenty of accounts on the NY lb that have little to no zones over 1m. Like me. This would make the tool more flexible while still being protective of new players. Can also use sync lock mechanics to keep multiscopers from abusing that part as well.