I've always wanted to experience a new game that had a Player Bounty System.
There obviously needs to be some type of sanction in place in order to deter a max level player from hovering over a lowbie area like a lawn mower.
If a max level player continues to gank/grief lowbies, then that player should be placed on a Player Bounty Terminal. If you accept the mission and hunt/kill the target, then your target should drop all of his gear/gold.
Player Bounties would make this game shine.
EVE tried that. But all that ends up happening is, the dude uses a buddy or a second account to kill himself, collecting his own bounty.
I would love to see a system like this. Players would be able to roll up to a billboard (sorta like the guild board) and post a bounty by committing a certain gold amount (or even offering items). From there it would be like accepting a quest where the goal is the death of the target, once the goal is accomplished they would head back to the board and turn in the quest.
Now, this would turn into a race for the "bounty hunters" as the first one to turn in the completed quest would get the rewards and immediately fail the quest for the others who have accepted. This allows for others to take up the bounty and whoever manages to track down and take out the target first wins. This way you don't have someone take up the bounty, only to sit there and hold onto it in order to stall others from doing the job.
One can only dream. :P
This has been discussed many times before on the old forums and I am still a fan of the idea in theory. The problem come when you start to offer rewards for killing someone that people can start exploiting.
IE: I put up a bounty on xyz's head for griefing. Now xyz's friend takes the contract, xyz lets his friend kill him and xyz's friend gives the reward money to xyz.
Or worse if it is for some sort of point reward for gear.. Same thing on a larger scale.
In the first example if the contract was done anonymously so you dont get a tell from xyz gloating about how he now has your money too then I guess just having the satisfaction of his death maybe enough for some.
Also the reward would have to ABSOLUTELY need to come from palyers vs just generated from nothing or again would be exploited to death!
I would hate to see a system like this.
It would remove incentive to kill lowbies, sure.. but what if you didn't do so intentionally?
I can see reasoning for folks to pool money to kill a certain target, but no, just .. ew.
There really shouldn't be reason to kill lowbies anyways. If somebody is anyways, the resentment from the community enough through other characters would be sufficient to drive them out.
People should be interested in a challenge, not just slaughtering piglings.