When a player initiates combat with another player they have a bounty/target poster of, the duration of the combat tag for both sides should be increased heavily, a rough idea being 3-5 minutes. This would of course go away/get reduced to a maximum of about 10-20 seconds after the battle is completed.
Additionally, if this combat tag ends without one player killing the other, the player that wasn’t the first person to attack the other should lose a smaller portion of their renown than getting hunted/assassinated, perhaps around 20%-50% of what they would lose.
The aggressor shouldn’t gain anything because this would encourage hunting someone, hitting them once, and then running away.
Reasoning
Anyone that’s bounty hunted players, especially the ones on the leaderboards, knows that most people are complete cowards and will never fight fair when they know they’re being hunted.
The short duration of combat tags makes it extremely easy for someone who doesn’t want to lose renown to simply run away until they can safely leave.
Almost every person that will run from a fight like this will also usually have a ketch with maxed out speed and long ranged cannons. If you have a slower ship than them, it’s a death wish to follow them. They’ll sink your ship and hit you once right before you drown. If this is implemented, all you have to do is not follow them and it’s their decision to lose their renown or not.
This doesn’t make it “unwinnable” for the victim, since if they fight someone normally there’s a fair chance of winning or losing.
Honestly I approve of this, but for the love of god make it less for NPCs, or when NPCs die your out of combat. I hate being tagged by a random pirate ship shooting me with a single light ball in a drive-by cannoning when im about to log off and I have to wait 5 minutes so I can finally log off.
I specified in the text that this only happens with players. Also, pirates on the ocean aren’t even bounty hunting targets. This suggestion is specifically for the bounty hunting or assassination of players.
I know, but I just dont like the current state of combat tagging in general. For players its too short (like you said), and for NPC vs Players its a bit too long (like I said). I just think Vex could do a general fix where Player combat time is increased but NPC combat time is decreased, since NPCs are easier to fight/worth less than fighting against players.
Plus, if your combat logging against NPCs then your built goofy.
The already in-game combat timer for npcs is fairly short so there doesn’t need to be a change for it. This suggestion is about TWO players, both the hunter and the victim are players
Strong suggestion with one bad caveat. The defender would easily lose renown to bounty hunters who would troll them by hitting them, and then running away repeatedly.
I can’t edit the post annoyingly enough, but that does bring up a good point.
This loss of renown from choosing to run away should have a cooldown. Maybe another 5 minutes like the cooldown on hunting players? Though I think it would be more reasonable to do it even higher, anywhere between 10-30 minutes.
This cooldown would only affect the two players involved, specifically if they interacted a second time within said cooldown.
With this higher cooldown, the renown loss for not finishing the fight should definitely be as harsh as 50% or slightly more of what they would’ve lost by being hunted, so there’s valid reason for the defender to actually fight.
If this cooldown would be as long as say, 24 hours, it might even be justified to make the defender lose 100% of what they would’ve lost normally.
In the event that it would be 24 hours, it should affect any players that attacked either combatant during the extended combat tag, to prevent people bypassing the cooldown by simply having more people. This would come into effect at the end of the hunter and victim’s combat tag.
These “bystanders” (for lack of better word) should both be unable to have their renown lowered by the aggressor and be unable to lower the renown of the defender through this method, with the same 24 hour cooldown.
Another idea that popped into my head, perhaps everyone in the server can can be marked for 1-2 hours, and can’t have it happen from anyone new that joins in the current server, to prevent witch hunting and people just waiting until the victim loses their renown to join.
This whole idea is becoming more complicated and just might be too complex to implement, so I think I’m going to make a separate suggestion with an alternative to this.
This is really good. It gives me an idea of having some NPCs (petty thieves) run away from you instead of attacking or firing smoke arrows or something and running away. Though I’m pretty sure that was in WoM , and Vetex probably removed it for a reason.
