What can you tell us about bounty hunting missions, e.g. using service beacons to place a bounty on a player who robbed you? What are our thoughts about the future of that system?
TL;DRAssassination contracts will likely come before bounties, since bounties need a more sophisticated criminal system and legal channels that don't exist yet, and either contract type would follow the target between servers.
So a couple of things there. One, bounties are certainly something that we have talked about. I think more likely in the nearer term, assassination is effectively the same thing. But the key thing about this is that with assassination, you have no guarantees about the ramifications of what you've requested. So if I ask you to kill somebody, and then you kill them, then if it was out in a place where you're going to get some criminal rating for it, you'll get the criminal rating and I'll get the criminal rating for it. So there's going to be repercussions for the actions. You could do it, but that doesn't mean there's not repercussions. Bounty, on the other hand, importantly, is going to be through the legal channels. And so therefore, it will allow us to say, okay, the UEE, somebody has mandated that this person has broken the law, and so therefore killing them is actually not only legal, but you'll get paid for it.
The best kind of legal.
Yes, the best kind of legal. I think they're both interesting and useful, but I think assassination will come first because it's less complicated.
I was just going to say, yeah, that's definitely the easier of the two, because the bounty system implies a certain sophistication of the criminal system that we don't currently have. As we evolve the criminal system and get more of those rules in place, then all of a sudden what you do that warrants a bounty will become more and more detailed and understood by the game, and that will allow us to then say, okay, well, yeah, this guy stole some goods, and I'm going to put a bounty on him for this, and there you go. And then guess what? Right now, we've got all of our different servers. We don't have the server mesh up and running, so when you leave server A and go to server B, that bounty or assassination contract is going to follow you wherever you go. I think that's going to be a really cool element to that kind of contract.