🔪 A Real Justice System: Crime, Consequences & Bounty Hunting—Now with Real Numbers

[WeAreAllMortal]

✔ Persistent Criminal Consequences​

Criminals can currently just “wait out” their status with short cooldowns. That’s not punishment—it’s a minor inconvenience.

A proper system needs memory:

• Grey Acts: 24-hour cooldown (online time only).
• Red Acts: 1-week cooldown (online time only).

This ensures consequences last long enough for law enforcement, restitution, and punishment to occur.

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✔ Better Crime & Punishment Tracking​

The current system doesn’t distinguish between different crimes. We need a system that:

• Logs offenses properly.
• Enforces scaled consequences.

✔ Bounty Hunting System (Proper Overhaul)​

The current bounty system is too restrictive and ineffective. A proper bounty system must:

Bounties That Stick​

✔ Bounties remain indefinitely active once issued—even if the criminal serves jail time or waits out their murder count cooldown.

✔ Multiple bounty hunters can pursue the same target independently—not just an “associate” mechanic where only one hunter is assigned at a time.

✔ Any player can take on multiple bounties simultaneously.

• This allows bounty hunters to track and engage several criminals at once.
• Encourages group bounty hunts, where teams of hunters actively track and engage groups of criminals, each with a whole stack of bounties in their packs.
• If a hunter group encounters a gang of criminals, they may collect multiple bounties in a single fight.

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Bounty Rewards: Fair & Exploit-Proof​

✔ Bounty rewards are split among all contributing hunters.

• The reward is distributed proportionally among those who:
  • Deal damage to the criminal.
  • Heal bounty hunters engaged in combat.
• This prevents kill-stealing and ensures group efforts are fairly rewarded.

✔ Restitution-based payment – The bounty fee is not system-generated, preventing exploits. Instead:

1. Captured criminals pay the bounty from their own pockets via voluntary payment.
2. If the criminal has no gold, they work it off in the penal colony.
3. Bounty hunter(s) are paid from the same farmed resources as the restitution system (e.g., ores, wood, ingots).

✔ Bounties persist until completed or manually revoked by the issuer.

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Hard-Core Punishment for a Hard-Core Game™​

You wanted a brutal, merciless sandbox? Well, here it is. Actions have consequences, and criminals will pay the price—literally.

Gold Payment on Capture – Justice Scales with Crime​

Crime Type	Gold Payment Per Offense	Notes
Murder (MC)	10g per murder	Think before you swing that sword.
Grey Actions (e.g., theft, looting blues, attacking blues without kill)	1g per offense	Petty crimes? Petty payments. They still add up.
Total Bounty	(10g × MCs) + (1g × Grey Crimes)	Criminal life comes at a cost.

✔ The more you screw around, the more you find out.

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Welcome to the True Hard-Core Experience​

✔ Live by the sword, pay for the privilege – The more crimes you commit, the higher the price of getting caught.
✔ "Casuals don’t belong here?" Great—then casual crime doesn’t either.
✔ "The game is for the strong?" Good, because career criminals will need strong wallets to stay out of the penal colony.
✔ No more dodging consequences – Can’t pay your bounty? Congratulations, you’ve just won a one-way trip to forced labor.
✔ Finally, a justice system that works – Because "wait out the timer" was never hard-core—it was just bad design.

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Oh, You Wanted "Consequences" in Your Sandbox?​

Enjoy your real "emergent gameplay" as bounty hunters stalk you down, drag you to justice, and make you pay—one way or another.

✔ Don’t worry. It’s still a player-driven system.
✔ It’s just that now, the players being driven will be the ones swinging pickaxes in the penal colony.

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We Still Love You, Reds—But Actions Have Consequences​

Look, we get it. The outlaw lifestyle is part of the game, and we wouldn’t dream of taking it away. A world without criminals is a world without bounty hunters, and that would be terribly dull.

But let’s be honest—crime has been far too easy for far too long.

So here’s the deal: You can still be a red, but now, you’ll actually have to work for it. No more running wild and shrugging off consequences like they’re a minor inconvenience. You wanted a true outlaw experience? Now you’ll get one—complete with outlaw hideouts, bounty hunters, and a justice system that actually functions.

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New Criminal/Outlaw Safe Zones – A Real Underworld​

✔ No more camping in towns waiting for your flag to reset. Outlaws need real black markets, lawless havens, and bandit strongholds. These will be added as separate locations rather than modifying existing cities.

✔ Outlaw towns will have their own guards—but they won't protect blues.

• Blues are kill on sight. If you’re law-abiding, you don’t belong here.
• Outlaw towns function like the mirror image of blue cities, with some differences.

✔ Guards react to crimes—but only those committed in their line of sight.
Committing crimes against fellow outlaws isn’t “free.” Guards will react to:

• Hitting or stealing from another grey or red → You’re smacked into Mercy Mode.
• Killing another grey or red → You're killed by the town guards.
• There’s no penal colony, no permanent consequences—just immediate local enforcement.

✔ Outlaw faction standing matters.

• When outlaw factions are introduced, guards will attack players with low standing in that faction, meaning even criminals will have to watch their allegiances.

One Murder, One Count – No More MC Stacking for Non-Killers​

✔ Only the player who delivers the final mercy-mode killing blow receives a Murder Count (MC).
✔ Damage dealers and healers no longer stack MCs. If you helped in a fight but didn’t strike the final blow, you remain grey, not red.
✔ More accurate criminal tracking. No more random MC stacking from fights you didn’t finish.
✔ If you kill, you own it. One murder, one count. And oh, before we forget—your first murder makes you red, not your tenth.

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Why This Approach Works​

✔ Prevents bounty exploits – Payment comes from the criminal, not an infinite system pool.
✔ Encourages bounty hunting as a real career path – More players can engage in meaningful PvP without random griefing.
✔ Facilitates large-scale bounty hunting – Groups of bounty hunters can track and eliminate criminal gangs, making for richer, more strategic gameplay.
✔ Avoids kill-stealing issues – The reward is fairly divided among those who actively contributed to taking down the criminal.
✔ Enhances emergent gameplay – Hunting criminals becomes a dynamic PvP experience rather than a rigid system.

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This expands bounty hunting into a real profession, encouraging team play, criminal group takedowns, and a much more rewarding dynamic for bounty hunters.