I kept thinking at it instead of sleeping and the whole idea changed completely to be player driven. This new system is more simple, more fun and can still coexist with the other so that we could have both an automated and a player-driven bounty system.

This is how the player-driven bounty system works:

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We get rid of the bounty points completely. The system isn’t anymore zone dependent, nor time dependent.

– Any player can put a bounty on a player of the opposite faction. To do this he must offer a money reward that goes from a minimum of one gold to infinite. The bounty is valid up to a month. Only the first bounty hunter to kill the target will collect the reward.

– The “bounty boards” will list the whole list of bounties created by the players. This list has various fields that you can use to sort it (similar to the Auction House interface):
Name – Level – Bounty Value (in money) – Name of who offered the bounty – Date when the bounty has been created – Online/Offline status

The last obviously shows if the target player of the bounty is currently online or offline.

– Now the bounty hunters can browse this board and take from it up to two targets to hunt, following this restriction:
While the bounty hunter can see the whole list of bounties on the bounty board, he can only grab those bounties that go from two levels below up to five levels above the level of the bounty hunter.
Different bounty hunters can take and try to collect the same bounty at the same time, remembering that only the first to win will collect the money reward. Once a bounty hunter succeed the other bounty hunters hunting the same target will be informed that they are too late.

– The hunt follows the system explained above. The hunter gains a new skill with a reuse time of ten minutes. When triggered the server checks the zone and the precise location of the target (it fails in the case the target is currently dead or offline, informing the hunter) but it delivers this information to the player only three minutes later. In the exact second an hunter uses his skill the target receives a voice message and a status icon telling “You are being hunted”. No more than this.

– If the hunter wants to collect the bounty he needs to use a second skill right before starting the attack on his target. This skill becomes usable when the target is whitin double the normal line-of-sight. These are the effects of the skills on both the hunter and his target:
* Both will be disbanded if grouped
* Both will loose any external (not self casted) buff
* Both will be invulnerable to PvP attacks (even from factional NPCs) if not coming from each other
* Both are vulnerable to each other attacks, no matter of the ruleset on the server
* The target (and only it) is healed completely if wounded

– This second skill can only be used once. When triggered the hunter has up to eight minutes to find and kill the target, if he fails or flees or gets killed the bounty is lost and can be obtained again from a “bounty board” only after eight hours and up to a max of three different attempts.

Now you can become a bounty hunter as a profession and collect money offered by other players :)