I should go to bed but I wanted to write down a simple fun system I imagined to implement in World of Warcraft. Its mechanic isn’t complex and it should be easy to implement and fun to play. It also fits easily with the planned additions and both with the PvE and PvP ruleset. Here’s how it works in the practice:

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Every time a player kills or helps to kill a player of an opposite faction he gains a point (one and only one, no matter of the levels). This point will finish in a pool called “bounty points”. So if a player killed ten other players he will have ten bounty points.

These points decrease with the time. Every ten minutes without killing anyone a player looses one bounty point. This up to an hour. For every hour the points to loose every ten minutes increase by a factor of three. So for the first hour without killing anyone you loose one point every ten minutes, for the second hour three points every ten minutes, for the third hour six points every ten minutes and so on. This happens always, including when you are logged out.

Now the fun is that a player of the opposite faction can visit a “bounty board” located in each zone. This bounty board will list the top 20 players of the opposite faction that are from at least ten minutes in that zone and with the highest bounty points. On the board you’ll be able to see name, level and the bounty points of those players, but not the class. An “headhunter” can grab from this board up to two different “targets”. When a target is taken the target player will receive a voice message telling he is “being hunted” and an icon stating so, no infos aside this. The hunter instead will gain a new skill with a reuse time of ten minutes. When this skill is used the server will get the precise location of the target but it will deliver this information to the hunter only three minutes later. In the case the target is dead when the server checks it, the skill will fail and can be used again one minute later.

The hunt begins. Once the hunter or the target die in a direct duel the “victory spam” will be delivered to the whole zone and the winner “rewarded” with a nifty graphic effect. In the case the hunter is the winner he will also “earn” ten bounty points. If the hunter is defeated he will have to wait at least twenty minutes before picking up again the same target.

The hunt can also finish if an hour passes without an actual attack or if the hunter leaves the zone or logs out for more than five minutes. In the case is the target to leave the zone the hunter will know so. He can use the skill to know where the target is moving to and he has ten minutes to be in the same zone. If he succeed the hunt will continue, if the hunter doesn’t follow the target the bounty will be dismissed. The target will be attackable by its hunter (and vice versa) no matter of the zone setting and PvP/PvE ruleset.

The encounter between an hunter and its target works like a duel. A hunter can activate a flag when he wants to start the fight. This flag works instantly and it produces the same effects on both the hunter and the 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

The hunter has eight minutes to start and win the encounter after this state is activated. If it doesn’t happen the encounter is considered lost. This special state can be triggered only once.

That’s all, probably I’ll add more details, tweaks and changes in the next days. It is one idea I started to imagine because I want to rebuild completely the PvP system of my “dream mmorpg” to integrate the new things I’ve learnt from playing World of Warcraft :)