Creating moments: the $500 EVE Mystery bounty and what it means
Our bounty system isn’t just about guides and screenshots…
As our EVE community gets stuck into week two of Havoc, their game’s latest expansion, there’s been a break in our long-running, $500 mystery bounty. But what exactly is this big, ambitious thing, that’s so unlike our other bounties?
What can we do with bounties?
The second stage in our mystery bounty has been solved, and the third is now live! This is a multi-part experimental bounty with big rewards, and a bid to test the limits of what our bounty system can do.
The first two stages involved a few devious puzzles, and the pursuit of a strange character named Mŷs Tæ Rae across Just About and into the hinterlands of social media.
It’s been wonderful to see our community piecing together the clues and we’re really pleased with a few of the moments along the way, some of which have occurred off-platform. For instance, here’s a YouTube video by our Stage One winner, Wadd Enderas, on his journey:
We’re doing something different for Stage Three. Another oddball named Jackbeard has wrested control of our systems in order to pose a new challenge, one based not on puzzle-solving but on in-game feats. EVE Online has plenty of tools to help our members link themselves to these feats - which otherwise would be a problem for bounties like this - and we’re excited to see what happens next.
Given the scale, the features, and everything we stand to learn from this bounty, the potential exists to create epic ARGs and big community moments at some point down the line. That’s our vision. But let’s not go full Molyneux quite yet.
Any members who’ve been sleeping on the mystery bounty so far, now’s your chance to take another look. Head on over to Stage Three and see what Jackbeard has to say. Elsewhere on EVE there are plenty of new bounties to get players into Havoc’s second week, including this one to kill, or score a kill with, the new ships.