Base Concept
Each player, with the exception of the highest-scoring player, has exactly one other player marked as their bounty prey at a time. Killing said prey earns the hunter 2 points instead of the usual 1, as well as removes 2 points from the prey, hence upkeeping the aspect of a zero-sum game. The moment the prey is killed, a new bounty is set up, with the server assigning another player as the new prey. If these continuously assigned preys are killed in succession, the point additions and subtractions double each time: 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. with some configured max limit. This is where the binary part of the name comes from.
However, the binary streak is reset the moment the player either dies, or kills an enemy that is not their currently assigned bounty prey. As such, to maximize rapid score gains, some enemies have to be purposefully avoided. Furthermore, dying and respawning reloads the assigned bounty prey, while killing a non-prey enemy doesn't.
Bounty Load Balancer
To keep the globally active bounties relatively fair, we rely on some sort of bounty load balancing. Each time a new bounty is loaded for a player, the following two factors are taken into consideration:
- current amount of bounties a player holds on their head should be similar to that of others
- chance distribution of bounty assigning favors pitting the player against other players with similar scores, making very easy or very hard interactions less common (but not null)
Players only know who their own prey is and are not informed if they are currently someone else's prey. The prey killing the hunter only yields 1 point, so the bonuses are realized in only one way.