Suggestion: S Rank Scaling System

[Felis]

Why have levels or ilvls in the first place if the content is going to kick you up or down?

I don't think it have to synch down the level of the player. Synching down the level of the gear should be enough. The players keep all their skills for the S Rank, but with much less power.

[Kuwaitum]

I am with re-scaling the S ranks in ARR & HW both, with all players ultimately reaching Lv.70. I won't be specific and trust the developers to come with a solution for this soon enough.
I do believe S ranks which takes +60 hours to respawn -and not to mention triggered- should deserve more than a 30-90 seconds fight!!

There is absolutely nothing engaging or fun about hitting a mountain of HP.

As if there is FUN killing an S rank Hunt in 20 seconds! I can't see that facetanking with your mighty iLevel raises any Adrenaline.

Also, where is the fun in killing a mob (S rank Lv.50) that does 'no damage' to you (Lv.70 i340)?! Unless you felt superior when you were Lv.25 and killwd Lv.3 Ladybugs outside Limsa Lominsa in 10 secs?

Not to mention, if some players really like killing those easy-to-kill-now S ranks fast before others get by. I think they have some personality/social problems feeding from trolling (I feel sad for them).

[RubyCirha]

This idea seems like it wouldn't be to hard to implement and I can totally get behind this cas in all honesty I gave up on hunts cas there killed before I can get to them and half the time ARR hunts arnt even called

[ElHeggunte]

As if there is FUN killing an S rank Hunt in 20 seconds! I can't see that facetanking with your mighty iLevel raises any Adrenaline.

I never said it was? All I'm saying is simply juicing a Hunt's HP and/or damage while leaving them otherwise mechanically unchanged is the antithesis of fun. That's called fake difficulty and is something developers should avoid doing. That's exactly what SE did for overworld mobs at the start of HW and people hated it.

This is simply a case where old content shouldn't continually be shoehorned into relevance, especially not with a short-term solution like cramming Hunts into FATEs. It may work for now, but when players once again run out of carrots on sticks to chase and stop caring about Hunts it's just going to wind up making it harder to low-man or solo the Hunts later on.

It's already hard enough to get people to show up to SB A and S-ranks and that's without making them require a small army to kill.

I don't even bother to call ARR A-ranks anymore because no one ever shows up for them when I do. I call and wait or call and then go off to do what I was in the area for in the first place, only to come back ~10 minutes later to find the Hunt still sitting there wondering if I ignored him because he did something to offend me. So now I usually just kill them when I see them. The same thing is starting to happen with SB A-ranks, too though I still see the occasional announcement for those.

So the only thing forcing them into FATEs is bound to do is cause them to go to waste eventually because then they'd be impossible to solo, but you wouldn't be able to gather enough people for them either. Just like how no one really ever bothers with Odin or Behemoth anymore. Their FATEs used to crash severs and now the people who show up to them wouldn't even pack a LeBaron.

Also, where is the fun in killing a mob (S rank Lv.50) that does 'no damage' to you (Lv.70 i340)?! Unless you felt superior when you were Lv.25 and killwd Lv.3 Ladybugs outside Limsa Lominsa in 10 secs?

Again, I never said anything of the sort. You're reading a lot into a very clear, very specific 13-word sentence that I wrote in response to a very specific point made by the OP (that they've since edited for clarity).

Crazy concept, but it's possible that I find that neither scenario is fun. It's just far less fun hitting a mob that still poses very little threat to you except now it has 10x the HP it used to so it takes you 15 minutes to kill it. Putting them into FATEs and thus making them take longer to kill might help more people earn kill credit, but we're fooling ourselves if we think that'll make the Hunts any more "fun" than they are now.

[JunseiKei]

Personally, I've never seen anyone say a hunt is fun. I've also only ever seen people complaining about early pulling (doesn't exist) and want changes to hunts when they want everyone and their grandmothers have the ability to benefit from a hunt, not realizing they are shooting themselves in the foot. If you want to understand what I mean, look to the first iteration of the Diadem. When you have so many players, it becomes drastically hard to gain contribution. Instead of people being able to gain gold/full credit, everyone gets silver/middling credit, or bronze/little credit.

Scaling up monsters, or scaling down players, is a horrible thing to have present when hunts aren't popular or on servers with fewer players in population. Look before Stormblood dropped and most people were on break waiting for the expansion. Very few people were engaging hunts and it become the norm to wait for more people. This is "fine" when there's nothing else going on and you've nothing to prep for. Right now, I think of having to deal with being scaled down or having hunts scaled up and all I can think of is "if it takes me 5 minutes just to kill a hunt, plus possibly 3 to 5 minutes waiting for other people because of social peer pressure, that's a good 8 to 10 minutes I could have done something progressive elsewhere." Touching back on keeping lower population servers in mind, remember they can have population droughts, too, when content is lacking. When SE implements this stuff, like many other games, they put in only one iteration in their game. Meaning, whatever changes they place will be the same on a high population server as there will be on a low population server.

People keep throwing around the phrase 'hunts were designed to be relevant content for max level players.' If you mean solely do-able by max levels, you'd be incorrect. You can engage hunts earlier, but will need more players to do so. If you mean relevant for max level players because of gear, you'd still be wrong. Most of the things hunts give you are glamour, materia (arguably needed at any level and have multiple ways to acquire besides just hunts), but other than that, they've only offered things meant as a means for players to catch up. Usually, it comes in the form of tomestone gear upgrades- relevant to players that do not raid, or whose team have not passed the fights to gain certain upgrades (no judgement here, they could have just started). And fluffy collectibles.

All in all, hunts are about as relevant as the Gold Saucer, but due to social expectations or peer pressure, garner more ire and demands for changes that may or may not actually benefit the activity in the long run. The tiger mount is supposed to be as time consuming as the mentor mount or Fenrir.

[Tsumdere]

Maybe a system like Odin would work. For example, Safat (or any ARR/HW hunt) scales up every time you kill it, up to level 70. On the other hand, if people cannot kill him and it is sitting spawned in the overworld with only one or two people there, for every 5-10 minutes the hunt is spawned it scales down all the way to the hunt's original level. This would be beneficial for both large and small servers.

[Chocolys]

There does not seem to be dynamically in-fight scaling mechanic existing in the game. Even Fates are scaled on spawn, and not during fight, even if the latter would be more fair and logical to the actual number of participants.

I guess that's why the game uses some sort of work-around to estimate how to scale each Fate on spawn.
Before 4.0 it was based on the number of participants that just completed the previous same Fate spawn. Since 4.0 it's based on the number of participants that have completed the last nearby other Fate.

So I would not be surprised if there is a current limitation of the game engine, that prevent creatures from auto-scaling dynamically once spawned.

On a side-note I notice "city hunters" complaining that an ARR S Rank died before they could arrive to kill it.
What I mean by "city hunters" is people never helping to trigger an S rank but just camping in town or doing something else just waiting for someone to call for an S rank in some Linkshell.
If you don't partipate in spawning an S rank, then you should not complain about not being present fast enough to kill it.

Otherwise a workaround without involving scaling could be that any S rank spawn with a temporary invulnerability buff ( 1, 2, 3 .. minutes?) so it gives enough time to players actively hunting it to spot it and be able to kill it before some other hunting group or random bypassers do it.

[Remedi]

The easiest soluition actually is making allied seal coming off something else, making content scaling up kinda defeats the purpose of power progress of RPG which is a feature of the genre, consider that this problem comes of some commodity or benefit we get off old S ranks if those commodity were not to be, we wouldn't be having this conversation and soloing old bosses wouldn't be considered such a damnable offense