Hunts. the tiger and the out of hand early pulling.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rita1989

There is a difference from finding an S rank yourself and leeching off other people's work who were nice enough to call the hunt that they potentially put hours into spawning just to have it pulled immediately by someone else and potentially get little credit depending if party is close enough when it's pulled.

why is being a decent person so hard it won't kill you to at least wait 2-3 minutes.

Aint nobody got time to wait. Be lucky some one calls it out for you to leach off it.

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Originally Posted by Ragnhar

Take for example the thing that made me do this thread, i found an S rank in the shroud and of course i announced it, less than 2 mins since i have said anything and with only about 6 people on the spot some rando just comes in and pulls it and of course everyone wants credit. They just go at it with their whole might and the thing died in about 20 secs with a lot of players on the way.

that's the point to hunts. you see you kill. not wait around. "early bird catches the worm". I wonder what you act like if you did nm/hnm in ff11... that was cut throat.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ragnhar

I'm sure everyone by now as been annoyed by early pulled hunts, less than 1 min after they where first announced, this is specially annoying on ARR hunts as even S ranks die within seconds of being pulled. What i'm trying to say that maybe that stupid tiger mount shouldn't be linked to something that requires other people to not be douchy so you can get it, maybe that way all the cancer that hunting has become can find a cure.

1st come, 1st to kill.. SE wint over this 3 years ago. There are no early pulls in FFXIV if you can kill it, Do it! They openly told everyone that "hunt" are a free for all. Stop QQing over it alrdy.

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Originally Posted by RubenSnizzle

iirc, didn't they said that hunts are first come first serve basis? No rules about it, if ppl want to be 'good willing' if you could say, they can, but there is no restriction what so ever on hunts.

^^^100%^^^

The core problem with hunts lies in the fact that they were intended to be competitive, but the amount of damage/enmity required to get full credit for one is so low that several players are able to pull it off if they're partied, which leads to people being flagged as rude/selfish if they're unwilling to wait for more to arrive/don't bother calling hunts at all.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hazuki87

1st come, 1st to kill.. SE wint over this 3 years ago. There are no early pulls in FFXIV if you can kill it, Do it! They openly told everyone that "hunt" are a free for all. Stop QQing over it alrdy.

Whatever you may think hunt etiquette should be, it's essentially a strawman to bring up SE's official stance when the concept of "early pulling" is a matter of server convention and not official policy in the first place. In complaining about it or criticizing it, the poster is not implying that it's against the rules in any way, only that it runs afoul of what some segment or another of the population think should be the standard behavior of players approaching the hunt.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kattzkitti

Squeenix's official stance is that all hunt content is free for all, first come first served. If a player (and their group, where applicable) believe they are capable of handling the given target, they are fully free to pull at their own discretion. This whole "relaying the <pos> through hunt shells" thing is a purely player-driven phenomenon, Squeenix has said on multiple occasions that it "goes against the spirit of the content" and thus they frown on it (although they'd never actually step in and stop it, for obvious reasons).

"Early pulling" isn't a thing, has never been a thing, and never will be a thing. If you weren't there when it was pulled, you were late and your impotent rage is laughable.

This may be the public official stance, but I'd argue the achievement for the mount says privately they know/think otherwise. Let's pretend that players actually played along the line of the "spirit of the content". No public/LS announcements to invite half the server to come kill hunts, no hunt tracking websites to help pool knowledge of when things were killed and when they might be available next, etc. Now, try and find a group of 8 or so players that could reasonably achieve the required number of kills in the face of the fact that there are likely other groups competing for those same kills. This could easily mean that such a group would spend hours trying to hunt for an S-rank, not finding one simply because, unbeknownst to them, they were all killed by competing groups less than 24-hours ago.

Guess what? Much of the community at large is simply not that dumb. Given the achievements and such (at this point mostly mount speed and materia, but you can bet gear upgrades are around the corner) locked behind hunts, a great part of the community realizes the design/reward balance is really poor and that it benefits the community at large to work together, to figure out what spawns S ranks, how quickly they can respawn, to track when the latest kills were, and ultimately, to spread the credit to as many players as reasonably possible when a hunt is found. So of course, when someone "early pulls", it ticks off the part of the community that prefers to work together.

You can bet SE knows many players have made hunt-killing a community activity to gather large groups of hunters, and with so many people getting credit for so many kills, 200 S-rank kills (which would be a pain, but not unthinkable for playing 'in the spirit of the content') would be a ridiculously easy goal for how a large portion of players actually play this content. In this context, 2000 S-rank kills, to SE, must have seemed a more reasonable challenge, a de facto acceptance of how this content is actually played regardless of what their public position actually is.

In effect, when such a large portion of the community tries to work together for something like this, and greedy players actively work against that community on whatever grounds they have for acting that way, it is, in a sense 'griefing' that portion of the community. Although, in order for such an act to actually be a violation of the ToS or otherwise punishable, you'd have to actually define it in such a way to be quantifiable. Just calling something 'early pulling' is problematic.

For instance, one could say it's 'early pulling' if a pull time (commonly stated in Eorzean time) was announced, and someone pulled well before such time; however, who has the authority to decide what the pull time is? Even so, given that you can't really macro dynamic facts like that into hunt announcement macros (the common means people use to announce hunts across FCs/LSes/shout), just relaying that information to the community involves a significant manual effort. It's little wonder that out of all the hunts I've attended since SB launch, I've seen such pull time announcements only once or twice.

So basically, what this part of the community wants simply isn't enforceable even if SE openly sympathized with them. At the heart of it is simply a design problem. Without rewards, why would people bother with hunts at all? Obviously, there needs to be rewards so players are motivated to participate in the content, but the balance feels very off.

Additionally, I get what SE was going for this content, and prior to 3.0 I even participated in it mostly along the lines of what they intended (as in, I'd join a 'hunt train' party and we'd hit each map looking for A-ranks and any S-ranks we were lucky enough to find). Those parties were fun and I even enjoyed searching maps with others looking for those hunts. 3.0 changed that, though, for a few reasons:
Hunts didn't get stronger with each expansion, fewer people were needed to kill older hunts. Of course, assume they tuned all hunts to level 70, now people without either expansion wouldn't even be able to approach the ARR hunts, let alone stand a chance to actually kill it even in a team.

Starting with 3.0, we ended up with two different hunt currencies, and at different times players have had different desires for one or the others making it more difficult to keep a team together since some members would rather go for one currency while others for the other currency.

While S-ranks remained elusive and could take a team to trigger them, some of the spawn conditions were such that they would instantly break up a team. Gather at specific legendary nodes at specific times? Great, because you know every single aspiring S-rank hunter out there has a 60+ BTN/MIN with those nodes unlocked, right? Every single time I've attempted to help out hunt parties with such spawn conditions they inevitably break up due to most members not having the means to help, and alone, RNG simply isn't in my favor to solo-spawn something like that.

So, with all that in mind, I have some suggestions how I think this content could be improved and ease tensions, possibly getting players to not make quite as big of a deal out of it and shift the focus back to 'hunt train' type parties:
Remove S-rank kills from the achievement for the mount (or simply change the mount to be awarded by the A-rank only achievement). If S-ranks must be kept for the mount, then not only change them to be based on time, but make them spawn every 6-12 hours because a serious hunter going for 2k S-rank kills would likely have a number of A-rank kills that would completely dwarf the 3k A-rank requirement. As it stands, a newish player to hunts might kill a few A-ranks, and seeing the 3k/2k balance might incorrectly assume they should reasonably be able to kill 2 S-ranks for every 3 A-ranks they kill (only to be very disappointed when they learn the reality of S-ranks as they currently stand). Or, as a last possible alternative, link it to a number of A-rank kills plus the achievement for killing each unique S-rank at least once. That way S-ranks are still involved, but not in a "you're not likely going to be able to do this unless you only hunt for the next couple of years" kind of way.

Make S-ranks spawn based on time only. This way they appear a bit more steadily and can be seen along the lines of a nice bonus to hunt train parties if they can handle the (relatively) tougher challenge of killing it. It would also make it such that players wouldn't feel useless because they're actually locked out of helping spawn the S-ranks.

Merge the hunt currencies, or at least make all hunts award both currencies.

TL;DR - SE knows much of the player community doesn't approach this content in the way they intended for it, and they've mistakenly mis-balanced a widely-desired reward in such a way that expects the community to continue as-is; however, certain players who don't care about that part of the community actively work against the community making the achievement much harder to earn than it would be without such players.