Everything wrong with the current state of The Hunt - a discussion

This may or may not be a post coming out of frustration with some people turning a blind eye on this or even some people being too entitled - but please, hear me out and be open minded to this criticism.

So, yeah, hi .. hello there.
As someone who got into hunting soon after rejoining the game in 2.4 and becoming part of the Spawn & Theorycraft Community in 2.5 I noticed a lot of ups and downs inside The Hunt Community - usually the community fixed everything themselves .. but there are some things that started probably about six to eight months ago, when the "mapping" became public knowledge and basically many people started doing it - interrupting with the experience and fun in the game from other players.

What is "mapping"? I won't go into detail, let me just say that it interferes with the way "The Hunt" was "intended" to do and the way it was implemented.

Why is this not good?
People will basically just spawn camp. As easy as this.

As you may notice this takes away the "reason" "The Hunt" is about. If you can call it like that. And yes, there are still people that really enjoy The Hunt, people that actually care about running around and try and not use a way that wasn't public knowledge until recently. Hell, and there Cable Monkey and I thought that bots would be a problem if this makes the round.

Speaking of Cable Monkey, many people know him because of his Hunting Maps - many people use them to this day. As Cable mentioned on his website and soon after on the Hunt Thread as well, because of the recent activities of certain individuals he probably won't update his hunt maps for 5.x - and with this recent comment we learned what kinda happened.

This is something we noticed on our Server as well - people enforce rules on the hunting community and if people won't follow them, they will go as far as send /tells to hunting linkshell leaders to get people kicked. This is a new form of "hunting police" as we jokingly - for now - call it.

But there's more. People will camp zones by standing afk at the aetherytes and wait for third party programs to give them a call out as soon as a S Rank spawns. Many times those people arrive earlier at the hunts than the people that spawn them. They often even shout the hunts before the spawners arrive. This as well takes away the fun other people have in this game. I don't quite think that this was the intention of the developers.

And yes, "early pulls" do exist. It's just a definition kinda thing. Usually early pullers are considered people that pull a hunt mob as soon as they arrive. They jump off of their mount, even use sprint and pull. This will then lead to a domino effect chain reaction where everyone just attacks so they won't miss out on the reward. Even though there's no "time frame" attached to this .. every pull that happens after ~three to four minutes shouldn't be consired an early pull. Three to four minutes are a very long time to come to a hunt mob.

This is just a portion of the stuff that happens with actions inside the community, now let's get a hint at what's wrong with The Hunt System in general - as of Patch 4.5x.

Besides that mapping is a problem overall and needs to be adressed by the devs and fixed, The Hunt needs a somewhat revamp or just simple adjustements.

Many Spawners were happy that a question about The Hunt made it to the Q & A Panel at tha FanFestival in Paris - but the answer Yoshida gave us was ... disappointing. Let me tell you why:

No, S Ranks don't need to be made into a FATE-Type content, but there should be a way to sync players that are present at the hunt mark. Or, what we also have inside the FATE-System is that FATEs will scale according to the amount of players that killed the FATE the round before - or how many players are present at the FATE. So THIS should be something that's worth looking into.

Many people said that the hunt marks die too fast - or are not a challenge anymore. The most fun people have with the hunt is when new mobs are released with each expansion - and yet the fun only lasts so long ... as soon as people get better gear, it drops. They die too fast and don't punish players hard enough that stand in AOEs.
Yes, what I say is that even though it's considered casual content, which is NOT bad, it still should be hard. A S Rank can be called a Area Boss, so to speak. They are rare, there are conditions that need to be met (the triggers), they have strong attacks ...

Back in ARR the community made simple "rules", that no one talked about but everyone followed them. Be polite, don't pull too early, don't be toxic, work together, don't tell others what to do, invite people to hunt along.
The devs mentioned it many times that The Hunt is not meant for a whole server - yet the community said "No, we do it our way - we are not leaving people behind. Everyone who can manage it will get the reward.". This is something that doesn't get acknowledged too often, if at all.

Another thing is: don't let third party programs read the packages the servers sent to the client. There are ways to do this, I think. There just needs to be the will to do it.


Anyway .. that's just some things that come to my mind - and I hope you get what place I'm coming from.

I love The Hunt - I already loved it in FF XII with the little resources that were given (never played XI but I THINK I would've loved it there as well.). And I find it sad that this part of the game gets abandoned so much. And it's sad as well that content creators like Cable Monkey get pushed away from something they really enjoy only so that people that - even if not intended - produce a bad enviroment for those who are in this part of the game for a very long time.
Times change, yet it shouldn't be the way that other people have such an impact on an aspect of the realm that I then can do nothing about.

If you have read until this point: Thank you very much. I mean it.

Please let me hear what you experienced or if you have experienced anything like this - I really want a discussion if others think the same way other spawners/hunters and I do or if there's a general "It's just The Hunt/a game, get over it." mentality to it.

Mapping could be countered quite easily if devs would care about it. To diminish the effects of ACT they could reduce the visibility range for S mobs to normal mob range or, 2x visibility mob range or even 3x so they don't load in so easily. Standing afk at the aetheryte wouldn't give a notification, the amount of chars you need to cover the entire map would be too huge(so act users go home empty) . Scouting for a hunt would exist again. I don't think they will ever touch network data, the raiding scene depends too much on it now. The only thing I would wish for is that the hunting npc tell you the last time the specific hunt was killed (after the flavor/lore text) so the necessity of external websites and kill marking vanishes completly. You would know trying to spawn something actually is possible and not a time waste.