A hunt suggestion

As XIV grows in population, the dev team has gone above and beyond to make as much of the content as accessible as possible, and letting the game adapt to how a community grows.

There is but one content that has not seen much change, and that is hunts. Considered open world, first come first serve basis. In the past it worked well. There were enough people interested where marks were hunted down and killed within a reasonable amount of time. However, now with new levels, gear, and more players a rift has been created. With this a new type of toxicity has also been exposed.

As it stands, they can be free hunted, or there's a community of scouters who find the marks, and conduct a "train." This has led to some interesting interactions. On the one hand, you have the type that harass others to leave the marks as is for the train. So those free hunting are bullied into conforming with the general masses.

On the other hand, you have players who partake in troll like behavior by "early pulling" marks, or trying to derail a train, which gets players upset. The vast majority of these players who troll tend to remain silent so they don't put themselves in the ire of GMs.

Not to mention, due to train culture, there are players whose systems can't handle the massive turnout of players, so they can't partake in the hunt marks either. Low manning these marks also takes considerable time so many just decide to opt out of it.

I believe this open world content needs some type of overhaul. The best way is to mimic both the treasure map system, and the leve system. I will explain the latter first. There was a type of leve quest where you went out to kill a certain monster, and you were rewarded with a few cuts of it's meat. You would then go to certain areas and use this meat to bait out the actual target. Now, let's take the treasure map system, using the same spawn points for hunt marks currently, and turn it into something fun.

How do we get these marks though? The best answer to this are the daily hunt bills, and the weekly elite bill for the "B" rank. You get currency with those kills, and the you exchange them with the hunt board npc in town to get a permit for the A rank. You take a party of 4-8 out to the zone, use the permit, and the A rank spawns somewhere on the map. You have 20 minutes to find it, and kill it. Only players within the party who initiated the permit can attack it.

Upon killing the A rank, you get a pop item that can spawn the S rank. For zones with 2 A ranks, it is required to get both items to spawn said S rank.

Another way to get permits/spawn items, is to have it within the adventurers in need awards for the daily roulettes. That way, you can keep veteran players using DR so newer players can get their dungeons/trials/raids done. (Similar to how you gave us the option to run past dungeons for the Shadow Bringers relic weapons.)

(Part two below)

Part two:
If hunts are changed to a system like described above, this will even out the playing field entirely for players and eliminate a lot of the hunt toxicity, if not all. The GM team will also have any reports of trolling/early pulling of hunts drastically cut down, relieving some pressure and allowing them to focus on more emergent matters. The servers themselves might see some relief since the bouts of having 300+ players trying to get into a single zone, into a single instance will drop down as well.


Thank you for taking the time to read this!

I'm really not expecting SE to make any sweeping changes like this after they've done virtually nothing to alter the hunt system since ARR.

Realistically, the most we could hope for IMO is removing the infinite draw distance on S ranks (And by extension mitigating the effectiveness of the hunt detecting apps) and implementing some kind of simplistic HP/defense scaling to keep them getting melted when the number of players present vastly outnumbers the amount they're balanced for.