We need to talk about world visit and the hunt

Many factors, primarily World Visit, has made it almost impossible to participate in the hunt unless you are playing on a PC with an SSD.

On the Primal data center, hunts are organized into hunt trains, where a group of scouts will locate the individual hunt marks, note their locations, and kill them with a large group of players one by one. That itself is not a problem: the problem comes with just how many people will visit another server for the sole purpose of joining one of these hunt trains.

So many people will go to each train that areas sometimes become congested and impossible to load into. If you are able to load into each area for the hunt, the hunt mark itself dies in a matter of seconds from the sheer number of players that are swarming it. If you're more than a few yards away from the hunt mark, it will despawn in favor of the hundreds of other players, many of which are from other servers, making it impossible to target. And this is all if you have a solid-state drive and are playing on PC.

If you DON'T have a solid state drive, the areas take so long to load into that by the time you manage to gain control of your character, the hunt marks in the area are already dead and the train is on its way to the next area.

You might say, why not kill the hunt marks outside of the trains if you don't have an SSD? The issue there comes with the culture of hunt linkshells. Because the hunt train is so efficient, it's unrealistic to get the number of players necessary to kill the hunt marks since players would rather wait for a train. In addition to this, there's a culture that if you "snipe" a hunt outside of the train, you're essentially shut out of the resources used on the data center like hunt linkshells.

I'm sure some people are going to claim that I'm only posting this because I'm upset that I can't access this feature of the game, or that I should get a better computer if I want to participate in the hunt, but the fact of the matter is I have a good computer with a fast SSD, and I participate in the hunt regularly with almost no issues. I do, however, know of numerous players who cannot participate in the hunt for the reasons I listed above. I got involved in the hunt community because I wanted to make it more accessible for more players, but the way world visit currently works has made it less accessible for many players because of overzealous hunters from other servers. And that's not even getting into how hunts from older areas are balanced.

So what would I suggest to make hunting more accessible for more players, short of an entire rebalancing of the hunt? Simple: turn off rewards for players from other servers. Cross-world rewards have already been turned off for Ishgardian restoration for similar reasons, and you can't access timed gathering nodes when visiting other worlds, so why not do the same for the hunt? It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than the situation we have now.

Id rather say, turn the weekly coin from the raid into a Daily one, that way the hunts wont be needed as much and even if you still cant join em, you get upgrades easer. At this point with a full Datacenter and atm 3 instances of Lakeland (just today i saw 3 S hunts spawn on odin there) and all the SS hunts the upgrades became only a matter of, how badly can i no life to get all the trains.

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

Id rather say, turn the weekly coin from the raid into a Daily one, that way the hunts wont be needed as much and even if you still cant join em, you get upgrades easer. At this point with a full Datacenter and atm 3 instances of Lakeland (just today i saw 3 S hunts spawn on odin there) and all the SS hunts the upgrades became only a matter of, how badly can i no life to get all the trains.

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The problem with this is that it's not only gear upgrades that people hunt for. They hunt for achievements, for materia, for pretty much any reason. It'll either take a push down from staff that limits hunting, which players won't like, or more consideration from the players, which those coordinating the hunts appear to be unwilling to to do. The hunt community likes to hide behind the facade of "well the train works for everyone and we've made hunting so much better", but really, it's just full of people who only care that number go up fast.

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Originally Posted by PeekayTom

The problem with this is that it's not only gear upgrades that people hunt for. They hunt for achievements, for materia, for pretty much any reason. It'll either take a push down from staff that limits hunting, which players won't like, or more consideration from the players, which those coordinating the hunts appear to be unwilling to to do. The hunt community likes to hide behind the facade of "well the train works for everyone and we've made hunting so much better", but really, it's just full of people who only care that number go up fast.

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Personally I hunt because I like the experience of tracking down the mobs and fighting them to learn their mechanics. Sort of like a score attack arcade game. There's just not much fun in it anymore since the mobs melt in less than no time.

I was doing a FATE in Il Mheg the other day by myself, and as soon as the hunt train arrived I had such bad lag even though they were nowhere near me that I would get hit by AoEs I couldn't even see. I struggled to actually fight the enemy until they said they were moving to a different zone, and then suddenly it was normal again. It seems like lots of people hare having connection issues lately, but the sudden influx of players entering a zone can completely destroy people's ability to even play. There should definitely be some limitation or something if it actually impacts people not even doing the hunts to begin with.

My midrange computer is perfectly capable of running the game at 60fps in any other situation but it cannot handle the amount of people gathered at the same time around a hunt. The Hunt target doesn't even load for me in time to even participate. AoE markers don't show up and I get killed by something completely invisible. It doesn't help that some hunters in the train have absolutely no patience and will pull the target as soon as they get there with no regard for the rest of the train. Did you participate in hunting down the mobs for an SS rank? They don't care about you. I know this is more a matter of player courtesy than actual mechanic but this would still be greatly mitigated if hundreds of players from other servers didn't swarm the hunt train and make it unplayable for people with a midrange desktop, or a Playstation 4.

I don’t know what the proper solution would be but they need to come up with one. Is the gear upgrades from hunts thing new? I did hunts every once in a while before the patch on a standard PS4 with an HDD and it was rough but it wasn’t impossible like it is now. I’ve had to stop doing them because it’s just not worth the frustration.

Honestly I think they should find a way to axe cross world hunt trains but idk how that would work. If you stopped other worlds from joining the problem would pretty much disappear.

I liked hunt trains back in SB, but it feels like this system is not at all what was intended. The hunt system might as well not exist outside of trains, which for everyone except the spotters and guides are just resource farms gated by loading speed.

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Originally Posted by jamjeeshoul77

I don’t know what the proper solution would be but they need to come up with one. Is the gear upgrades from hunts thing new? I did hunts every once in a while before the patch on a standard PS4 with an HDD and it was rough but it wasn’t impossible like it is now. I’ve had to stop doing them because it’s just not worth the frustration.

Honestly I think they should find a way to axe cross world hunt trains but idk how that would work. If you stopped other worlds from joining the problem would pretty much disappear.

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Yes and no, gear upgrades from hunt tokens coincide with every other patch cycle.

from my perspective, i do hunt train these days because i can't stand expert roulete. No variety anymore. right now anyways you do 3 hunt trains and your capped. I can see other people avoids dungeons like the plague and do that instead and cause all sorts of problems. It might get better with the new exploratory missions.

Agreed, x-world hunting is hideous and stressful.

Personally I'd axe Cross world Hunts and maybe bump the spawn rate a little to compensate.

I really enjoyed Hunts in Stormblood. Trains were more manageable, less laggy and there was an actual community feeling on each server. You'd get to know the other Hunters, make friends, scout, help out triggering S ranks and so on. Nowadays there's still some community but overall it's more impersonal. Hunts are just a big zerg and for most of us there's no point scouting anymore, we just aren't needed. S ranks below ShB are hardly worth the time now too, often sniped or killed within a minute of being called and no longer dropping current Hunt currency. It's a shame, with both Hunts and crafting killed off this expansion the list of activities to sink time into shrank quite a bit.

I too am in favor of removing cross world hunts rewards. The whole hunt zerg culture is very off putting.

I've done some trains recently because of the tome gear upgrades with nuts and the fact that my new PC can handle the rush (never do hunts on a PS4). Most go fine. Others are a complete s***show. See a lot more "locals only" trains a lot lately.
S ranks are sometimes not even worth going to unless they are on your server, and even then sometimes they are dead the moment you get the call for it and get there. If there's one on another server, good luck getting through the queue before someone (usually someone who DIDN'T spawn the S rank) pulls up and starts hitting it.