Are S-hunts spawn shield a necessity now?

Based on multiple observations in the last few months. I have decided to write a topic discussing if there should be a spawn shield for S-hunts or not.
S-rank hunts are special bosses that spawn after a certain one or multiple criteria are met, and they're by default difficult to solo and to kill with a couple of players. Their kill rewards are tomestones, hunt currencies, and a chance of materia clusters, which are sought out by some players for various reasons.
The difficulty of S-hunts from spawn to kill and to respawning again is intentional to make it a community effort and not a single-player experience. Because of that, the S-hunts spawn cooldowns are in real-time days, making it impossible to encounter the selfsame S-hunt without world-hopping. With that in mind, it can be really frustrating to miss or not arrive in time for the S-hunts, which caused the community to establish means and norms to avoid such eventualities, like discord notification servers and waiting minutes before attacking to give chance to as many as possible players to arrive and participate.
As is the case with norms and community cooperations, not everyone shares the same willingness to cooperate with others due to different points of view and opinions. However, trolling proved to be the worst negative behavior that can happen during S-hunts, wherein a player would early-pull for malignant purposes such as ruining it on others and gaining infamous.
While such behaviors are totally expected, they become a problem when they keep occurring over and over again. Such is the observed case in Light DC in recent months, where a group of players are still intentionally early-pulling S-hunts as soon as they spawn, making it difficult to reach old S-hunts from previous expansions such as ARR and HW in time.
As stated previously, this has been going on for months in Light DC, and there can be no doubt some other DCs are having the same issues in their S-hunts. This brings to mind the question of whether the time has come for a spawn shield to be activated on S-hunts to prevent trolling activities. Especially with the game having a sharp increase in the number of players with no change to spawn cooldowns, which increases the frequency of such activities to happen that negatively impact many players.
My personal recommendation would go to supporting the implementation of a spawn shield on all S-hunts that lasts 5 minutes, which is time enough for all players to get the notification, world-hop even with high queues due to all players world-hopping, teleport, and form parties in front of the boss, without actually forcing players to wait long. This would be greatly helpful on old S-hunts that can't last 20 seconds.

My recommendation is to leave hunts as is.

Kinda sad such a thing feels needed. Early pulls suck, but if the 100 other people standing around didn't follow up, then the person who pulled would just die and it would reset.

This never happens of course...so it's the community as a whole's fault.

S rank hunts are basically the game's version of FFXI's HNM's. They aren't meant to be a content the entire server comes to claim when spawned. If you're in the area actively trying to spawn it then you should be able to reach it before it's killed. However people are under no obligation to stand around and wait for 200 people to teleport into the zone and reach the area it spawned at before killing it. There is no need for invincibility timers or shields to allow people to jump to a different world then teleport to the zone then run to the spawn location because the people doing it have no ownership of the spawn. They aren't entitled to claim rewards on it. Being in an Hunts LS does not give you claim to any hunt spawns at all.

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Originally Posted by FoxyAreku

Kinda sad such a thing feels needed. Early pulls suck, but if the 100 other people standing around didn't follow up, then the person who pulled would just die and it would reset.

This never happens of course...so it's the community as a whole's fault.

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It feels terrible when even EW S-hunts get early-pulled and die quickly while a lot of players are still on the way. It's an on-going struggle that is on for long.

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Originally Posted by RitsukoSonoda

S rank hunts are basically the game's version of FFXI's HNM's. They aren't meant to be a content the entire server comes to claim when spawned. If you're in the area actively trying to spawn it then you should be able to reach it before it's killed. However people are under no obligation to stand around and wait for 200 people to teleport into the zone and reach the area it spawned at before killing it. There is no need for invincibility timers or shields to allow people to jump to a different world then teleport to the zone then run to the spawn location because the people doing it have no ownership of the spawn. They aren't entitled to claim rewards on it. Being in an Hunts LS does not give you claim to any hunt spawns at all.

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Unless people actually stand next to an aetheryte in wait for a spawn. It's increasingly becoming very difficult to reach S-hunts in time. I have personal experiences when I couldn't even reach ARR S-hunts when they were in my world.
They're not a content for the whole server, but they're also not a content for a couple of players. Saying you don't have obligation to wait doesn't give you the right to negatively ruin it on 100 other player. Its not a content for you, its a content for us all.

No.

XIV's community is already carebear and mostly waits for organized hunt trains.

Every other MMO I've ever played world bosses are killed on timer by guilds who know when and where they are going to spawn. Want to kill a world boss, have to beat out other people who want to kill it. In those games bosses give more than a common currency as well, so there is reason to actually care.

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Originally Posted by Thi

No.

XIV's community is already carebear and mostly waits for organized hunt trains.

Every other MMO I've ever played world bosses are killed on timer by guilds who know when and where they are going to spawn. Want to kill a world boss, have to beat out other people who want to kill it. In those games bosses give more than a common currency as well, so there is reason to actually care.

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The community mostly sufficiently waits for organised A-rank hunt trains because of the way they're ran, S ranks is a whole other matter in my experience.

Unless you yourself are directly involved in working to spawn it, often they've been engaged and are dead within ~2 minutes of any shout-out going out in link shells and discords etc.

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Originally Posted by Hafu

The community mostly sufficiently waits for organised A-rank hunt trains because of the way they're ran, S ranks is a whole other matter in my experience.

Unless you yourself are directly involved in working to spawn it, often they've been engaged and are dead within ~2 minutes of any shout-out going out in link shells and discords etc.

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That sounds fine to me. If your not working to spawn it or know the people who are, you shouldn't be entitled to it.

S rank hunts are not designed for everyone to be there.
Stop trying to clog up zones to the brim with people before pulling. Once there's a sizable group it's fine to pull imo. It's open world content, they shouldn't be gatekept on some virtue that doesn't really exist. Witch hunting people because they pulled an open world mob before someone else deemed they be ready is a terrible thing that happens.
Not to mention you may end up keeping people not hunting from even entering zones because most instances are gone now and look man, I gotta catch that big fish. S ranks are back up in a couple of days some of those fish take weeks to respawn.

tl;dr: early pulls don't exist, late arrivals do.

There are no early pulls, only people who are too late.

There's no point in these threads.

Everyone will argue to the death that S ranks aren't meant to be shared (despite the fact they've admitted on live letters that it's intentional we share hunts via third party sites and 1000 S rank achievements exist) and that it's fine.

However, I guarantee if SE decided to add a spawn shield to S Ranks and add some QoL to hunts, you'd be burned at the stake if you said they should revert it and go back to free-for all.

It's sort of similar to things like weapon coffers on EX. Every time it was suggested, players strongly disagreed. Now it's been officially added everyone loves it.

The ff14 community just hates QoL. There's no debate to be had. They'll argue against it just for the sake of arguing.

The achievements with 1000 S ranks from the corresponding expansion came only after the world travel was implemented and I would say that these achievements were intended by the developers for the players to use the world travel, because that gives the possibility of five to ten times more S ranks from the expansion (which is more than all S ranks on a single world combined), depending on what data center you are on.

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

It feels terrible when even EW S-hunts get early-pulled and die quickly while a lot of players are still on the way. It's an on-going struggle that is on for long.



Unless people actually stand next to an aetheryte in wait for a spawn. It's increasingly becoming very difficult to reach S-hunts in time. I have personal experiences when I couldn't even reach ARR S-hunts when they were in my world.
They're not a content for the whole server, but they're also not a content for a couple of players. Saying you don't have obligation to wait doesn't give you the right to negatively ruin it on 100 other player. Its not a content for you, its a content for us all.

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Can we just drop the farce here about portraying yourself as an advocate for other people? The reason you made this thread is because you're upset ppl did not wait for you to transfer worlds, teleport to a zone, then run to spawn coordinates for an S rank spawn that you did nothing to help spawn. If you aren't actively helping spawn the S rank then you have no place to complain if the people that did spawn it kill it before you get there. Again being in a hunt LS does not entitle you to every spawn that appears and gets reported in it. To flip your attempt at an argument the other way. Why should 100 people wait 5+ minutes for you to come running in from another world? That's collectively 500+ minutes of other people's life wasted because you want the count for your mount achievement to increase by 1.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

S rank hunts are not designed for everyone to be there.
Stop trying to clog up zones to the brim with people before pulling. Once there's a sizable group it's fine to pull imo. It's open world content, they shouldn't be gatekept on some virtue that doesn't really exist. Witch hunting people because they pulled an open world mob before someone else deemed they be ready is a terrible thing that happens.
Not to mention you may end up keeping people not hunting from even entering zones because most instances are gone now and look man, I gotta catch that big fish. S ranks are back up in a couple of days some of those fish take weeks to respawn.

tl;dr: early pulls don't exist, late arrivals do.

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Accepting this idea more now. It's not worth it to hop servers to see if people can hold it in for a couple minutes after a relay goes out. :p

Also people need to stop nagging for invites. PF PF PF! :D

A small redesign in the way they work would probably be in line.
They're not like FFXI where the rare mobs were a first to tag gets everything and no one else can even help out sort of deal. That was meant to be kind of cutthroat
They are clearly designed to be shared but at the same time the servers themselves can't even handle the amount of people that want in which does sort of feel like a design issue

What the solution is is beyond me though. Only things I could think of is a max damage receivable buff so they last long enough to actually do something, especially older ones, or make the rewards truly be only for the claiming party and promote it that way so hunting them would actually be a dedicated activity people would be forced to compete for
Neither of which sounds particularly good to me

For the record though whenever I'm actually part of the group doing the work to hunt down the A ranks or spawn the S ranks I do get credit for all them. Which leads me to believe a lot of the complaining is likely people that don't really understand how hunting works at all and see a shout in a town then get upset that it didn't wait for them to finish up what they were doing at the AH before warping out to the location

People being trollish and early pulling older ones is pretty annoying though. Groups that work on spawning S ranks tend to spread out and work on all available ones at once, sometimes across multiple worlds, and having a group show up and kill one while the people doing the work are all collecting together is kind of crappy

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Originally Posted by RitsukoSonoda

Can we just drop the farce here about portraying yourself as an advocate for other people? The reason you made this thread is because you're upset ppl did not wait for you to transfer worlds, teleport to a zone, then run to spawn coordinates for an S rank spawn that you did nothing to help spawn. If you aren't actively helping spawn the S rank then you have no place to complain if the people that did spawn it kill it before you get there. Again being in a hunt LS does not entitle you to every spawn that appears and gets reported in it. To flip your attempt at an argument the other way. Why should 100 people wait 5+ minutes for you to come running in from another world? That's collectively 500+ minutes of other people's life wasted because you want the count for your mount achievement to increase by 1.

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Did you participate in Light S-hunts? I'm sure you did not.
I know what I'm saying and how things are going in here. The same early-pullers going out for months, camping in the zones with potential S-hunts spawn to early-pull them as soon as they spawn. I can go out myself and spawn S-hunts if all I want is the kills, but I'd rather not feed early-pullers and let them ruin it on 100-200 other players who want to get the achievements and the rewards but arrive to find them dead. This is a massive multiplayer online game and not a single-player so you're not the only one out there. You are not more important than me. It's not about me or you, but its about the playerbase as whole. The behavior of "My benefit over yours" is sick when the option of "My and your benefit" exist and isn't difficult to do. S-hunts were designed by the devs to be a community effort with world-hopping and as such aren't and should not be an exclusive content to whoever is on the site waiting for them to spawn. It's just a poor excuse for a toxic behavior.

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

The same early-pullers going out for months

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There's no such thing, friend.
Only late arrivals.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

There's no such thing, friend.
Only late arrivals.

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Late arrivals at the same minute is something new.

Well, when it's dead it means that someone got there in time and everyone else was too late.

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Originally Posted by ACE135

Well, when it's dead it means that someone got there in time and everyone else was too late.

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Something something.... "If you ain't first, you're last"?

The fact that you can seldom spawn a S rank without it immediately being detected and mass-relayed across the entire data center by a bot or player utilizing a hunt radar add-on is the main reason why I feel like there needs to be something that ensures any hunt spawns live for at least a few minutes.

If it was truly just a "first come, first serve" situation with no third party programs involved, then I'd probably feel differently because you have virtually no chance of missing out on your own hunt spawns under normal circumstances, but on multiple occasions I've spawned something then had a mob of 20+ people already waiting at it within the minute who could've easily blown it up before I got there.

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

Late arrivals at the same minute is something new.

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Late arrivals in the same minute is all those people agreeing with the early puller rather than waiting for some kind of official call. One person can early pull and people can watch them die. They choose not to.

At least put a shield for a few minutes on the SS rank boss the moment it spawns. People who camp that area and do not help with beating the minions tend to pull immediately, thus screwing all of the other people who did contribute to spawning the SS rank in the first place.

[Bonus points and dishonorable mentions to those who complain when said SS rank boss does not spawn because the minions did not die on time or a complete wipe happened on a minion].

At least after Savage hits for an Xpac, they definitely should have a shield (I actually noticed they do it for the primo rares in Zereth Mortis in the latest WoW patch and it works out really nicely there).

You could maybe let them go without a shield for latest expansion S ranks at launch, where everyone's still at relatively minimum gear (plus there letting them live longer might actually be problematic when the wave of players coming for the hunt collides with the wave of players already in the zone because of new xpac - I still remember when Shadowbringers came out getting DCed at least once when trying to do MSQ because I was taking my time and meanwhile the vanguard wave of 80s were already starting hunt trains and stampeded Rak'tika ...)

The alternative is probably to do away with contribution based credit for hunts, so that people are not incentivized to go ham as much as they do now, because right now the system forces them to to ensure a sufficient contribution share especially if they don't have a Full Party, or their group lacks enough Tanks; although for fairness if only one hit suffices to get full reward, there might need to be a nerf to the rewards as well. (FWIW, I've noticed a similar tendency of people to go ham on Zereth Mortis rares too, even though WoW does have the "One Hit" credit system, and I have to wonder if it's learned behavior due to FFXIV's system and a lot of people playing both, especially lately)

They should just make A and S-ranks harder.

Like, balance them to the DMG you potentially do with the last savage gear of that expansion.

So early in a expansion when many people want to do them they have to wait with pulling because otherwise they just wipe.
And later when not so many play you got the gear to survive with a smaller group.

They should make it so you no longer get credit for killing them on different world and then reduce the number of kills required for the achievements. I never liked the idea of having the entire data center coming to kill hunts. They die far too quickly for something that's supposed to be a powerful world boss and it causes horrible congestion issues for people native to the server. The likelihood of someone pulling early, even accidentally, greatly increases when you're sitting there waiting for hundreds of people to come.

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Originally Posted by Espon

They should make it so you no longer get credit for killing them on different world and then reduce the number of kills required for the achievements. I never liked the idea of having the entire data center coming to kill hunts. They die far too quickly for something that's supposed to be a powerful world boss and it causes horrible congestion issues for people native to the server. The likelihood of someone pulling early, even accidentally, greatly increases when you're sitting there waiting for hundreds of people to come.

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Seriously underrated comment.

Hunting was a fun activity when it was server-wide, even if it meant that hunting was a bit limited (12 A-ranks per spawn window, S-ranks being a bit more limited). Instances didn't nearly explode in a hunt train, let alone S-rank or SS-rank spawns and the whole thing did not require Discord or size-reduced Cross-World Linkshells to organise properly. I worry that depending on how Datacenter Travel within logical datacenters (Chaos <--> Light) will work that it may further escalate some of the aspects of the current hunt culture, for better or worse depending on who you ask.

While it is true that it allows you to complete the corresponding achievements in a reasonable amount of time and you essentially have an absurd surplus of tomestones, hunt currency and clusters for Materia, it does strain instances a bit and is rather unviable for people with weaker hardware, especially in the currently popular "comes first serves first" mentality. I am currently unable to participate in hunt trains since the scale of the trains simply escalated past my physical limitations.

I want to stress that I see neither side as "wrong", I only wanted to again point out problems with either system.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

S rank hunts are not designed for everyone to be there.
Stop trying to clog up zones to the brim with people before pulling. Once there's a sizable group it's fine to pull imo. It's open world content, they shouldn't be gatekept on some virtue that doesn't really exist. Witch hunting people because they pulled an open world mob before someone else deemed they be ready is a terrible thing that happens.
Not to mention you may end up keeping people not hunting from even entering zones because most instances are gone now and look man, I gotta catch that big fish. S ranks are back up in a couple of days some of those fish take weeks to respawn.

tl;dr: early pulls don't exist, late arrivals do.

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Imagine spawning Safat and it dying before you even manage to find it. Yes, early pulls do exist.

I remember spawning an S rank a few years ago. We waited for 10 minutes and people still complained we early pulled.

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Originally Posted by Wolwosh

I remember spawning an S rank a few years ago. We waited for 10 minutes and people still complained we early pulled.

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The problem isn't really that we are never happy despite how long we wait, the problem is that we have no quantifiable data of "when was the first sighting" within the game client due to no actual timer (shield buff duration) being present. Taking the time required to relay hunt information into equation, someone who received the notification 5 minutes late will either "give the benefit of doubt" that their source was late or will think their source was fast on relaying, thus they feel like the hunt was early pulled.

If there was a visible timer about "when was this sighted", the amount of complaints of "early pulling" would dwindle into nothingness.

Just need to make them respawn and those that's already killed it be put on a cooldown so they get credit for killing it again till there cooldown is over. That way others can have a chance at them. How it is now before you can teleport there it is already dead.

Agreed, Hynaku.

Having played both Shadowlands and this, and yeah I know it's considered kinda gauche here to praise WoW but ... I'm going to say that after experiencing Mechagon (last xpac), Korthia, and Zereth Mortis, that WoW is handling rare mobs and world bosses infinitely better than XIV.

They respawn relatively fast (mostly; ZM has a few that, like S ranks, require specific things be done to pop them even when available and Korthia had that one rare where you had to sit and wait for it to build its stacking buff to transform into its "real" form - imagine if you killed an A rank too soon and it only counted as a B rank ...) but you can only get full rewards from them once per day (week for the raid-size WBs). They gain HP dynamically as more people join the fight, so there's at least a fighting chance for more people to get there in a way there isn't in XIV.

As a result it's also less of a big deal if you miss one because it'll be back relatively soon, which means that salt is oddly enough fairly minimal for rare hunters in WoW vis-a-vis hunters in XIV. Everything is handled ad hoc in the zone, unlike XIV where basically everything nowadays is done through city sized Discord servers (Linkshells? Unless you're in the elite spawner linkshell for your world, those are usually just good for getting a steady diet of too late relays lol) which in turn has a heavy effect on player culture (as you're FORCED to participate in mega discords in order not to be effectively locked out of content).