The Hunt - S ranks pull

Hello, mates.

A few days before Christmas, a player started claiming all the Chaos S ranks at the time of arriving. THat behavious persists nowadays.

While I think it's not against the ToS, it's really rude not to collaborate in the spawning of S ranks and not respecting the spawners decision to wait for others to join.

As a measure against this kind of behaviour (before people get frustrated and stop collaborating spawning S ranks) I would propose some kind of 5-10 minute veil (alike Ixion) that only the spawner (or any of the spawners in NMs that require a group) can break by attacking or the time has to expire so anyone can land the first hit.

That would prevent leechers (I don't want to mention the one we are sufering in Chaos) to start the battle whenever they want without have been involved in the spawning process.

Cheers!

Agree with OP, there's one particular individual who ruins S ranks in the Hunt for all other players. There's an unwritten rule that you gather when an S rank is spawned and let the spawner pull. Instead what happens with this person's actions is that ARR and HW ranks die early, and SB/ShB/EW ranks end up hitting (and with EW ranks) killing people who have gathered. Something like what OP has suggested would help to make hunting S Ranks fairer for all players, especially if common courtesy and patience is ruined by one bad apple.

It would have to be 3 minutes at most, and that wouldn't guarantee the ShB/EW marks survive longer. Most of these are also spawned by groups of people, so giving one person a buff wouldn't help.

What matters more is when the mark dies. At least over here, people seem perfectly fine when one is pulled after 2 minutes and dies in 30 seconds, but take issue when someone charges in and everyone hesitantly chips away for 5 minutes. You might as well blame the people who are unloading all their cooldowns just because they see the mark attacking someone, as if hitting it once doesn't give full credit.

It being an unwritten rule is precisely why they're ignoring it.

Unfortunately there are players who aren't interested in being courteous to others but SE's intent for the hunt has always been kill on sight. If SE responds when the subject comes up, they repeat that hunts are kill on sight and they have no plans to change that.

With this being patch week and players wanting Causality for their relics, you're going to have a lot of early pulls because players want to be able to get to the next spawn as fast as possible. There's not much that can be done about it.

Encourage the community not to attack immediately if something is pulled early or to get one hit in then stop attacking. That will buy a little time for those still on the way.

If you're using the Faloop third party app, manually release immediately once the spawn location is confirmed. The delayed release only hurts those in the community who rely solely on Faloop and aren't also using one of the other third party tools.

Things will be better about a month from now when those who usually don't hunt have their relics completed and go back to other content.

By the way, it's really silly to refer to just the early puller as a leech when 95% of those who show up are leeching and never assist with relays let alone spawns. Either they all are or none are.

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Originally Posted by Kurohi

That would prevent leechers (I don't want to mention the one we are sufering in Chaos) to start the battle whenever they want without have been involved in the spawning process.

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Name and shame them or shut up. Do you know why this kind of behavior doesn't happen on JP data centers? It's because when someone tries to do it, they get blacklisted by every PF known to man and several hundred naked male roegadyn lurk around their house to harass them into no longer playing the game.

Are you spawning the S ranks? No? Then get off your high horse.

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Originally Posted by VictorSpoils

as if hitting it once doesn't give full credit.

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It doesn't. SE needs to change the formula to make it so that you don't need to be in a party to get 100% of the rewards.

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Originally Posted by Astrahime

It doesn't. SE needs to change the formula to make it so that you don't need to be in a party to get 100% of the rewards.

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Maybe, but as it stands right now, all those people sitting in full parties don't have to unload their entire kit or continuously spam Tomahawk to get it.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Unfortunately there are players who aren't interested in being courteous to others but SE's intent for the hunt has always been kill on sight. If SE responds when the subject comes up, they repeat that hunts are kill on sight and they have no plans to change that.

With this being patch week and players wanting Causality for their relics, you're going to have a lot of early pulls because players want to be able to get to the next spawn as fast as possible. There's not much that can be done about it.

Encourage the community not to attack immediately if something is pulled early or to get one hit in then stop attacking. That will buy a little time for those still on the way.

If you're using the Faloop third party app, manually release immediately once the spawn location is confirmed. The delayed release only hurts those in the community who rely solely on Faloop and aren't also using one of the other third party tools.

Things will be better about a month from now when those who usually don't hunt have their relics completed and go back to other content.

By the way, it's really silly to refer to just the early puller as a leech when 95% of those who show up are leeching and never assist with relays let alone spawns. Either they all are or none are.

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This is not a matter of patch week or so. This player has been lurking the server with this behaviour since before Christmas.

Besides that, one thing is SE official stance on hunt matters (kill on sight), but they had to foresee community collaboration or it would be literally impossible to kill the required amount of hunt marks needed to complete some achievements.

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Originally Posted by Astrahime

Name and shame them or shut up. Do you know why this kind of behavior doesn't happen on JP data centers? It's because when someone tries to do it, they get blacklisted by every PF known to man and several hundred naked male roegadyn lurk around their house to harass them into no longer playing the game.

Are you spawning the S ranks? No? Then get off your high horse.

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I'm not sure if that would be considered harassment, as as I said, I think that behaviour is not against the ToS (though someone mentioned, in-game, that community disruption is against the ToS, but I'm not sure). So I will not say the name of this Twintania server player.

Soon you can spawn lvl50 S mobs as lvl100, and if you get unlucky some random guy will kill it before you even get to it. Then you can't really blame it on the "leecher", who were not entitled to anything in the first place, right?!

I think they should do something to prevent that at least. And there are many ways to do it. Spawn it later after triggered but with an indicator, spawn it with fading buffs, spawn it as hidden fate, spawn them all on max lvl, or give a message directly "A powerful hunt has been spawned in the southwest direction" or something like that.

I think they should make hunts more difficult too. Especially S and SS ranks. Those are kinda world bosses alike, so they should hit a truckload and have a lot of aoe spells.

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Originally Posted by Kurohi

Besides that, one thing is SE official stance on hunt matters (kill on sight), but they had to foresee community collaboration or it would be literally impossible to kill the required amount of hunt marks needed to complete some achievements.

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I wasn't thinking about your early puller specifically when I said that but the community in general. Patches are always chaos because people get tomestone crazy. Those who only hunt at patch release aren't going to care who pulls, they just want it dead so they can get to the next one. But those people will disappear within a month, leaving hunts to the community regulars. Your early puller will still be around but his antics will be less effective because the community regulars (should) know to wait.

Chaos isn't the only data center with early puller problems. All the NA data centers have them and we've learned to cope mostly by giving the community tips on what to do when an early puller appears (or someone accidentally facepulls).


SE knew some players would cooperate with each other, of course. But they were thinking in terms of a dozen or so online players from the same linkshell and not the hundreds out of the thousands of players that can be connected through Discords that now show up. What has happened with hunts since the start of Stormblood and even more so after world visit was added is far beyond what they planned for the content.

Aether is suffering a repeated early puller, too. The Aether DC community at large shows a profound resiliance and sticks to the "tag and step back" method. It's disheartening to witness the mark dead while many are en-route. "Hug the Aetheryte" tactic, cross-world linkshells, and a web companion aids are not helpful enough to reach the mark on many occasions.

OP's proposal: The Spawner's Perogative

A veil, or some sort of limited buff giving the perogative to spawner would be a solution to the immediate problem. Of course it would expire within a fixed amount of time to prevent a lost opportunity for all. This solution would curb anti-social behavior in a normally collaborative endeavor. Hunts are one of the few casual endgame activities and shouldn't be competitive. OP's proposal would also solve the fast kills on Forgiven Rebellion, where spawners are forced to spread across the map, and often the furthest participants miss the kill. The developers have been so careful to avoid competing loot streams in most activities; yet, these S-Ranks are a limited resource. Equally, anyone can purchase a level-boost and solo lower-level S-Rank marks without skill or time invested. The barrier of entry is low for this anti-social behavior, intentional or unitnentional.

Another problem needing addressed involves mismatched levels in hunts. I have met a few players who have their early MSQ progress impeded by A-Ranks blocking quest NPCs.

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Originally Posted by Glasshound

Aether is suffering a repeated early puller, too. The Aether DC community at large shows a profound resiliance and sticks to the "tag and step back" method. It's disheartening to witness the mark dead while many are en-route. "Hug the Aetheryte" tactic, cross-world linkshells, and a web companion aids are not helpful enough to reach the mark on many occasions.

OP's proposal: The Spawner's Perogative

A veil, or some sort of limited buff giving the perogative to spawner would be a solution to the immediate problem. Of course it would expire within a fixed amount of time to prevent a lost opportunity for all. This solution would curb anti-social behavior in a normally collaborative endeavor. Hunts are one of the few casual endgame activities and shouldn't be competitive. OP's proposal would also solve the fast kills on Forgiven Rebellion, where spawners are forced to spread across the map, and often the furthest participants miss the kill. The developers have been so careful to avoid competing loot streams in most activities; yet, these S-Ranks are a limited resource. Equally, anyone can purchase a level-boost and solo lower-level S-Rank marks without skill or time invested. The barrier of entry is low for this anti-social behavior, intentional or unitnentional.

Another problem needing addressed involves mismatched levels in hunts. I have met a few players who have their early MSQ progress impeded by A-Ranks blocking quest NPCs.

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What about those cases where more than one player was involved in the spawn? What determines who gets to be the designated spawner, especially on something like FR where half the players in the zone are going out after the minions (with the largest group all too frequently going to whatever spawn was closest to the S rank then immediately beelining to FR's spawn point) while the rest camp the spawn point? Or when you have multiple spawners hitting a node at the same time so it's hard to tell whose hit triggered the spawn?

S ranks may be a limited resource but they're also not the only source of tomestones and hunt currency. At most you miss out on a kill toward an achievement count but there will always be the missed kills on occasion.

What needs to be addressed is the attitude in the community that 100+ players, including the spawners that have already invested a considerable amount of their time so the community would have something to kill, need to be held up from doing the other things they want to be doing for the sake of the 2 or 3 entitled people who feel that others should wait for their convenience. The 5 minute pull standard was adopted because that's enough time to get to any S rank once the relays start going out (one minute for relays to get passed between linkshells, one minute to get to the zone, max travel time from Aetheryte to farthest spawn point is 110 seconds, an extra minute to help out with loading issues).

Re: A ranks interfering with MSQ progress. That's been part of the game all along. A quick shout to Novice Network or FC friends will usually take care of that A rank. Something that is helpful to share with new players is that A rank hunts aren't especially trigger happy (S ranks are less tolerant). As long as they're just talking to a NPC or interacting with a click object close to the A rank, they should be safe as long as no one else comes by and starts attacking it. Just make certain they approach the NPC or object in such a way that the A rank is on the opposite side of it.

If SE could choose whether they want each S-rank to reward:
50,000 sacks of nuts
50,000 poetics
40,000 uncapped tomes
15,000 capped tomes
500 materia clusters
across 500 players

or

5,000 sacks of nuts
5,000 poetics
4,000 uncapped tomes
1,500 capped tomes
50 materia clusters
across 50 players

They would choose the latter to require players to spend more time earning these rewards and more time subscribed. If anything, the hunt community has always impressed me. Doing their best to maximize rewards for all. It is antithesis to most of what the MMO community has been for some time.

I'd like to suggest how I would reduce a majority of frustration (and by extension, harassment) involving S and SS ranks.
While not against ToS, the friction is caused by a minority of early/instant or accidental pullers appearing before a reasonable amount of time has passed to account for world-hopping congestion.
I'm not interested in a discussion about what is and how to deal with it, but what could be:

I believe if S and SS ranks spawned with a 5-min Invincibility buff it would act as a built-in pull timer and account for the early puller vs congestion conflict.
The 5 minute duration (the length can be debated) or nature of the buff (could be 90% mitigation) is arbitrary to me so long as a majority of people are able to strike the elite mob even should an instant-puller act.

They're not going to put in a buff because it's overworld content and no single player can own that.
If anything we should encourage quicker kills instead of clogging up instances preventing players who don't even want to hunt from entering a zone.

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Originally Posted by Ezera_Alastar

I believe if S and SS ranks spawned with a 5-min Invincibility buff it would act as a built-in pull timer and account for the early puller vs congestion conflict.
The 5 minute duration (the length can be debated) or nature of the buff (could be 90% mitigation) is arbitrary to me so long as a majority of people are able to strike the elite mob even should an instant-puller act.

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I have no strong feelings for or against a 5 min invuln period since that's more or less what tends to get followed voluntarily. While I don't like the idea of an invuln period in general, most S ranks are up for at least 5 minutes after spawn before they get pulled so it wouldn't be increasing the wait time in most cases.

I would be happy to bet that within one week of implementation, players would be demanding for it to be increased to 10 or 15 minutes because they'd be missing out just as much if not more than they were before it was implemented. Instead of those occasions where it's really getting pulled 7-8 minutes after spawning with the courtesy and cooperation of those already present, S ranks would start getting pulled the instant the invuln drops off and no one would be holding back for the sake of those still on the way.

So 5 minutes I wouldn't object to. Longer than that and I would. That's too much time wasted for too many players who have other things they would also like to be doing.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

They're not going to put in a buff because it's overworld content and no single player can own that.
If anything we should encourage quicker kills instead of clogging up instances preventing players who don't even want to hunt from entering a zone.

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A short invuln period takes away ownership, which is fine in my opinion. There are too many out there who act like they and their friends own the hunt as it is.

A 5 minutes invuln wouldn't cause zones to become any more congested than we're already seeing. The game already throttles how many can teleport into a zone each minute. More players wouldn't be able to enter the zone when the game won't let them in.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

A 5 minutes invuln wouldn't cause zones to become any more congested than we're already seeing. The game already throttles how many can teleport into a zone each minute. More players wouldn't be able to enter the zone when the game won't let them in.

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Right and we need to avoid this.
By killing it asap.

If you've gotten to the zone limit, you've failed your fellow players.

I'm thinking of a flat invul buff that is there only during certain times, like the release of an expansion where hunts are invul and unaggroable could be very helpful by giving people time to arrive. It doesn't need to be owned by anyone. I'm not sure if the instance limit can technically be expanded upon, so I can't think of much. It's abit more like the multi-instances and this buff can be removed after sometime.

I don't think it's possible for SE to have control over 'who spawned this' since this is open world content and anyone on the map could've been hitting the mob required to do it, or met the spawn requirements on accident.

I was a spawner for quite awhile and while I understand our desire to share the hunt we worked on with as many people, early pullers will unfortunately exist and while inconvenient, the majority of people usually wait. An invul and aggroable mob will be a disaster as trolls can just aggro the S rank and take it to where people are standing.

I feel like we'll just throw ideas into the void, I don't think SE will add anything like that.

I feel an invulnerablily buff is a bad idea as it breaks kill on sight. A level down aura that weakens over time would be best. Weaker attacks slow down kill while still leaving teams to slay as intended.

What they need to do is increase S ranks HP to at least double what it is now. This is 7.0 item level and S ranks live to about 45sec to 1 min unless there is a train in the zone which in that case they live about 30-45 sec. Same thing goes to A ranks. When 7.5 hits s ranks might as well just spawn dead at that point.

The Veil OP mentions is attempted by hunt tracking websites like Faloop, but it is also at the same time negated by the use of 3rd party tools

Almost impossible to truly achieve spawner veil now

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Originally Posted by Pantouffles

There's an unwritten rule that you gather when an S rank is spawned and let the spawner pull.

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There isn't and it's not my problem. I'm not obligated to follow fantasy rules someone made up in their head.

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Originally Posted by EponaTBHSMH

The Veil OP mentions is attempted by hunt tracking websites like Faloop, but it is also at the same time negated by the use of 3rd party tools

Almost impossible to truly achieve spawner veil now

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Spawners don't own what they spawn. So sorry that Faloop can't get that in their collective head. It would cut down on a lot of the drama.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Spawners don't own what they spawn. So sorry that Faloop can't get that in their collective head. It would cut down on a lot of the drama.

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Honestly aside from threads like these, the only "drama" I see is people getting mad in shout chat when someone pulls early. As long as SE will consider open world stuff free for all, wasting time arguing about it or trying to find solutions is useless or at best band aid, Faloop or not.

if you buff their HP you risk creating another issue of instance getting capped, and people complaining about not being able to get into the instance while the S rank is dying, there's no real solution to all this

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Originally Posted by EponaTBHSMH

Honestly aside from threads like these, the only "drama" I see is people getting mad in shout chat when someone pulls early. As long as SE will consider open world stuff free for all, wasting time arguing about it or trying to find solutions is useless or at best band aid, Faloop or not.

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Not only that but "early pulling" doesn't exist. Some people need to get that into their brain.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

Not only that but "early pulling" doesn't exist. Some people need to get that into their brain.

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Early pulling does exist when it steals from the spawners. Get that through your head.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

Not only that but "early pulling" doesn't exist. Some people need to get that into their brain.

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I get what you're saying

the thing is the concept of early pulling is something that's been created by the community entirely, mainly out of fear of missing out and people wanting a chance at nuts, tomes and achievements, which is the reason why these threads pop-up and people get mad in-game

Personally while I think of it as an inconvenience and would love for people to be nice since we're all after the same things in the end, I've come to terms that it's part of the ride, especially now that I know SE stance on it, I believe people shouldn't be entitled to getting hunts, whether you be a spawner, whether the hunt is in your world and people are coming from other datacenter.

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Originally Posted by Tygari

Early pulling does exist when it steals from the spawners. Get that through your head.

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No, it doesn't.

SPAWNERS DO NOT OWN WHAT THEY SPAWN.

Repeat that over and over until it sticks in your head.

Then repeat THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN EARLY PULL IN KILL-ON-SIGHT CONTENT until that sticks in your head as well.

I spawn and conduct to help the greater community. I encourage reasonable patience and cooperation to give other players a reasonable chance to participate. If someone wants to pull a S rank while everyone else is still waiting to give others time to arrive, I don't yell at the person who pulled. Instead I encourage everyone else to be patient and watch the puller solo the S rank for a bit.

"Early pulls" wouldn't be a problem in most cases if most of the hunt community wasn't a slave to FOMO and copied the "early puller". As long as you get a hit in before it dies, you get credit for the kill.

I also respect that SE designed the Hunt to be a free for all, first come first served. If others prefer to hunt differently, I respect that. If I'm out scouting for a train and run into players already killing one of the hunt marks, I'll let them know I'm scouting the train, about when I expect it to start, invite them to join the train and wish them luck with their kill. Once I get the rest scouted, I circle back to where the mark was to see if they killed it or not.

You know what? Most of the time it's still there when I go back and those players join the train instead. It's there because I had respect for their right to engage in the content as they wish instead of giving them grief and yelling "YOU CAN'T KILL THAT YOU HAVE TO SAVE IT FOR THE TRAIN". It was still there because despite what some treat as a terrible crime, I invited them to join the greater community and still wished them luck in killing it. I made them feel welcome instead of making them feel like pariahs.

Get it through your head that your rage and hate for others that hunt within the rules of the game even though they aren't hunting the way you want them to is the worst possible thing for the greater community. That is what creates most of those "early pullers" you rage about - players who had simply been playing the game and other players started harassing them for it. Why would anyone in their right mind want to join a player community that treats other players that way?

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Originally Posted by Pantouffles

There's an unwritten rule that you gather when an S rank is spawned and let the spawner pull.

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Unfortunately an unwritten rule is only a courtesy and not an actual "rule". It's not against the tos to pull at any time or allow specific people to pull it. It's open world and anyone is allowed to pull when they want. Just because there's link shells and discords on NA servers for trains and S ranks call outs does not mean it's a game rule, it's just a community rule. I hunt A ranks in ARR and HW solo when I see em. I could call it out and then wait but its faster if I just kill it and get my reward and move on.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

No, it doesn't.

SPAWNERS DO NOT OWN WHAT THEY SPAWN.

Repeat that over and over until it sticks in your head.

Then repeat THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN EARLY PULL IN KILL-ON-SIGHT CONTENT until that sticks in your head as well.

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How about you repeat "I won't steal from spawners". Over and over. Something needs to change.

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Originally Posted by Tygari

How about you repeat "I won't steal from spawners". Over and over. Something needs to change.

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What needs to change is the attitude of entitlement within the hunt community that has swelled to enormous proportions since content creators popularized the Hunt during COVID. Even though the same shenanigans were going on pre-COVID, the community didn't turn it into drama when people missed out.

Now it's a constant stream of drama because of people like you who don't help spawn, don't help scout and don't help conduct talking about things you only hear about through third party hearsay.

i think it'd be nice if s ranks had a sort of people-in-instance sync the way the dawntrail fates do right now. i'd prefer that to a 3-5 minute invulnerability from spawn because sprouts unknowingly spawn stuff all the time, and the attempt to wait 3-5 minutes for attendees when it's finally shared would happen anyway. i also just don't like the idea of the invulnerability. i love sharing s ranks because that's how i got my 5,000 s rank achievement, but it's still technically open world content. SE has punished people messing around hunts a handful of times since i began hunting regularly mid-shadowbringers (thank you, discord!! no thank you, linkshell and cross-world member limits :^( please increase cross-world linkshell member limits!!!!!!!). dawntrail fates' hp sync does seem to need a bit of work, often because people leave due to dying too much or a different hunt was announced or shared, but i think it would help a ton!

are you still going on about the incorrect information i gave you as a sprout hunter years ago :eek: my bad lol