Open letter to Yoshida: Your preview on The Hunt is misleading

[Wolf_Gang]

Dear Yoshida,
Last monday, you gave us a preview of what we can expect from the new Hunt feature. This is what we extrapolated from the letter:

"...those of you looking to amass large quantities of Allied Seals, you can acquire as many as you'd like from hunting down elite marks. Just be warned that sometimes they can be hard to find, and even harder to kill. Players who don't have quite as much time on their hands, however, can use the Hunt board to slowly build up Allied Seals at their own pace."

So the 3 points you made were:

• Elite marks are hard to find.
• Harder to kill a Mark alone than find one.
• There is a casual alternative to acquiring seals.

The reality of the hunts are the complete opposite what you intended:


Finding Elite Marks are pretty easy.

You completely underestimated both the information networks and ingenuity of players. Many of the elite marks themselves are on simple timers. It was only a matter of time before people figure out what the elite marks are, where they spawn and their spawn rate. Maybe it would have taken in week, in reality it took a day. One day after patch, over 90% of elite marks have been exposed. It just a matter of whether you're in that information network or not.

Then there's FFXI-APP with Radar plugin:



This app only reads the game's memory, making it very difficult to detect and has been in wide spread use since 2.0 The Radar plugin specifically, showcases all the mobs within a wide AOE radius of your character on screen. It also has the ability to filter the elite marks with it's embedded XML. Players are simply stationing people in different zones with the app enabled and finding elite marks within seconds of their spawn. This allows a small group of people to completely monopolize all the elite marks


Elites marks aren't so elite.

Remember this little gem? You sure gave the impression that these were a real danger to the world:

Take this guy for instance. Although I managed to take a few screenshots, it wasn't long before our eyes met, and I was introduced to his gargantuan club. Needless to say, I died instantly, but it was worth it to give you all an idea of what new dangers await in patch 2.3.

Maybe these marks have the right amount of HP and the system simply tailored around small-man encounters. But with information networks and the easiness of finding marks, there will always be a high distribution of hunters per mark. Even in small man encounters, the marks pose little threat. Me and a small group burned through an S-rank faster than most FATEs. Unless these Elite marks have some 1-shot abilities, it's not entirely impossible for some of them to be even solo'd.


Granted, we were all wearing i90+ gear. But if Elite marks aren't tailored for us, then who? This brings up the next point:

There is no Casual pace of obtaining seals

What constitutes a casual? You can buy Myth gear with Seals for 20-30 a piece. At a reward of 7 seals a day, we can see how the grand company bills could suffice for new players. But is buying your first set of Myth armor what makes you a Casual? Casuals want Sands of Time, too. The rewards are so disporportional you absolutely have to farm hunts in order to get any reasonable amount of Seals. Not to mention the hunts themselves also give a huge quantity tomestones and because there's no cap on consumption, you're creating an unfiltered stream of competition for every single mark.

[Wolf_Gang]

The solutions this feature needs are:

1. Better distribution of players throughout the world
2. Difficulty of Elites need to scale
3. Daily/weekly bills need adjustments
4. The Elite mark rewards need to be lowered

My proposals:

1. Better distribution
Having the entire server go after one B-Rank Elite is way too much competition for a "casual" option. Many ways to allievate this but I propose: Weekly Kill Caps - You only recieve a reward once per kill. e.g. Killing the same elite mark a second time gets you zip.

There can be hunting log containing all the marks and when you kill one a check mark appears with it's description. Signaling you've completed THAT bill for the week.

S-ranks can continue to be unrestricted but locking loot on B/A ranks will distribute players more evenly throughout the week.




2. Difficulty scaling
Similar to FATEs, the HP of Elite Marks should scale based on number of ppl who killed it last. (or any other criteria your system will allow). B rank were intended for a small (1-2) ppl but if 20+ people are consistently killing it, their HP should scale to accomodate.


3. Daily/weekly bills need adjustments
These can work similar to leves/treasureMaps. Either way, the rewards are too small for a "casual" player to obtain AS at a reasonable pace.

4. Nerf Elite marks rewards
There is just no way around it. Players will find all the marks and with the help of tools, it will always be easy. The only way around this is to lower demand. Rewards for killing an elite mark are just too high and disportionally higher than instanced content. A blanket cut of Seals, myth and soldiery per kill will help lower the incentive.

[Gerolan]

Apart from the nerf the seals a lot, I agree with every point you have made and wish I could like it 100s of times.
As someone that has eight characters though (it's an addiction) the current system pre all those cheating means I can cap sold on them all
But fantastic post and liked!

[DracotheDragon]

i do agree with this more then the others, having a hunting log with the elite marks who are a challenge to both high level people and casuals and a limit on the kills will stop people zerg rushing and wiping out the rare monsters

[samurailargo]

the log idea is great. and restricting it to getting getting bonuses once per week would give everyone a chance, but they would have to adjust things to fit that way. It would solve the zerg rush we have seen all week, having it die down later as the week goes on. the guildleve/ map idea is not so bad either. personally i would like to see a mini-quest/game with rank B hunts. Its sad that people are monopolizing hunts on some servers. I do hope they find a solution to this issue.

[NyssaElf]

Wouldn't it be simpler to make B like A, A like S and S like Odin. Also tack on an extra million health and a bunch of one shot mechanics. The Zerg would still be there but would take that many to kill it. Not changing spawn rates for A and S and lower Bs maybe. I doubt the Zerg will change since you have a chance of getting books from the monsters themselves. Why does everyone always want caps? Caps means less to do.

Pretty sure this a lot of what you said I just don't agree with lowering marks. There are so much grinding as is. I don't want a cap either

[RyuDragnier]

Wouldn't it be simpler to make B like A, A like S and S like Odin. Also tack on an extra million health and a bunch of one shot mechanics. The Zerg would still be there but would take that many to kill it. Not changing spawn rates for A and S and lower Bs maybe. I doubt the Zerg will change since you have a chance of getting books from the monsters themselves. Why does everyone always want caps? Caps means less to do.

Pretty sure this a lot of what you said I just don't agree with lowering marks. There are so much grinding as is. I don't want a cap either

The problem is that when players abuse the system too much, limits come into play to punish them. Unfortunately everybody else gets caught in the crossfire. Expect a cap or some other nerf to the amount you get in response to everything.

[NyssaElf]

The problem is that when players abuse the system too much, limits come into play to punish them. Unfortunately everybody else gets caught in the crossfire. Expect a cap or some other nerf to the amount you get in response to everything.

So why not just up the challenge instead of nerfing it out curiosity?

[Jacost]

So why not just up the challenge instead of nerfing it out curiosity?

Because they're not meant to be challenging. Putting a cap on rewards would actually make the system behave almost the way it's meant to.

[Zyrusticae]

I really don't understand why they made the Myth gear so cheap in seal cost (literally within the double digits each), and then turn around and make all the GC gear cost THOUSANDS. What the frell?! This makes no sense!

I mean, when you do that, and then turn around and make it so that ONLY elite marks give anything resembling a decent amount of seals, it's no freakin' wonder people start chasing after these things with wanton abandon. People want that gear! And the only way to do it... is to farm these things, so in the end you get hundreds of players running around killing these things INSTANTLY the moment they show up. It's stupid. It's beyond stupid. How did this happen?! How did they overlook this?!

So, yeah. I agree with pretty much everything in the OP. Reduce the crazy reward disparity between elite marks and daily bills. That alone would do wonders for improving the palatability of this content. That, plus that hunting log addition, plus difficulty scaling would easily make everything much, much better.

As it is? MONTHS of doing daily bills just to get ONE GC weapon? Yeah. Yeah, no. Forget you. That's not cool, man.