Ideal versus Real

[Ryel]

It's unfair to SE to suggest that they ruined Hunts. I mean, I'm not saying that's what you're getting at, but a lot of people do, so I'm using your post as a platform. Sorry.

SE had the right idea in mind with the Hunt. It was the playerbase that stripmined the content and left nothing but ruin in its wake. I'll point you here for all you need to know about Hunts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfG8qY0dINY

This isn't true.

The burden is entirely on the dev team to design content in a way that this doesn't happen and then to make adjustments when it does. With the way they release gear rewards it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes levels of deduction to come to the conclusion that players will always take the path of least resistance and highest reward. Not only that but the content was re-released in the same state multiple times after repeated feedback on the state of the system, it's also not as if the concept of open world notorious monsters with various spawn conditions is new to MMOs, FFXI in paticular (SE's longest running MMO) has had multiple iterations of content designed around systems like these from NMs and HNMs to ZNMs and various other systems.

Saying "the playerbase ruined the content not SE!" absolves the developers of the burden of creating and designing content, something they're paid to do and something we're being charged for with the expectation of them doing so. Hunts may have been a decent idea on paper but a good idea on paper may not always be a good idea when presented to a live playerbase.