Hydaelyn is beautiful, and it is utterly wasted

[starmorph]

As for the long tough FATE chains, i actually like them. The world doesnt have to be soloable- its an mmo. Bring friends.

This is all well and good for smaller scale stuff like HW Hunts/FATEs which are doable with a party, but on a grander scale the likes of which OP seems to be suggesting we're talking about organizing full raids worth of people on a whim.

[Nixxe]

You are stating what you like, which is fine. But you haven't provided any support that the current system is any better either. Overall this is not constructive. What do you like about the current system and why?

Relative to your system, it's less obnoxious, fosters greater community participation, and is more open ended. Things like spawning S ranks are generally a group activity and there are entire communities built around doing the hunt. And you want to reduce it to another type of B rank with a weekly mark bill? Gross. I don't even like that for B ranks and even though 100 centurio seals is actually kind of decent now that I need them to level desynth, I don't bother doing the weekly as it is. I'm sure your system is great for people who pretty much just want nothing to do with the hunt, but want the rewards, or people who are scarred for life because oh god one time someone didn't like when they pulled, but for people who actually do hunts regularly, you'd really just be ruining everything.

[Derio]

I do think hunts and fates should see a major overhaul, but story driven engaged fates are fun but how many do you expect them to make

[Zojha]

If there was a chance to get good rewards people would flock to them.

If there was a chance to get good rewards, people would also flock to jumping down cliffs. You'd see whole lemming trains at the Witchdrop in Coerthas Central.

Does that make jumping down cliffs a fun and engaging type of content that deserves to be developed further? Maybe develop fall poses you can combo mid-flight and a rating on landing? Bonus points if you manage to land with the body parallel to the ground?

(Truth be told, that doesn't even sound a lot less fun than your run of the mill FATE >_> )

[Airget]

If there was a chance to get good rewards, people would also flock to jumping down cliffs. You'd see whole lemming trains at the Witchdrop in Coerthas Central.

Does that make jumping down cliffs a fun and engaging type of content that deserves to be developed further? Maybe develop fall poses you can combo mid-flight and a rating on landing? Bonus points if you manage to land with the body parallel to the ground?

(Truth be told, that doesn't even sound a lot less fun than your run of the mill FATE >_> )

Ya, it just sad thing is Hunts are already toxic without having any form of a unique reward. Imagine if a unique reward was added, it would be a nightmare.

Heck maybe making a new DOL that is based around finding rare mobs could actually be an interesting gimmick. You'd have to fight them on DOW/DOM but the "Hunter's" Role would be to use their abilities to find unique mobs, some would be "common" and easy to find maybe even easy to subdue with the Hunter alone and then you would have the "Unpoiled nodes" like mobs that you would need another player or job at X level to defeat.

With A/S rank hunts they could have it where X amount of Hunter's need to reach a goal in order for the hunt to reveal itself or an X/Y like situation, where let's say 1 A rank needs 20 X if it's 1 Y or 10 X if it's 2 Y, Y being the amount of time each Hunter needs to complete the objective in order for the mob to reveal itself.

It could potentially lead to more engaging content, the Hunter's themselves/any involved in completing the objective would be given 2 perks, 1 being the ability to change their job to a DOW/DOM without any timers down and the 2nd being unique loot for revealing the Hunt mob as a Hunter. Of course said loot would only be claims if the mob is defeated.

[Melonlycake]

There is a strong disconnect with what is told versus what is shown.

Amal'jaa abduct Ala Mhigans to be tempered. They're cowering and crying for help as you fight the beastmen off- they are if you fail. Later you kill them. It's very dangerous, and it's shown. NPCs talk/react, but you get background you couldn't have through context alone via those blurbs. It's not flawless, but in the confines of the medium it's very effective.

GW2s model actively blocks progress through a zone. It isn't easy to get players in old content without buffing the rewards- reward buffs throw off balance in other game modes. That's the problem: you can't keep scaling rewards for easier or older content, and you can't make that content so difficult it's impossible when it's no longer relevant. An active, changing game/world will render content obsolete by its nature. Open world needs to be largely accessible. More involved content is and should be instanced.

[Lycieus]

Beefing up FATEs or Hunt marks will not last as incentive. If the rewards do not scale with content as it is released, it will only make it less accessible.

I would suggest rewards should scale with time. It would be as simple as having them drop a separate currency. Or dropping some ilevel of gear that is perhaps 5-10 levels lower than the current dungeon gear(not the tome gear, the greens that drop in dungeons).

[Shougun]

Would love to see the hunt system work more like self spawning, when they first announced it I really thought of it more like it was in FFXII (Hunt Board + Hunt Leves). They do have the minor hunt system that is cards, just to be "fair" but still different than what I hoped/expected.

Leve has you draw out the monster by doing a series of tasks, reward and challenge can scale to the character (if they want the system to last longer) but that the content wouldn't have to dynamically scale and more importantly could have limits making them better than FATEs/Hunts. Part of the issue with the FATE/Hunt content is their challenge can't really be designed that well - expectation is non-existent because we have large and small servers and different play points, so you can have people join and leave of vastly different numbers and making content interesting to that vast dynamic situation... it basically can't rely on basic combat to be interesting. Can't make compelling (basic combat*) content when you can barely expect what your combat situation will be (the mass death of Odin being a bit unique, but he is not a normal example).

To compound this issue the reward thus becomes scaled on the flavor of the month, like in a leve you have specific restrictions and systems that makes the reward efficiency rather straight forward and consistent but with Hunt/FATEs its not. When the new job/classes come out FATEs become massively effective (and zergfest/boring - imo) which scaled the reward of FATEs up drastically over dungeons (and absolutely destroyed the interaction/gameplay element due to the amount of people), because they were done so fast it made the time per reward vastly higher. So SE is designing/relying on a system that is inconsistent in both it's enjoyment performance and its reward.. I've never really supported them as a compelling piece of content ;/ (imo).

*The few dynamic things I tried on a friends computer in GW2 were interesting because it got around some of that issue by making the interaction more interesting (like FFXIV has a "few", very few, interesting FATEs that do above the norm of spawn a monster at you - where the interactions are new or at least the story itself is well displayed like steps of taking over/losing an outpost). So the ones where things change in the world in FFXIV or have different than regular presentation I still enjoy (the combat isn't the fun part, its experiencing the change of pace or presentation and "story" that becomes the fun), even though they're FATEs but those kind of FATEs are really rare - and it seems like the ones I did in GW2 that sort of "interesting" difference was more common (although again, I've not played it a lot - just played on a friend's account a bit).

I understand that not all content is made for one person, so I'm not suggesting that everyone hates them, but in general I've found FATEs/Hunts to be a rather uninteresting content that I only do if the reward efficiency is best at the time (and not because of interest in the content itself, I'd rather do anything else). And at the points where FATEs/Hunts are the best time efficient reward I wish the entire time that SE made another content better or at least equal to them because I just don't like it as a content. Although I'm not suggesting that FATEs need to be removed and agree that some brain dead ones are good, but the number of interesting ones I hope increases drastically - and as for Hunts Id love to see a system in parallel that works just as effectively for players who want to solo/duo/small group content the overworld (in general I feel like the leve system has a lot of great opportunities that just need to be addressed in terms of reward (also how they're picked up/delivered), and perhaps how they generate - since leve system allows for a much better control on the combat / interactive experience).

Oh, and yeah the over world is incredibly pretty - hopefully they can mix their ARR and HW styles together, love the scale of the later but ARR's more hand touched details are nice.