Let's talk about Hunts - a detailed rundown of their assumed mechanics

[NoboruSouma]

Also, they can say 'that's not how it was intended' all they want, that's just burying their heads in the sand and willingly ignoring how things ended up working.

There's nothing else to say except that it seems they don't want to listen to the dedicated hunting community that there needs to be a system revamp.

Since some of them happen without the entire server being there, does that mean someone "pulled early"?

Yes, and you fer sure know that early pulls can happen all the time, even with just a few people on the way. Specially in the night or the early morning where just a few are on the way - they port right into the zone after the shouts, even when it's just ten seconds and someone pulls.

Of course the answer to all of these is "no."

Just proved you wrong.

If you don't want it to be like that, well, then know the people you are Hunting with, and don't call out the Hunts to re-linking shells. Do it with your FC. With your friends. By yourself. With people you know and can trust not to be "early pullers." Either that, or shout it out for the whole server and deal with early pulling.

That's no answer to an existing problem and you should know that it just needs common sense to not interfere with the game experience of other players.

1) If they report it to Ariyala, then they contribute. Period.
2) Are people that only link to certain shells a "selfish drain?" 'Course not.

1) That was not the point of the argument. We, the hunting community, do most of the work with figuring out spawns, timers, contributing to the trackers etc. Lazy people even violate against the ToS while using third party software to hunt which is absolutely no contribution. People even do fake reports on trackers just to interfere with the right reports.
2) Of course they are. Just adapt it to the real world - it just means and gives the feeling of "We are privileged, you are not.". And again, this is just common sense. I would've given you a thumbs up if you said: "You can only have x amount of hunting linkshells and not everyone can be in every existing linkshell, not all people re-report, there are many leechers [...]" and so on.

All you showed was that you approve a system that's outdated with this amount of players and that's okay that this hunting system makes players violate the ToS:

3.2 Disruption. You may not in any way disrupt or interfere with the Game experience of other players, including the disruption of Square Enix's computers and servers.