Would you all like to see something beyond S-Rank Hunts?

[RiyahArp]

That's dynamic - it changes while the fight is in progress, not when it's over, leaving the boosted difficulty for the next group to deal with. By my system I'm suggesting, the next time it spawned, it would be at low HP again, and again scale up as people join the fight.

The idea is a bit more "do you really want SE to muck around with things like they did with FATES?" But your idea...you just made people joining the battle into increasing liabilities. If you combine this with very hard mechanics, you are giving no real incentive for anyone to share hunts or wait, as opposed to have a single FC lowman it as much as possible.

Then you get into the point of "why is it in the open world anyways?"

I think it would be interesting if they did things like try to attack settlements and the goal of the players would be to drive away the monster rather than outright kill it. This could also be used as a balancing mechanism since just throwing more people at the monster to fight it might not be enough to keep it from destroying a village if people aren't able to deal damage fast enough. If the monster takes too much damage it will leave, but still be alive. If the group is really good they'll be able to kill it before it flees.

FFXI did exactly this with their tales of aht urghan expansion. Essentially you had mobs invade a part of the main city's zone, and if you didn't drive them off you'd lose things like teleports and goods. You would have to regain it back later.

The problem is that the culture of MMOs has changed I think. You'd need a lot more of a server awareness and culture to be willling to defend zones, and in FFXI you always used the zones that were under attack. Here i don't think many people would care if the ruby sea was lost, for example.