Make S ranks hunts more engaging and "fair"

[Jojoya]

snip for character limit

It just dawned on me that you're EU and so you're probably being impacted by Faloop hierarchy and Early Access versus Public Access BS.

Seeing things from that perspective, your idea then seems like a better solution because it takes notification control out of Faloop's hands and puts it back into hands of anyone who wants to hunt, not just Faloop's favored and privileged children.

Regarding engaging fights, depending on what you consider "engaging" hunts may never reach that level. Even the SS ranks have a small number of mechanics that aren't difficult to learn. A level sync isn't going to make them all that much more engaging once the mechanics are known. They'll still just be target dummies with higher HP pools in the long run. Most of the fun comes from being part of the "flash mob" that appears to kill them.

Trying to "make the system more robust against griefing" would also remove part of the challenge to getting the SS to spawn. You would effectively create a "can't fail system" instead of a system where there is still some risk of failure. SE has to balance any proactive anti-griefing tools they would create against how it impacts the intent of the content.

What SE's exact reasoning is for the hidden timers I can't say. If I were asked to guess, I suspect it's because they're prefer to not have large crowds of players camping zones for hours at a time when there are other players using those zones for reasons other than the Hunt. Players are far more likely to act when the information is freely given to them than if they have to make the effort to seek out the information. Again, that's just what I would guess.

I don't have any problem with world travel being quicker if SE has the ability and desire to do it. My problem is with players who think that other players owe them time and should have to wait excessive periods so they and more random players from other worlds can take their time and still get credit.

I'm glad for the discussion. SE needs the broader overview of how different members of the community see the content if they are considering possible changes. If SE did decide that change is needed, either I'll adapt or I'll quit the Hunt. Nothing lasts forever.

[CidHeiral]

A small, organized team of 2 or 3 players can now quickly kill ARR/HW S ranks before the dozens of people on the way arrive. If done repeatedly and on the entire DC, it can deny content to interested players. Particularly to PS4/HDD players, or people who moved away from the Limsa aetheryte for a second. This is not a hypothetical: it has happened

Those 2-3 players would be well within their rights to do so. Hunts are a free for all. Waiting around for other players to show up to the kill is a purely community created courtesy. In any other MMO the only rule would be "you snooze you lose." I think it's great that people wait for others to show up to S rank kills but a small group that chooses to take one out on their own isn't doing anything wrong.

[LilimoLimomo]

You mentioned that the purpose of these trackers (discord/websites) is to share the information with as many people as possible is a good thing. But on the other hand you think that having world-wide chat notifications about spawned S ranks and where to find them would remove "the hunt from the hunt". It seems like having the information gated behind another app/website is somehow more appropriate than having the information in the game. I can't follow this line of reasoning. Wouldn't making the information available to more players with less barriers be "better"? On the other hand it seems we agree on the fact that ls/cwls are too limited and that tools that extract the locations are "bad", although it seems you have resigned to the status quo.

In my opinion, the thing that still makes The Hunt a hunt is that the game doesn't automate this; players are doing it. There are specific activities that need to be accomplished for A- and S-ranks to spawn, and players do that manually. When S-ranks spawn, or when all the A-ranks for an expansion are available, players announce the "event" on hunt linkshells; this shares that information with players who have actively joined such linkshells. The players gather together and kill the targets together. All of these acts — spawning, spreading knowledge, joining and listening to linkshells, and travelling to the targets to kill them are manual and intentional activities that players engage in. The more of these the game does for you, the less of a hunt it is.

And honestly, I think it's beautiful. I've played other games where similar activities were highly contested, first-come-first-serve. But in FF14, players have banded together and generally speaking try to make sure that everyone who wants to can get to Hunts and reap the rewards. The devs didn't make this happen, the community made it happen. We made the decision that to the best of our ability, nobody will get left behind when Hunting. I know it's just a video game, but that kind of compassion and community-minded spirit genuinely gives me hope for humanity.

[forksapien]

OP has made some very good points and suggestions.

IMO, the things SE should consider improving:

1. S ranks from older expansions can be killed too fast.
Right now, no lv50 players will do lv50 hunts, no lv60 players will do lv60 hunts... etc, everything are blasted down by lv90 players in seconds. This is probably not the hunt SE devs intended. JellaW said S ranks on the whole DC can be blocked by 2-3 people. If this is actually happening with malicious intent, it should be fixed. People have already proposed good solutions.

2. Discouraging use of plugins that give people advantage.
Surely SE is aware of this, and probably hard to do anything against it.

Things that are not really SE's fault:
1. Antisocial behaviours on EU Light (pulling, resetting, despawning SS etc)
Faloop organises hunts on both EU Light and Chaos. Light is full of drama but Chaos it's very pleasant. There must be some system that Chaos admins are using to keep griefers out, and it's missing on Light. IMO this is not SE's fault - Faloop admins on Light should ask Chaos admins how they regulate their community.

[JellaW]

Those 2-3 players would be well within their rights to do so. Hunts are a free for all. Waiting around for other players to show up to the kill is a purely community created courtesy. In any other MMO the only rule would be "you snooze you lose." I think it's great that people wait for others to show up to S rank kills but a small group that chooses to take one out on their own isn't doing anything wrong.

Players are indeed within their rights to do so, the issue comes from how easy it is to grief other players this way. And it will only get worse with gear creep. The suggestions in this thread don't impede players to engage with content however they like, just to make it more difficult to grief and deny gameplay to others on purpose.

[JellaW]

Things that are not really SE's fault:
1. Antisocial behaviours on EU Light (pulling, resetting, despawning SS etc)
Faloop organises hunts on both EU Light and Chaos. Light is full of drama but Chaos it's very pleasant. There must be some system that Chaos admins are using to keep griefers out, and it's missing on Light. IMO this is not SE's fault - Faloop admins on Light should ask Chaos admins how they regulate their community.

Having witnessed some of this myself, all DCs regularly have issues with antisocial behaviour. Chaos DC did have its own share of drama in the past, when cross world visit rocked established communities. Light alternates months of peaceful hunts with some weeks of instapulls/snipes. And the culture is different in each DC: in Chaos it is frowned upon to use/rely on 3rd party tools for Hunts, in Light they are much more common. Perhaps the abundance of 3rd party tools makes people more individualistic and antisocial, instead of coordinating within the community for Hunts. And no admin can do anything about it, while SE has a laissez-faire policy for 3rd party tools.

[Jojoya]

@Jojoya Thanks for the edit tip!

Regarding your points:

You mentioned that the purpose of these trackers (discord/websites) is to share the information with as many people as possible is a good thing. But on the other hand you think that having world-wide chat notifications about spawned S ranks and where to find them would remove "the hunt from the hunt".

I was thinking in terms of the notifications that you mentioned that would tell a player when a hunt was nearby, not just in terms of S ranks. If you're only thinking in terms of S ranks after they've been spawned, I'm fine with that.

I want to say the Q&A that included the question about converting hunts to a FATE style system happened sometime during Stormblood. I don't have a direct link, just the memory that the question was asked and the response was "we're very unlikely to make this change due to the effort required to convert the old hunts".

There is no way to make the system more robust against griefing without removing the challenge intended. We're not intended to have a free pass resetting minions to keep them engaged until we can get more players to show up. Those who want to grief will continue to find ways to do so unless they get banned.

SE made the choice to hide the spawn windows. By doing so, they've encouraged the community to cooperate and share information with others. The more information that SE makes available to players at a basic game level, the less reason there is for the community to interact.

The hunt system was never designed with world visit or data center travel in mind. I'm sure if SE could speed up queue times without risking some sort of instability in the system, they would. But speeding up queue times just means more players arriving faster and those at the tail end of the queue still miss out when the hunt is pulled before they arrive.

QoL is always nice but too much promotes a sense of entitlement to rewards without effort. The more convenient SE makes The Hunt, the more players who currently ignore it will start to participate. The hunt community has already created the proverbial double-edged sword with the relay system. Those getting a relay feel entitled to participate even if that means a couple of hundred other players sitting around several minutes waiting for them to decide to show up. Then there's the anger, insults and sometimes harassment when people choose not to wait.

SE makes the final decision about what they want the content to be. So far, they've shown no sign they want to change things. Considering the current problems within the hunt community, I doubt they're going to increase convenience and make it worse.

[CidHeiral]

Players are indeed within their rights to do so, the issue comes from how easy it is to grief other players this way. And it will only get worse with gear creep. The suggestions in this thread don't impede players to engage with content however they like, just to make it more difficult to grief and deny gameplay to others on purpose.

You cannot grief anyone by killing an S rank because there is no wrong time to kill an S rank. The only instance where this is the case is intentionally resetting SS hunt minions to despawn the event, which the GMs do take action on if reported.

[JellaW]

You cannot grief anyone by killing an S rank because there is no wrong time to kill an S rank. The only instance where this is the case is intentionally resetting SS hunt minions to despawn the event, which the GMs do take action on if reported.

Not quite. The automated response by the GMs is that, even if "early pulls" are not necessarily against ToS, they can take action if they determine it was done with malicious intent. Those are their words. The issue is proving it, and SE has provided no guidance to do so. That's one of my requests: to clarify what counts as malicious and how to prove it.
For example, if someone repeatedly pulls and quickly kills older expansion S ranks despite being aware several people are on the way and being told so.
On SS minions despawns, we have reported several cases on the Light DC over the years, with no change.

My overall point is: Hunts are in a strange position in the game. They provide relevant rewards for current content: uncapped tomestones (all A/S ranks) and capped tomes (EW A/S ranks). With the EW relic grind being fully about uncapped tomes. And yet it's content that can be fully trivialized. ARR/HW marks can be killed too easily, and if a lot of players gather for EW marks, they die so fast they never get to cast mechanics. While almost all other sources of lv90 tomestones require some form of synced duty effort, Hunts give them for little effort to the average player. That is a clear imbalance. Changes like level sync or HP boosts would force players to actually engage with the content, and promote cooperation in an mmo.

[Jojoya]

My overall point is: Hunts are in a strange position in the game. They provide relevant rewards for current content: uncapped tomestones (all A/S ranks) and capped tomes (EW A/S ranks). With the EW relic grind being fully about uncapped tomes. And yet it's content that can be fully trivialized. ARR/HW marks can be killed too easily, and if a lot of players gather for EW marks, they die so fast they never get to cast mechanics. While almost all other sources of lv90 tomestones require some form of synced duty effort, Hunts give them for little effort to the average player. That is a clear imbalance. Changes like level sync or HP boosts would force players to actually engage with the content, and promote cooperation in an mmo.

The imbalance occurs because of the rewards. Remove the endgame tomestones from all hunts and you massively reduce the interest in participating.

That's far easier for SE to do than to redesign hunts. Players would still get Poetics, hunt currency and appropriate credit toward any hunt achievement they might be working on.

Also, there aren't nearly as many level synced sources for the endgame tomestones as you make it sound. You've got prior expansion hunts for Causality and a few daily roulette bonuses for Causality and Comedy. That's it. Any other prior expansion content rewards Poetics at best even when synced.

SE could remove the Causality from older hunts but I don't think that's going to accomplish much.

They could set hunts to only credit players on their home world. That would fix many of the complaints but would add new ones.

They've told us they have no plans to spend time and effort converting old hunts to a new system when the time and effort could go toward creating more content. That doesn't necessarily rule out revising future hunt content.

They also have no desire to change HP or other stats on old hunts. They want them to continue to be accessible to groups of players of the intended level (even if that rarely happens in practice).

This is a sample of the community making their own problem by trying to be too nice to those that are only interested in the reward and not the content itself.