The Hunt is garbage and needs to be fixed

[dspguy]

On Primal, I probably get to about 90% of S-ranks. I'm not on a hunting Discord. I hear it second hand in FC chat or Novice Network. I wonder if this is a DC/community problem more than a hunt problem.

[Jojoya]

On Primal, I probably get to about 90% of S-ranks. I'm not on a hunting Discord. I hear it second hand in FC chat or Novice Network. I wonder if this is a DC/community problem more than a hunt problem.

That's going to depend on what an individual believes the problem to be and what angle they're looking at the problem from.

Too many people showing up? That's because the hunt rewards well when it comes to getting tomestones for low time/effort and streamers started advertising the hunt to their followers when interest in the Hunt had originally been fairly niche. It was true before we had world visit even if some can't remember it. It remains true in the wake of world visit and data center travel. Lowering or removing the tomestone rewards from the Hunt would actually be the best way to remove the congestion problem. The number of players that care about their kill counts for achievement mounts and/or the hunt currency is much lower than the number of players who care about just the tomestones.

That the relics this expansion were acquired entirely through tomestones did not help. In past expansions, most players would have quit going to trains and S ranks once their weekly cap was hit. With the relics costing a total of 6000 Causality (or its predessors depending on when someone started working on them), stopping when weekly cap was hit wasn't enough. They needed to keep farming more tomestones for their relics.

What's the impact of that? Assume the player only gets their tomestones through hunts.

Right now, someone who wants to cap their weekly tomestones via the Hunt would need to attend 8 EW trains or 30 EW S ranks. (Comedy can't be obtain from previous expansion hunts)

Someone just getting started on farming all 19 relics would need to attend 475 EW trains or 1475 EW S ranks to get all the Causality needed (it takes 2 Shadowbringers trains to get the same Causality as one Endwalker train, and it will take 8 prior expansion S ranks to get as much Causality as 3 EW S ranks give). Obviously they're not going to be able to get that all in a single week but it adds massively to congestion since hunts get promoted by some highly visible members of the general community as the best way to farm tomestones.

The congestion is more from game design this expansion because the relics were made tomestone only.

Hunts dying too fast? Combination of congestion and power creep. Hunts at the start of the expansion were far more congested than they are now (despite relics not being added yet). The 36 kill trains were taking a minimum of 90 minutes even as bullet trains, which would equate to 30 minutes for a standard 12 kill train. Bullet trains now can be completed in about 12 minutes. Power creep is massive during end game but the HP for hunts remains the same throughout the expansion because some players don't reach end game until late and SE doesn't want those players to feel excluded as they try to get gear.

Hunts getting pulled before people arrive? All sorts of things contribute to this. Congestion, rapid communication that reaches one part of the community, slow communication reaching another part of the community minutes later, but most of all the problem mainly ends up assuming things. Players assume they're entitled to be part of every kill (they're not), that others are supposed to wait for them to arrive (no one has to wait), that they have 5 minutes from the time they get the relay to arrive (except they received the relay 3 minutes after the spawn and others who got their relays sooner are already itching to pull because they have other things they want to do).

The Hunt is rapid, real time content. Even with a cooperative and courteous community, you don't want to wait because you can never be certain of exactly when a hunt was spawned unless you were in the zone when it did. Drop what you're doing and get to the hunt as fast as possible.