The Hunt is garbage and needs to be fixed

[LianaThorne]

Hunts went from this cool, player driven thing to a Discord ping. That's my issue with Hunts. I know it's still player driven, but before you kinda had to know the people on your server and get into a Linkshell and there was effort on the player to Hunt. Now it's join Discord server mute everything but the ping you want and follow the ping. The social aspect of it has just evaporated. It's another example of cross world travel killing an aspect of a server's community.

It's definitely way more accessible now. I'll give it that. No longer do you have to try to get into the secret club, but at least to me, it felt better when it was Linkshells. It gave it purpose. Now, hunts are just low effort tome caps and gear upgrades.

I find myself participating way less than I did before. That's my TLDR.

I mean, to be fair, there are way more people now doing hunts than before. It would be pretty inefficient to try to get like 100-200+ people organized with just word of mouth. The devs also made hunts the most efficient way to grind tomes for relics so that's probably also making things feel worse than before. It might not be ideal but I understand why people ping rather than just run through servers shouting for hunts or relying on just linkshells. People want to get into as many trains as possible and Discord allows for cross-DC hunt attendance.

[Ardeth]

I mean, to be fair, there are way more people now doing hunts than before. It would be pretty inefficient to try to get like 100-200+ people organized with just word of mouth. The devs also made hunts the most efficient way to grind tomes for relics so that's probably also making things feel worse than before. It might not be ideal but I understand why people ping rather than just run through servers shouting for hunts or relying on just linkshells. People want to get into as many trains as possible and Discord allows for cross-DC hunt attendance.

I understand why it's like that I do. I'm not advocating for some way to limit people from enjoying it. That old system had its own issues as well. It's just that the more and more we can connect, the less we actually do. We've turned Bill's Hunt Train into The Dynamis Hunt Train. Bill's still running it, but he's been knocked off the card. He's just some guy now. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. That social aspect of it is dead. I just don't connect with it the same way as I did with it before. It has become a lesser thing to me now. Meaninglessly cheap content to cap with. And maybe it was that way before, but it felt like more. It had heart, and you can't really fake that.

So yeah, we have more people than ever doing hunts than ever before, but socially, it feels like less. Now, don't get me wrong, you can still get those people who make it worth it, but it's so sterilized now. Hell, if you don't know that there's a Discord for it, you'd never even know the hunts were even happening. It's just ironically a flawed system that works too well in the wrong direction. You take people away from the game for a feature in the game. Content in the game. You can't hunt without Discord, and that's bad.

Your only other option after that is constantly checking the Party Finder or being lucky enough to have someone in your FC relaying it. And why would someone willingly handicap themselves? So they go to Discord. I'm not one man crusading on Discord. We all use it. You have to now, but we shouldn't, and that's my issue. Skype wasn't required back when I started in 2012. We used it, but it was limited to actual friends. It had more soul to it. Now you join Discords left and right and cheapen the point of it all. It's social media, not anti-social media.

Anyway, this old man is going to go yell at clouds.

[Reinha]

The devs also made hunts the most efficient way to grind tomes for relics so that's probably also making things feel worse than before.

If the current relic wasn't a tome weapon, this wouldn't be an issue. It wasn't an issue before. A rank trains gave the same amount of tomes in previous expansions, but the people who were doing relic quests were doing them in other content because they had to.

So imo the problem with the efficiency is not because of hunt design, but because of relic design.

[Jojoya]

People aren't getting mad about early pulls because they missed like 30 tomes or whatever. They're mad because you need to kill the dumb thing 1000 times for a mount. Enjoying the content is irrelevant.

Personally I'd say that enjoying the content is extremely relevant. No reward is worth doing content you do not enjoy.

There are plenty of mounts in the game that require far less effort than the hunt achievement mounts. Maybe people should stop and think about why they feel obtaining those 3 mounts is so important hen they'll likely never use those mounts past the first week of getting them.

Sounds like a lot of time wasted that could have been spent doing things that they, I don't know - maybe enjoy?, instead.

People bring more grief on themselves over their obsessive need to collect and/or complete things that amount to nothing the moment they stop playing the game and don't really have any particular value in the game either. Insanity at its finest I suppose.

So uh, the best way to fix hunts is to keep them scaled to players lvls instead of them just being glorified world mobs. It is that simple and would make them more fun and keep them from being one shot.



Also why the hell would you remove rewards from content? Criterion and Variants are literally dead because of the lack of rewards, what kind of nonsense? Good thing Yoshida wants to increase the rewards in the game baseline LOL, Peak rage bait.

Did you know that Criterion and Variant aren't dead as content to all players? There are rewards for doing that content. There are players using those rewards and selling them on the marketboard.

The content may be dead to those only concerned about power progression but that's not the entire player base.

Content doesn't have to appeal to every player to be worthwhile and plenty of players repeat content despite no longer getting any rewards they want/need.

Why do they repeat it? Because they enjoy doing it and that is what matters to them in the end. When there are players willing to repeat content despite a lack of rewards, the developers have done something right with the content design.

I mean, to be fair, there are way more people now doing hunts than before. It would be pretty inefficient to try to get like 100-200+ people organized with just word of mouth. The devs also made hunts the most efficient way to grind tomes for relics so that's probably also making things feel worse than before. It might not be ideal but I understand why people ping rather than just run through servers shouting for hunts or relying on just linkshells. People want to get into as many trains as possible and Discord allows for cross-DC hunt attendance.

I wouldn't say the developers made it the most efficient method. Instead I would say that the developers allowed players to turn it into one of the most efficient methods.

A good group of players could spam level 90 dungeons and get Causality almost as quickly. The difference is there is more personal effort and responsibility required when spamming dungeons.

The organized hunt has become the simplest way for most players to get their tomestones and now some are looking to get it changed so there is even less effort and responsibility needed.

If the current relic wasn't a tome weapon, this wouldn't be an issue. It wasn't an issue before. A rank trains gave the same amount of tomes in previous expansions, but the people who were doing relic quests were doing them in other content because they had to.

So imo the problem with the efficiency is not because of hunt design, but because of relic design.

It was an issue in the past.

We had overcrowded trains in Stormblood when players were still limited to their homeworlds.

We had overcrowded trains in Shadowbringers because they were always a good way to get tomestones.

The overcrowded trains in Endwalker have been a longer lasting issue due to the relic grind but they haven't been unique to Endwalker.

We will no doubt continue to have overcrowded in Dawntrail because players are used to the convenience in getting their tomestones.

Technically, it is a hunt design problem in that the design make the trains viable and a good source of tomestones for the time spent. If the respawn windows were 2-8 hours instead of 4-6, trains would be stray clean up at best instead of full 12 mark trains most of the time. You'd see a lot more spontaneous kills on sight because who is going to have the patience to wait around for 6 hours for the rest to show up?

If the average player could farm level cap dungeons for their tomestones and get more in the same time it takes a train to clear 12 marks, players would move back to dungeon spam from trains because it would be more efficient. I know that the more highly skilled players can get the tomestones faster via dungeon spam even now but the average player in a group of average players can't.

[Reinha]

If the average player could farm level cap dungeons for their tomestones and get more in the same time it takes a train to clear 12 marks, players would move back to dungeon spam from trains because it would be more efficient. I know that the more highly skilled players can get the tomestones faster via dungeon spam even now but the average player in a group of average players can't.

Another factor is that it's mostly about hunts vs dungeons, and many people are fed up with the same boring dungeons. At least with hunt trains there is a sense of being in a hurry and more lethal mechanics without you being held back by anyone else. But dungeons... holy mother of tediousness, it's so slow and an incompetent party makes it even worse.

Why is there no other content that drops a significant amount of tomes? Savage, extremes, criterion and the most recent normal raids give worse tome rewards for time spent than dungeons or hunts do. If hunt rewards were nerfed then other content should be buffed to compensate for that. There is no need to make dungeon spam the only "overcrowded" piece of content by giving it disproportionate rewards that trump literally everything else.

[Nonoliri]

Be the spawner and you won't miss out.

I've been the spawner and missed out. I once spent an hour killing mobs at the end of a window and when it spawned in, I didn't know where in the zone it had spawned in. But someone else had found it and pulled it, and a group of people got to it before I could.

Honestly, I'd just like it if when an S rank spawned in, there was like a... few minute period where it was invulnerable. Just to let people get to it. I can understand someone not wanting to wait around for 15 minutes for everyone else on the server to finish up what they're doing and getting over to the mark, but at the same time when a mark can die before the person that actually worked on spawning it can get to it, something seems wrong.

[tsuchii]

Garbage in every way imaginable

[Doomed_Raven]

The only time I found an S rank mark as a newish player, was in the churning mists. I went away for 2 mins, came back to where I was mining and there was like 80 people there. I only managed to change class and hit it once before it died.

[Aniise]

Hunting has lost it's appeal to me during Shadowbringers, when the trains and Worldtravel became a thing.
Before that, I was an avid S-rank Spawner and A-rank searcher. Finally spawning that S Rank or spotting that A Rank that others missed, calling it out and see the people flock in one after another was a fun way to spend time.
Now? This content is mostly locked behind discord, not everyone can even become a spawner, to get in you need to be 'someone' within the hunting community, and now you gotta conduct a whole train.
It became boring and stale, and on top of all, it feels so meaningless.
I join a train, I kill one A Rank after the other, I feel nothing.
No joy, no accomplishment, nothing.
Only boredom.

Maybe at least lock hunts to your homeworld or something. That might help the whole situation maybe a tiny bit.
How to stop the trains by now, however, I have no clue. I think that might not even be possible at this point anymore.

[Azurarok]

I was lucky enough to be in an empty enough train to see DT marks do their mechs like 2-3 times and they're fun. They should shorten some of the cast times and/or the amount of time it takes for them to start casting. I want to see more bodies on the floor