General "how to fix the hunts" thread

[Immut]

Ok let's get solution oriented here. We all know what the problems with hunts are.

1. They don't live through more than 10 people beating on them long enough for everyone to get credit.
2. You can steal ALL the credit by provoking it and resetting it.
3. If you pull early you get blacklisted
4. If you don't pull early you might lose render due to overcrowding.
5. Every single player in the game is assigned the same hunts.
6. GC gear has some insane damn price tags holy hell.
7. In addition to being fundamentally broken, Hunts are also the only source of Allied Seals.



So how the hell do we fix it?

Suggestions I've seen in other threads:

1. Don't give everyone on the server the same freaking mark. You should feel terrible about that decision. It should haunt you for the rest of your life.
2. Remove non-billed mark rewards. Goes hand in hand with #1. DO NOT DO THIS WITHOUT DOING #1 FIRST.
3. Make them like 1.0 faction leves, where you earn faction leve credits to spend on more advanced leves. All marks are duty bound and initiated through levequests.
4. Make them like FFXI hunts, which were basically the same thing except you used an item to summon them.
5. Make them immune to provoke. I'm going to assume this was just a genuine mistake and not a complete lack of forethought.
6. Make all bills far, far more rewarding. 20 seals is nothing. It's an A rank. 5 seals is less than nothing. There's no reason to even hunt the weekly or dailies when you can just do A ranks. Dailies should be at least 60 seals/day, weekly should be 100 seals or more.
7. Implement faction leves as a separate source of allied seals, tailored towards organized grinding, and leave hunts untouched. This should eliminate the overcrowding problem at the very least.
8. Fix the render priority problem that you've ignored since launch. Making exceptions for Odin and Behemoth does not change the fact that there is a fundamental problem with your engine that needs to be fixed.

That's all I can think of for now. Let's stick to actual suggestions, that way the devs don't have to wade through a bunch of complaints they already know about to see solutions.

[Calevr]

No. I don't like this.

I like it the way it is but maybe they could have alot more hp. I have ejoyed meeting new people through this.

[Edli]

No. I don't like this.

I like it the way it is but maybe they could have alot more hp. I have ejoyed meeting new people through this.

AGree. Just make them scale depending on the amount of players that are near the hunt. 10 players, buff pops up 2x attack/hp. 20 players, 4x. 30 players, 6x. People might actually die to a hunt which along side the added HP will make the fight longer and maybe, just maybe may give us a challenge.

Is that really so hard for SE to implement?

[Alphras]

The main problem with the hunts is, that alot of players are using external tools to find the hunt mobs and then tell everyone in their big linkshells about them. I thought that square would do something about that in todays update ... but no, they don't seem to care.

The Hunt was marketed as challenging content for groups. Now it is just zerging to get hundreds of marks.

[Seibah]

Honestly, the hunts are actually a pretty fun concept. And the actual way they spawn or whatever is fine. The problem is their HP is way too low and the fact that they often times aren't even visible once swamped by a third of the server. As it is, it's not a fight, even S ranks aren't; the entire server throws themselves at these bosses, they're downed in a minute or less, and half if not more of the people there can't even see them.

Buff the HP/Defense etc of ALL Elite Marks very significantly, and fix how long they take to show up on the screen. Even if these hunts are supposed to be a "challenge to get contribution", or whatever, it's morally wrong to use something like "they won't load because we didn't set them like odin/behemoth sorry lol xD" as an excuse for difficulty.

Buff the HP, make them always have top loading priority. People start getting seals, we actually get to experience the power of these so called S Hunts, and the community becomes a whole lot happier.

These are ELITE marks, among the strongest monsters in Eorzea. They should be formidable, not something players will down in a minute.

Honestly I was expecting bosses like, "The eyes have it" in Coerthas or that one chimera fate north of the Ceruleum Plant when I heard of S Marks.

[EllPii]

AFAIK, tagging them is the only way for you/your party to be awarded a Mark-log. These alone saves you ~an hour of hunting if your intention is to get sands/oils.
As mentioned by Alphras, disregarding the need for these hunt mobs to be strengthened, there are still players out there using radar tools to get to the mob first for tagging.
SE needs to fix this issue first, giving players an advantage over players that do not use these tools.

Increasing the seal reward rate is the wrong thing to do, if anything the reward is far too high, some people already have 3+ sands, and this is only day 3.
SE needs to change the reward rate algorithm, rather than simply copy-pasting it from FATES.

[zlotjko]

as someone who is in a hunting ls, i can say its like wild west.
You can get first hand info (someone in the ls or you gets the find) or second/third hand (ls finds out from others ls). Because lots of people are listening (part of those ls), it has the similar effect. 30-60 sec after the information is released, everyone (and their mothers) are at the marks location.

I have seen B ranks die in 3 sec and A in 5 sec. Marks are pulled, not by people who found them, but usually by the same people all the time (ninja pulls).
Without an effective way of sanctioning that kind of behavior, usually it is like this:

- Be in a full party (anything less will give less then max)
- Get info (stop what you are doing, exit the dungeon if its a S rank)
- Teleport
- Pray that nobody pulled already or that will pull while getting to the marks location
- Wait there with the rest of 50 trigger happy hunters and try to get as much enmity for the duration its alive (3 sec B, 5-6 sec A and 15-20 sec S).

While am sure this mechanics will sort itself in time (less people needing the oil/sands/alex or running out of soldiery (items)), am sure there are a few ways of fixing this without much manhours.

- When a mark is spotted (selected for the first time), it can't be attacked for the first 3 min and it can be attacked only by the person who first found it (if he didn't die or is not in the area). After 3 min, anyone can attack it. (at least on A ranks)
- World notification for S spawns (some text "bla bla bla the might garlok roars from his cave bla bla bla" meaning 5/10 minutes till the appearance).
-Increase HP of the marks depending on the number of people in its proximity. Seeing 2-3 randoms killing a weekly targets (when 50 people can get the kill per spawn) isn't fun for anyone except those 2-3 randoms...
- Area notification for A rank spawns (just a notification of a spawn, not the exact position).

[PrettyShambolic]

The ONLY good thing about hunts is they gave reason for linkshells to be used making the game a little more social, which has been a particular disappointment to me as a PC user finding every single Free Company has a "PS chat channel" to exclude half the playerbase. Microsoft are right to want individual servers for the game to launch on their consoles, my biggest problem with this game is that SE took the decision to mix PS3/4 players with PC players without considering the fact PS systems have locked chat channels half of us can't access, so for PC players, the best we get in chat channels is the odd 'hello' when someone logs in while PS3/4 players have the kind of social experience that made me love FFXI.

Why doesn't the game have a built-in VOIP service that all systems can use? That's what should have happened if you intended to mix different platforms onto the same server.

[NovaUltimatum]

Honestly, the hunts are actually a pretty fun concept. And the actual way they spawn or whatever is fine. The problem is their HP is way too low and the fact that they often times aren't even visible once swamped by a third of the server.

So should S-Rank be bosses like these guys?

[Renik]

2. Remove non-billed mark rewards. Goes hand in hand with #1. DO NOT DO THIS WITHOUT DOING #1 FIRST.

No, i want to develop my character in the open world, and non-billed hunts are perfect for me, the solution is simple, the rewards are too good for something that is being played as a zerg, so, reduce the number of myths, maybe by half, and remove sands and oils (books) from drop list and purchases.

There's instanced content where the sands and oils would help more as a reward, revitalizing the duty finder, instead of plaguing the open-world with zerg parties.