General "how to fix the hunts" thread

[Airget]

Or maybe just purchase sands/oil with allied seals?

You're not paying attention to what he's saying, he's saying because of lockouts in CT and Coil, that there should also be a one week lockout for Hunts, since it is a bit ridiculous how "easy" it is to obtain oils/sands from content which is easy compared to something like coil.

With 51 hunts, 17 of each rank the numbers are simple
B=5x17=85
A=20x17=340
S=50x17=850

One rotation of S rank mobs is enough to obtain a sands of time, and about 2/3 of that is enough for the oil.

S ranks do appear to spawn on a daily or at least 2 day basis, with that in mind gaining 850 really isn't that tough but the aspect of it becomes more hostile because of the potential reward from allied seals. It was a mistake for them to add a concept which had no limit to the amount you could gain in one day and offered a reward to allow you to obtain il110 gear with the least amount of resistance.

Since this is another thing to keep in mind, obtaining allied seals, 500 and 750, goes across the bored, so with the time that use to be spent doing coil to give 1-2 people a chance at a sand/oil now those same groups can just spam hunting to gear up and everyone can recieve a sand/oil in pretty much the same time frame.

It kinda makes coil content useless and it's understandable why comments like "should remove the limit in coil/CT now" are there because it is true, when you pretty much offer the best item through an open world event, that has no restrictions and in that time you can also gain mythos/soldier seals, what reason do you have to do the other content.

In a way, Hunts in their current form are dealing with the same exact issue that Retainer ventures had when they were first introduced. They offered a reward, which made doing other content feel less rewarding and trivial cause hey why fight levi Extreme if the furniture can just drop from the sky and into a retainer inventory.

[Craiger]

3. If you pull early you get blacklisted
So ? If you pull early, you deserve to be blacklisted... When I find a Elite Mark, I first of all tell it to my Linkshell and FC, because I know people won't wait long and I want to give them a headstart. Then I call it out in /shout. I'm perfectly fine to wait several minutes before pulling. But there is always someone who gets there and just jump at the target as soon as he gets there.... I don't bother blacklisting people, but I don't blame people for doing it. They ruin the experience for many players.

Was gonna comment on more of your points, but I don't have time... I'm just gonna say that I don't agree with most of your solutions at all...

1.) The first thing they should fix is their HP as many have already said
2.) Fix the contribution for the fights... Even if I'm in a 8 man group, and I start attacking as soon as the fight starts, I might not get full reward on S ranks, cause I'm lagging. You shouldn't be punished for lagging. It's not like it's a hard fight.
3.) Fix the cheating that's going on in the community... Yesterday a PF group was created, I joined it, and I walked to the location the others where standing. 2 mins later the S rank Elite mark spawned at that exact location....
4.) Lower costs of GC armor, I'm not gonna spend thousands of Seals just for some Vanity...

Probably more, but I don't have time...

[OranKells]

this is the problem of an open world without lockouts. No strategy to any of these hunts. It comes down to a zerg fest where you have to scratch claw and pray to get your pound of flesh in for the credit. These reminds me of Odin back in the day when hundreds of players swarmed on him and he was dead in seconds. I arrived at a rank S fight the other day and didn't get credit not because I was too late, but because the monster wouldn't load on my screen due to the mass of people in the way.


I see a number of solutions:

1) scale them up X1000000. so that when the entire server goes after it we can all get credit
2) don't scale them up but lock them out to all but the party/alliance(cmon 2.35...) that claimed it. Who knows these hunts may actually prove challenging.
3) rework the reward system somehow? incentive the weekly hunts more? Also weekly hunts perhaps shouldn't be shared by everyone. Hunting Naul is a nightmare and I can't imagine a rank A or S will be any better with the current system. Maybe you only get the full amount of seals for each hunt once a week regardless of the bill? I'm just spitballing here.

[Dyvid]

snip

Then you're just going to have to deal with another group of people complaining about lockouts. Fact is you can't please everyone. I'm doing hunts for GC specific gear so I need to kill a lot of elite marks. By putting a limit on how many I can fell in a week, you place a negative impact on that goal. If Oil/Sand is the issue then charge 500 seals for them.

[odintius]

I was hoping this would be more challenging feature not another zerg fest 2.3...

[Purrfectstorm]

SE could make the mobs only appear for a few minutes if unengaged. Problem solved.

[Dyvid]

I was hoping this would be more challenging feature not another zerg fest 2.3...

Like I said, give it a month or two when everything calms down. Right now everyone wants to play the new shiny content.

[Edli]

3. If you pull early you get blacklisted
So ? If you pull early, you deserve to be blacklisted......

Don't be ridiculous. You're not in his party, not in his FC, ls. He doesn't owe you anything. You're a complete stranger and he isn't obligated to wait for you. Calling him names, blacklisting him is childish. Is the system at fault here not the players.

[Nukocafe]

Like I said, give it a month or two when everything calms down. Right now everyone wants to play the new shiny content.

It's not going to calm down when people can spam this and gear up faster than spending every week battling through coil or CT lockout.

[Shougun]

Wonder how feasible it would be to setup local instances multiple times over.

Short explanation:
FATE systems, as have been demonstrated in other games and this, have a hard time balancing new content- however they are great to find new people and also just to casual wander the world without a decked out party (don't need to have a hardcore group at your beck and call to possibly succeed). An idea to mix the two systems is to allow players to jump into squadrons by an automated system and fight the boss at known limits, if you know the max amount of players and you can plan around classes a little then you can greatly control the experience vs FATEs of the unknown. This would prevent* new content zerging as it could not actually happen anymore, it would ensure proper challenge, allow more dedicated boss mechanics, still allow players not to be hardcore party hunters, and not have a hardcore claim system. *creating many instances could cause the servers to crash depending on how the server instancing system was set up.

Just wadding out the new content time in a FATE system will help, but this will always be a problem in the systems currently in place- a change must be made or just expect this always.. for a few weeks or so.

Long explanation:

Basically when you go to fight one of the large hunts it would instance you with a number of other people attempting to do the hunt. In this way the top amount of players fighting the monster is maxed and monster is thus easier to control in terms of balance and fun.

How would you make it not look lame to drop a bunch of players from your screen when crossing into an phase/instance? I think this would be awesome, use one of the classic final fantasy battle screen changes like the whorl or screen shatters we see in games like FF7 or FF10 (I know the effects are in other games but I imagine those two are the most known). So at the same time you get the screen transition effect you will be fighting along side other players in a given instance.

Few problems I foresee with this is that you could have someone just attack, get loaded into a slot of that local instance, and then just hang around doing nothing. I recommend a point activity system for that. Some sort of classic devil may cry bar for doing actions, the higher you get the activity the more points you can get (to gold or something). Bar would be balanced to particular classes, so no worry about being a tank vs healer. Also you could just transfer this system to other FATEs so people can see the likely hood of getting a bronze vs gold. Now the purpose of the above system would be to ensure a minimum level of activity or else you fade out of the local instance.

Parties would join as units of course (no separation). There would be a class counter to ensure a phase is not all one class type. I imagine a party finder tool would be useful, just a flag you can set up once you've spotted the monster- will quickly put other players looking for a party together and then you can join the phase together.

I imagine allowing players to join another on going phase until the monster is 65% hp wouldn't be too bad. Also very importantly you must not allow players to rejoin another instance after their monster has died, or at least cannot double the credit- but can still help (otherwise you could abuse the system). After you kill the monster there could be some sort of special astral effect put on the monster or area of ground he is on to show that there is a monster there still for other players but defeated, or just not show the monster anymore but the mass of players going towards an invisible spot would be weird..


This would take care of all the claim issues, the balancing issues*, but would also lessen the hunt aspect unless they added more traveling to them- they'd be more of an assured weekly so long as you could get a group or shout for one once you found them.. To increase the hunting aspect you could set a timer after the monster is first killed that after that time they will find a new location to be hunted at (like 30 minutes after first being killed the monster will accept more phases to be made).

*FATEs and FATE like systems will always have balancing issues impossible to make akin to a boss you'd be used to (what I see most players complain about, that mostly they are 1 hit kill mechanics and zerging). You must have known limits otherwise it is unlikely to see the perfect scenario.