Remove the hunt until the system works as intended.

[Dark-Saviour]

Pretty soon, end-game is gonna be for purely bragging rights.

Cool. A step in the right direction.
Now if we could just get people to stop caring about 'bragging rights'.

[Fahzewn]

So far, what I got from this thread was that NMs HP pool is too small for the amount of people running around, some people are using 3rd party apps to "find" the mobs (how SE did not expect this is beyond me giving the history of their previous MMO(s)) and that some are classy enough to leash the mob to reset it so they can get a "chance" at full credit while others who might have had it already is screwed.

Maybe they(SE) should start with that first? If it's possible to work on those things, maybe it would be reasonable for more people.

NMs could behave similar to Rift's open world boss/event system where the HP is based on the amount that is in the zone and maybe after X amount of time a stacking debuff(takes more damage as time goes on) appears on the NM in case the zone is "heavy" at the moment but no one is bothered to help kill the NM.

The 3rd party apps...let's face it, there is probably no way to fix this other than making the NMs trigger/force pops whether they were FATEs(no thanks)/Leves/GC Leves.

Leashing...tricky as someone could drag it around preventing anyone to kill it if they unleash them (though I can see the puns now if they ever have a Kraken type NM). Maybe it has a area where it acts normally but once pulled outside of it, it enrages and drops whoever(DT move?) is dragging it around? Get it back in it's area and it returns to normal with HP remaining what it was when it left. A and S mobs only?

In the end, I like the system overall and I just randomly run around to look or see the shouts. If I get em, great, if not, oh well and I move on to the next thing. I think it is working as intended but the oversight was the reaction the players would give with something like this. Open world material is important I think but not everyone is going to like it.

[Hybris-Maenad]

Quit slapping "casuals" onto this. Most raiders are after these to gear up their alt classes as well.

Last night I kept changing my chocobos' name to that of the A rank names and the majority of people chasing it and crying when I put it away were some of the servers more well known raiders.

The majority of players cheating the system are raiders. Why the hell would a casual have ffxiv app(or other memory readers) anyway?

[Rbstr]

Quit slapping "casuals" onto this. Most raiders are after these to gear up their alt classes as well.

Yeah it's certainly not the "casuals" farming the hunts. You have to be very organized to get serious reward from it. Several people scouting, logging the times of death and being in the zone for the ~ hourly spawn.

The B- and A-ranks are obviously not intended to be huge events that you call dozens for.
Combining that with the fact that the per-hunt rewards are so small (hundreds of B ranks to get the most desirable rewards) it really encourages folks to try and monopolize them.

I think they should add a weekly seal cap, something like a good item (sand or whatnot) every two weeks. Then bump up the rewards some to make it so you don't need to get every B-rank the ever spawns to make decent progress on the cap.

[Velhart]

I think they should add a weekly seal cap, something like a good item (sand or whatnot) every two weeks. Then bump up the rewards some to make it so you don't need to get every B-rank the ever spawns to make decent progress on the cap.

Or add a cap in general. Can only get 250 allied seals a week. Bridge it so its only possible to get a Sands of Time every three weeks and Oils of Time in two. Might be hectic at the beginning of the reset for the week, but at least it would die down by the end of it.

[Sygmaelle]

Or add a cap in general. Can only get 250 allied seals a week. Bridge it so its only possible to get a Sands of Time every three weeks and Oils of Time in two. Might be hectic at the beginning of the reset for the week, but at least it would die down by the end of it.

Yeah sure and only one S kill allowed per month while we are at it. You can get 2 sands & oils per month in Scob if you rotate the attribution properly + 1 oil in ST per week, why on earth you want to put a lock on something that require like minimum 10 hours worth of play to get ONE sand (if you dedicate your time at hunting that is) where you can clear the whole Scob in like 1 hour twice and get 2 of them, mmm ?

VS 1 sand or oil every bare minimum 10 hours.

I dont know but I think its pretty fair here. Oh and btw I have like 150 allied seals since its out and i just need one oil + one sand to finish my gear + some drops in Scob, so yeah im not really a desillusional casual, even got my ha spear.

Im fine with people puttin a lot of time at gettin all their soldiery gear which is already beein time locked (450 per week, you need 2 weeks for your biggest upgrades, twice, which is one month alone for just 2 pieces), even more so by seein them upgradin the gear with sands / havin UAT by doin ST.

They are doin much more efforts than your average Scob raiders who simply had to down content once and then have a guaranteed upgrade each week + HA gear. I mean come on, its like 10 - 15 hours of learning per fight x4, then 1 - 3 hours per week big maximum.

In term of time I say that it is roughly the same and these persons wont have HA, nor Savage titles. Give them a break for mindlessly farmin mobs that disappear as fast as they spawn for hours, its investement too.

Im not trolling btw

[Felessan]

I think they should add a weekly seal cap, something like a good item (sand or whatnot) every two weeks. Then bump up the rewards some to make it so you don't need to get every B-rank the ever spawns to make decent progress on the cap.

I said it before, i'll say it again - it's much better if hardcore crowd get what they want and leave in 2 weeks then if they are forced to do it over 2-3 months.
I myself need around 4 sands and 4 oils for main & off specs. I can get it in a week time of farm and i most probably will stop going to hunts leaving it to less serious crowd. Otherwise I'll just reduce time for hunts from 6 hours per day to 2 hours per day. Yes, crowd of 20-25 people is less than 60-70, but still from my experience 3 full parties is already a bit too much for comfortable hunt.

[Velhart]

I said it before, i'll say it again - it's much better if hardcore crowd get what they want and leave in 2 weeks then if they are forced to do it over 2-3 months.
I myself need around 4 sands and 4 oils for main & off specs. I can get it in a week time of farm and i most probably will stop going to hunts leaving it to less serious crowd. Otherwise I'll just reduce time for hunts from 6 hours per day to 2 hours per day. Yes, crowd of 20-25 people is less than 60-70, but still from my experience 3 full parties is already a bit too much for comfortable hunt.

Remember the good ol' days when you could only get one Sands of Time a week and had to decide/lot against seven others to get it? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Sands should not be this easy to obtain. From how it sounds, people are getting a lot for upgrades, which is diminishing the value of upgrading from 100 to 110.

[Ashkendor]

Or add a cap in general. Can only get 250 allied seals a week. Bridge it so its only possible to get a Sands of Time every three weeks and Oils of Time in two. Might be hectic at the beginning of the reset for the week, but at least it would die down by the end of it.

This is the best way I can think of to handle it too. It would put a stop to the rampant over-farming.

Possibly the cheating, too; either way the cheating wouldn't have as big of an impact then.

Remember the good ol' days when you could only get one Sands of Time a week and had to decide/lot against seven others to get it? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Sands should not be this easy to obtain. From how it sounds, people are getting a lot for upgrades, which is diminishing the value of upgrading from 100 to 110.

I farmed a Sands of Time yesterday over the course of about 15 hours. I started a hunt party with some people in a LS i'm in at around 7:30 AM. Hunting was pretty good as the crowd hadn't logged on yet. As the day went on, marks got more and more scarce. B and A ranks would be zerged before our entire party was even able to teleport to them. We'd show up to S ranks and only get 5 seals. That kind of thing. All in all I find this implementation pretty disappointing. The thing that sucks is that even if they capped it now, there's already damage done.

[Velhart]

I actually agree with the petition. This is a system that everyone and even the developers said during beta that open world NM's would not work well if they retained a level of value worth hunting. I don't know what led the developers to believe that all of the sudden this was a good idea, especially since they haven't found a true proper way to make large scale FATE's work well. If Sands/Oils were not in the picture, the system would not be so overwhelming as it is now. Then again, people would barely be doing them if those items were not in there. Which leads me to believe that a system like this with so many people, it just does not work in the form it is right now and only feels like an afterthought at best.

I've proposed this a couple times before, but I believe the best solution is to bring the Faction NM system back. This was something that actually worked extremely well in 1.xx. You would do guildleves for certain factions and when you gathered enough points for them, you could get a special guildleve which did contain something you would compare a S-Rank NM to, which required a group to beat. How it could work in this game is have it based off your grand company. Do guildleves for your GC and spend allied seals on special guildleves that pop these NM's. Once you kill them with a full group, they drop the gear you currently see from the hunting vendor now plus a chance of Sands/Oil/Alexandrite dropping.

With this, it promotes casual play, gives you tough boss fights in the open world that some have wanted, don't have the wrath of the entire server ruining the experience for you, and can do easier balancing on the rewards. I just don't get why SE brought back a system that worked so poorly in FFXI into this game. They even changed things around in FFXI itself to alleviate the issues that ARR has now. While I definitely took advantage of getting 2 Sands from the system, it doesn't go without saying that this is in fact the worst thing that has ever been put into ARR and I do believe they need to make haste on either fixing it or taking it down till they can present it in a way that doesn't create such toxicity as it does now or stop promoting cheating.