Hunts: What's Really Wrong With Them

[Donjo]

Incoming wall of text.

First, I shall preface this discussion with a single statement: Hunts are working exactly as the developers intended for them to work.

With that aside, let's get going. I'll start with a quick analysis of each Rank of Elite Mark and what it means for those hunting them.

B Rank: Tuned to be defeated by a minimum of a single person.

A Rank: Tuned to be defeated by a minimum of one party(4-8 people).

S Rank: Tuned to be defeated by a minimum of one alliance(24 people).

B Ranks are occasions where you're walking about and find this enemy that looks a bit out of place. It's Level 50, has that odd explody indicator next to its level, and it's slightly bigger than other monsters of its model. You pop up and give it a whack to see what kind of fight it'll give. It puts up a bit of a fight, but you've defeated it in about a minute or so. Perhaps an adventurer passing by decided to join the fray and make things slightly easier. It dies and you smile a bit at the reward for going out of your way to kill that monster.

A Ranks are visibly bigger than B Ranks. It's easy to tell that they shouldn't be tackled by a lone adventurer. So, you call up a friend or four and take it down. In a party, A Ranks are exciting battles and many of them have neat mechanics to deal with. You all walk away with your reward and your friends thank you for sharing.

S Ranks are huge, menacing, and definitely not to be underestimated. You know you're going to need a lot of people to take it down, so you take to Shout, FC, and LS chat and bring the army down upon it! Even so, the creature puts up a significant fight, and victory tastes sweet.

Here's the next major statement: S Ranks are the only Rank of Mark that developers expected players to shout everywhere for. They're the only Rank of Mark that are meant to handle "the mob".

Here is the biggest problem with hunts right now: We are treating B and A Ranks as if they're S Ranks. Bringing "the mob" to these lower Marks who are tuned to be defeated by a far lower number of people is a surefire way to get people angry at not getting credit. The fact of the matter is that B and A Ranks were not designed to be attacked by 50 people at once, so things fall apart when they are attacked as such.

Therefore, the crux of this is that the problems with Hunts are not the fault of the Developers. They are the fault of us Players. Square Enix did not create a broken system; we're simply using it wrong. This, of course, begs the question of "why are players doing this?", but that will be addressed later.

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Here are the most common problems with the Hunt that people seem to keep "identifying":

1. The Marks have too little HP.
2. "They're always dead before I get there!"
3. Open World Content shouldn't be giving Raid Level rewards.
4. "I can't see the Mark!"

Let's go over these one at a time.

The Marks have too little HP.
As I've alluded to above, they have exactly as much HP as they're supposed to. Any monster will go down quickly when more than the intended number of players attacks it at once. This is a fact of life. Imagine if you could take 8 people into a 4 man dungeon. Everything dies quite quickly because the content is tuned to be cleared with 4. What's happening with Hunts is exactly this, but on a much larger scale.

"They're always dead before I get there!"
This is a natural byproduct of the "incorrect" way of doing Hunts that players are currently employing. It is completely unreasonable to expect people to wait for the entire server to arrive at a single location to take down a monster. Every second that people do wait is a miracle in and of itself. The fact of the matter is that for every person who arrives at the mark, the chance of each individual person getting full credit for the battle decreases. There's a critical mass here somewhere.

Now, this leads to the direct result of people being angry that they didn't get to a Mark in time: The vilification of the player(s) brave enough to make the first attack. This is completely irrational. As I stated before, once more than 4 people arrive at a location for a B or A, it's completely possible for those present to just kill the Mark. I understand that you can see the "puller" as the exact reason that the Mark was dead before you got there, but the mob of people next to the puller who all started hitting it to are just as much at fault if you're going to use that logic.

The crux of this eventually falls into a statement going along the lines of "That stupid <insert name here> pulled early! Report him!"

First, someone pulled "early"? With the attitudes I've seen about how people are expected to wait for the entire server to descend on even a mere B Rank, it's become increasingly obvious that "early" is an empty word. People are expected to wait a literally infinite amount of time for others to arrive. Therefore, it doesn't matter when someone pulls. That pull is going to be "early". There will always be someone on the server who wants the reward for a Hunt but for some reason was behind the rest of the mob. Always. Nobody wants to wait an infinite amount of time to attack a Mark.

To those complaining about this reason: The fact of the matter is that the Mark died before you got there simply because you didn't get there on time. It's not the fault of the person who pulled. It's not the fault of the mob who attacked afterward. It's your fault for not being either the discoverer of the Mark or one of the first people there. This is called a "Hunt", not a "Wait for the LS to announce a location and then hurry there!" If a Mark has been called in an LS, it's probably already too late for you to get there... unless it's a S Rank.

As for reporting those "first pullers": This is also silly and irrational. Exactly what portion of the Terms of Service are these people violating? All most reports will do is get you warned. Exceptions can only be made when there is clear evidence that someone is intentionally attempting to make people angry, as that legitimately falls under Harassment. Most of the time, these pullers are just trying to get credit for themselves and/or their party with no ill intent toward the rest of the mob. In other cases, they're either taking on the monster alone or with their own personal party. It's not a crime to not announce the appearance of a Mark to the entire world.

Open World Content shouldn't be giving Raid Level rewards.
An interesting statement, indeed. I will go over this later, when I examine why so many people wish to Hunt.

"I can't see the mark!"
A limitation of the game engine that was, erm, supposed to have been fixed. Whoops. Staying right next to the Mark will help keep it in your render priority, so melee classes are recommended for S Marks. If B and A Ranks are disappearing on you, there were simply far too many people there for the strength of the monster.

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Okay, so those are the "problems". What are the most commonly suggested "solutions"?

1. Increase the HP of Marks across the board.
1a. Scale the HP and/or Defense of Marks either to the number of people currently present or by the number of people who last killed a specified Mark.
2. Remove Sands and Oils of Time as a possible reward.
3. Make all Marks a forced spawn that only allows credit for the party who spawned it.
4. Give full credit for any amount of damage or threat applied to a Mark.
5. Lower the reward of Seals, Myth, and/or Soldiery.
6. Institute a daily/weekly cap on Allied Seals.

Again, let's go over these one at a time.

Increase the HP of Marks across the board.
A flat increase to HP to the level players want them to be would completely ruin the intended number of people intended to be able to successfully down a mark. Attempting to make the developers pander to an incorrect way of doing a piece of content is not the right way to go about things. The same goes for 1a. If the engine allowed for monsters to dynamically scale their power/HP to the number of players currently near it, FATEs would already be doing it. Otherwise, FATE style scaling would create a horrible chain reaction of needing more and more people to defeat each Mark each time it spawns until B Ranks are as powerful as S Ranks and actual A and S Ranks are nigh undefeatable. The "caps" on the scaling would need to be very low in order to keep the intended number of people from being unable to defeat the Marks, which will not satisfy those who wish every mark to be alive for 10 minutes.

Remove Sands and Oils of Time as a possible reward.
This would surely cause a change in the number of people trying to do Hunts. However, the solution to "fix" a piece of content shouldn't be "make fewer people want to do it". I'll go into this further in the next section.

Make all Marks a forced spawn that only allows credit for the party who spawned it.
The only possible solution that will ensure that Marks are tackled by the intended number of people(or close to it). Possible variants of this include requiring specific items and leve-like allowances. This would certainly save the Hunt from "the mob", but at what cost?

Give full credit for any amount of damage or threat applied to a Mark.
This is very abusable and doesn't make a terrible amount of sense. Should the Paladin who rides in and manages to get the very last hit get full credit for the kill? I wouldn't think so.

Lower the reward of Seals, Myth, and/or Soldiery.
I'll go over ideas regarding this in the next section.

Institute a daily/weekly cap on Allied Seals
People don't do the Hunts just for the seals. They do it for Tomestones too. Limiting one currency wouldn't drastically change the dynamics of the system in regards to the number of people trying to use it.

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So, we've gone through problems and solutions. It's clear that players want the system to allow more people to get credit for Hunts, even if other players seek to or otherwise accidentally interfere with said system.

So, why do so many people want to do the Hunt? It isn't for "fun". It is the complete opposite of fun when everything but S Ranks dies in less than 10 seconds. The answer is simple: Incentives.

The flaws with the Hunt aren't with the Marks themselves. They aren't with the HP, defense, or power of these Marks. Any issues with monsters dying too quickly, people pulling before the entire server arrives, etc. are solely the fault of players, not the Hunt system.

Nay, the flaws with the Hunt are at the end of the journey. The reason so many people want to do the Hunt is because it's rewarding. Too rewarding. If there were to be any changes to the Hunt, it would have to be here; the point where players exchange their seals for rewards.

How is the Hunt "too" rewarding? Let's compare the time necessary to get common rewards based on "skill" rather than the Hunt.

X's of Time: A skilled and dedicated group of 8 people can get a maximum of two Sands and two Oils of time per week from the Second Coil. A coordinated and dedicated group of 8 people can, for example, each obtain one of these two hot ticket items per day via the hunt if they try hard enough. This is 4 items per week the "skilled" way versus up to 56(or more!) items per week the "hunt" way. If we throw Syrcus Tower into the mix, each player can obtain 1 of these items per week, for a total of 8 per week across the group.

Tomestones of Mythology/Soldiery: A B Rank Mark gives 30 Mythology for a maximum of 2 minutes spent fighting. This is more than even the hardest Trial fights. More than the original Coil. Content that is more difficult and takes longer. A Ranks give 80 Mythology, and S Ranks give 200. Given the rate at which these can be killed, there are those who aren't doing this for the seals, but for the fact that Hunts are now the fastest way to accrue both Mythology and Soldiery in the entire game by a laughably enormous margin.

It's perfectly okay for there to be a "fastest" way to obtain valued resources. However, the margin between Hunts and the "next best thing" is too wide.

Now, I stated earlier that the solution to "fix" a piece of content shouldn't be "make fewer people want to do it". However, the reason that people are coming to hate the Hunt is ultimately because so many people want to do it. It's a bit of a Catch 22. On one hand, the fact that so many people want to experience this content is a good thing. It's a factor of ultimate success for SE; successfully designing a piece of content that all of the varying types of FFXIV players all want to do. It's pretty amazing and SE should be commended for this, regardless of the storm it has riled up.

Unfortunately, the way to "fix" hunts cannot be to make them directly support larger groups of people because it explicitly goes against the developer's vision for the content. There have been several occasions where a patch directly attacked a way of doing a piece of content that went against their "vision", so it is possible that SE may do something to the structure of hunts to attempt to prevent this mob mentality regarding B and A Ranks.

When all is said and done, if the reason for something going wrong is the number of people trying to do it, the only ways to repair the damage are either to make fewer people want to do it or limit participation in some way. The easiest way to make fewer people want to do it is to lower the rewards and thereby make fewer people want to pursue them.

1. Tomestones: If tomestone rewards were reduced by between 75-90%, then Hunts would become solely about accruing Seals, not tomes. The tomes would be reduced to a nice bonus in lieu of the currency that Hunts are meant to showcase. Only the people who want the Seals would go after Hunts... which is what I believe SE truly wants to be the case. It may be possible that they added these huge amounts of tomes to artificially enhance desire to Hunt beyond the Seal rewards. If so, it worked!

2. Sands and Oil: It's too late to just remove these wholesale. It may even be too late to mess with their cost. However, it may be beneficial to raise the cost of blood splattered logs by a significant amount or render them only obtainable via the drop from Marks. Make this high ticket item less "inevitable" to obtain and fewer people will attempt to get them.

3. An idea for weekly caps: Hitting a weekly cap on seals also eliminates tomestone rewards. This would be the only way to institute a cap on Seals that would discourage players from Hunting after they reach their cap. However, they were originally designed to be uncapped, so suddenly capping them would go against SE's vision of the system.

An implementation of "limiting participation" is covered in the solutions: making all marks a forced spawn only targetable by the party who spawned it. This is very easy to limit, as such things would logically require specific bait and there could be transparent timers or leve style allowances allotted for the Hunt. This would, however, require a significant rework of a system the developers appear to be very proud of. I honestly cannot see this happening in any way, shape, or form.

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Conclusions

1. The biggest problem with Hunts is not only that it cannot support the sheer number of people who want to do it, but that these mobs of people doing it are doing it wrong. The issue is not with the Marks themselves.

2. Unfortunately, the only to fix this problem is to either lower the incentives to do it in some way or limit participation on a daily or weekly basis.

3. Hunts are at their most fun when Marks are tackled with the "appropriate" number of people. This is the way the developers intended them to be pursued. They are at their least fun when 50 people are at every hunt and the lower ranks die in less than 5 seconds. This is not the way the developers intended them to be pursued.

So, lastly, stop blaming SE for the state of Hunts. Just stop. The only people to blame for the issues you're experiencing is yourselves. The incorrect use of a system always causes problems. It's analogous to not heeding the warnings on your newest machine. It just doesn't end well.

PS: I haven't mentioned Hunting LS' in this post, despite them arguably being the "originators" of the mob mentality regarding hunts. To most, this is probably fairly obvious. It won't be possible to prevent communication about Hunts outside of the zone they are located, so there's no point in really discussing the merits of these LS' beyond the fact that they heavily contribute to the way we're doing Hunts wrong.

Aaaaand... this post is about 17 thousand characters long! This wins my personal award for "longest post ever written", indeed!

[Ephany]

My eyes bleed at this much text D:
Some good points made but it's all stuff that's been said somewhere in the 5000 other posts on the subject.

[Donjo]

My eyes bleed at this much text D:
Some good points made but it's all stuff that's been said somewhere in the 5000 other posts on the subject.

I've read plenty of those posts, but I've ever seen someone say "SE did it right and all of the problems are the player's fault".

[Shake0615]

While I agree with a lot of what you said, it is completely SE's fault for not foreseeing how swamped these hunts would be for the following reasons:

1) Many players have been asking for open world content since beta, including the return of Notorious Monsters
2) By adding really nice glamour pieces at over 1k seals each, it ensures that people will be blitzing to be the first to get them (just like win-trading for Wolves' Den glamours)
3) By adding other special rewards such as Alexandrite/Blood-spattered Mark Log for end-game progression gear
4) New content is always very busy anyway simply because it's new

Currently, the system is pretty much unplayable, it encourages people to cheat by using 3rd party radars (or rely on those who do cheat), and it is very poorly implemented. The system itself was pretty well-conceived...but there's no getting around the fact that SE should've known that more than 8-24 players would be hunting a given mob at a given time and should have tuned the difficulty accordingly or adjusted the available rewards as you said. Either way, the fault does in fact lie with SE.

[OPneedNerfs]

The problem is simple.

There is no problem.

People have asked for open world content, even when presented with the downsides previous games have shown. The playerbase that suggested this have managed to convince the devs that open world content is indeed the way to go, and that it would be okay.

All in all, I agree with your points, they were very well thought out and pretty much took what I would say right out of my mouth.

[jlewiss]

honestly the only way i could think of dealing with this situation is for a and s rank mobs to only give you rewards once per week. b rank could still be open game. this would majorly cut down on the amount of people that would be swamping the a + s rank mobs.

[juniglee]

honestly the only way i could think of dealing with this situation is for a and s rank mobs to only give you rewards once per week. b rank could still be open game. this would majorly cut down on the amount of people that would be swamping the a + s rank mobs.

I haven't actually done hunts myself yet (semi-retired). But that solution would compound the issues at hand. The issue isn't players swarming A + S rank - in fact, according to the post, that is the intended design. The issue is players swamping B + A ranks.

[Makado]

Exactly right but I didn't see you touch on the subject of players running around using that app radar thing. It seems that they can't even get in trouble for it leaving players like myself (PS4) at a disadvantage for hunting which kind of sucks. Wish those using could get punished.

[Susanoh]

So, lastly, stop blaming SE for the state of Hunts. Just stop. The only people to blame for the issues you're experiencing is yourselves. The incorrect use of a system always causes problems. It's analogous to not heeding the warnings on your newest machine. It just doesn't end well.

SE decided to make hunts the only way of obtaining sands and oils that isn't subject to lockouts in the entire game. That a lot of players looking to progress would want to try hunts is a result of that decision. It is not the players fault that the developers chose to place the only method of obtaining end game rewards outside of weekly lockouts in an activity that cannot sustain the number of players interested.

[Spellbinder]

SE decided to make hunts the only way of obtaining sands and oils that isn't subject to lockouts in the entire game. That a lot of players looking to progress would want to try hunts is a result of that decision. It is not the players fault that the developers chose to place the only method of obtaining end game rewards outside of weekly lockouts in an activity that cannot sustain the number of players interested.

This is a little off topic, but I think the fault lies in soldiery gear requiring "upgrades" to begin with.

In 2.0/2.1, players were given the means to obtain a great set of gear in the Binding Coil, and for those who had horrible luck with lots, there was an alternative in mythology gear that was still up to par.
In 2.2/2.3, players were given the means to obtain a great set of gear in the Second Coil, and for those who had horrible luck with lots, there was an alternative in soldiery gear, but if you wanted to be up to par, you needed more items from the Second Coil.

If soldiery gear was item level 110 out of the gate and required more soldiery tomes to get, or was simply item level 100 without an upgrade, we wouldn't be in this mess.