A massively.com write up on why hunts are ruining this game

[Cherie]

No, it's not melodramatic. When one activity makes all the others pointless and obsolete, then it's actually doing a huge disservice to the game, especially when you spend a lot of time and effort to create content like Syrcus Tower and Ramuh EX that most ouf your user base is completely ignoring and will continue to do so. Hunts is just bad designed content, and in its current form it should have no place in such a high quality game.

/agreed

Basically if anyone doubts this, just go in to Syrcus Tower and just watch all the gear hit the floor. It's all about the Unidentified Allagan tomestone at the end that you have fifteen sands on standby to upgrade for your 3rd alt. People might have grabbed up a few pieces of gear for Syrcus Tower the first or second week, but now that word has gotten around about the Unidentified Allagan Tomestone at the end, there is just gear littering the floor. Too bad moogles can't ticket players for littering!

[Airget]

I think this is what they forgot to do. They added in content in which for the most part you can pretty much gear to i110 without even having to touch coil which means for the most part, doing coil isn't really as needed because you can gear up to i110 through other means that don't force you to fight over sand/oil drops and that's the big issue there.

if I"m not mistaken I think sand/oils came maybe 3-4 a coil group, which means only half the group could obtain upgrades.

Now there is a system in place that just does away with that, honestly since they added these 250 allied seal items maybe what they should do is have coil give everyone a free 250 seal book, that would draw people back into doing coil because it would be a guaranteed drop and encourage players to do said content.

There in lies what they forgot to do, they forgot to alter/add to the loot pool of coil when they pretty much added content that replaced coil since it is an easier method to obtain tomes mainly because players don't have to fight over who gets the book or wait til there turn, everyone can pretty much obtain them at the same rate which makes teams working together pull away from coil because they can instead use hunts as a quicker way to gear up their players.

[Nekodar]

Being able to upgrade to i110 was always meant to be possible without doing coil.
They just had a 14-15 week period where coil was intended to be the only way to get i110 before letting non-coilers catch up.

While I think it was a mistake to not have any kind of lockout on obtaining sand/oil through hunts, it's not as broken as some people make it out to be.

[Felessan]

The "ruining" is more or less my own words. Not the words of the author.

Casuals don't care. Most of hardcore either don't really care or participate in hunts on hardcore basis. There are really only a small crowd (but its vocal, yes) that are affected by this.

Getting 5 sands of time in one week. I say its pretty broken and ruins the game. People are already rocking full Elite GC set.

And what? People already rocking in full HA sets with ilvl 115 weapons. It's a little to late to segregate crowd and limit access to equipment to slow down progression.
A lot, and it's really a lot of people currently on T9/past T9, and there are really no point now to limit others in progression. Quite contrary, now is the time when people progression should be boosted or we will have sudden jump from being "hardcore only" content to "every casual can go, echo included" without intermediate stage.

If you "normally" can't get the best gear then you don't deserve it.

The amount of what requires to "deserve" lowers with time. You can now get ilvl90 weapons in mere hours, back in 2.0 it required 3 weeks of mytho cap and passing through Titan Hard that was not such a joke it is now.

And this was implicitly admitted as a design flaw seeing as Soldiery is 100 and H.Allagan is 110. And before, the only way to get i110 Soldiery was Coil

They change the curve, it doesn't mean that the high point (i.e. where everybody should be at 2.4) will be lower/significantly lower as before.
2.0-2.1 was a design flaw because you got your full ilvl90 at the end of 2.0 and then you just slack the whole 2.1 doing nothing and dying from boredom. Now you effectively have 10 ilvl for each patch for wide crowd, 2.2 was 100, 2.3 is 110.

The accelerated pacing of obtaining rewards from hunts far outweighs other content. I know I'll be right, because SE will more than likely make changes to the systems rate of reward.
also Myth still had a hard cap in 2.1

We still have soldiery hard cap (and I can't even afford a full set for one class because of it as I got 2 soldiery weapons, one through t7/t8 back in 2.2 and one in 2.3)
SE did nothing to this date *but* made hunting for seals easier in organized fashion. As adjusting HP made it possible to grind even more successful even in prime times. I doubt that they do not understand what they are doing.

[silentwindfr]

the main trouble of the hunt it's the lack of deepth and balance into it.
deepth, because the activity it's resumed to wait for mark to spawn. when it was possible to create different level of hunt, like use the leves, add a hunt log, use the FATE already present... no instead they have choose to add monster that can be killed in small group, but with a huge respawn timer. (30 minutes for a monster at the base solo, it was stupid)

why the hunt is ruining the game? because it's not adapted to the game world! we are more of 5000 player per world! we have 17 area for the hunt... let's say only 2000 player do hunt... it means at least 117 player per area looking for the prey. even if only 1000 player do it, it's still around 57 player looking for a monster that can be killed by...a group of 4 with a respawn of 30 minutes.
even a kids can see the trouble here, you don't need to have a huge experience of the mmorpg for see the trouble!

the world is too small and too populated for feature like NM to work! add monster of Rank S that ask more of 24 player to be killed can be good (if they rework the respawn timer and reward and add more of them per area), but under this number? it's simply stupid!

we had the FATE boss, it was possible to add really difficult FATE of level 50 per area that will have serve the feature way better than rank B and A monster. for the dailies and weekly bounty, the leves and faction leves system was perfect! but no... they simply design a broken system that as good as the one we had at the realease of the V1. do you remember what did happend to the release of the V1?

it's time to redo survey for get true number of what people want and don't want, it's time to have a public test server under NDA for check if a feature will not broke the game! and more important, they need to take in account that people outside japan don't have the same culture! and something that can work in japan will not always work outside it!

balance, because it's pointless to do a dungeon when it's far possible to do 1.5 times if not 2 times the same amount of myth and soldiery with a good ls hunt.

[Seibah]

i really don't see why you guys care about "5 sands in one week" or whatever. I saw two people the other day who had full unweathered gear besides their extra weathered ring. evidently they struggle or don't care to clear content and given this game runs more on 1HKO mechanics than anything else they will probably continue to not clear content. who really cares if people are i110 if they're not even going to do anything with it. i110 will not get people past Twintania's twisters or Titan's landslides; let those people just get their feel good gear and move on with your own lives.

If you plan to use this gear as an opportunity to beef up for coil or alts, that's great. Stop being so worried about what other people are doing.

[Namasu]

If you plan to use this gear as an opportunity to beef up for coil or alts, that's great. Stop being so worried about what other people are doing.

Because other people building a sandcastle from hunting is a threat to my special snowflake status. /sarcasm

[silentwindfr]

personally i don't care about the sand/oil, but i care for the fact that the hunt is only the shadow of what it means to be! worst, drive people to act like douchbag because it's the fastest way to do all (get myth, sol and i110 stuff)

a game without balance is not a good game.

[Nicobo]

//quote
"The current bandage of increasing mark HP not only fails to address that fact but tacitly encourages huge zerg farming instead of participating in any other content in the game."
//end quote

^^;

[Lemuria]

Wow... it's like none of the defenders actually bothered to read. I guess that would require too much effort on their part.

The fact is that you have one type of content where you can obtain literally EVERYTHING. Tomes, check. Gear, check. Raid items, check. And this content is being monopolized by a select few. It's not even remotely fair to the majority of those playing the game, and unless you're one of the lucky few, which I'd argue most of the defenders are, you're screwed.

Good luck trying to get in a single blow when there's 100 other people doing exactly the same. Good luck trying to work on your allied seals when the daily marks are so utterly worthless you'd be better off spamming dungeons and buying the gear the old fashioned way.

Open your eyes. It's a broken system which needs some serious attention. When you can do this ONE thing to the exclusion of all else and get everything you'd ever need, there's a big problem. Doubly so when it can be done in such a short time frame that all other content becomes meaningless to attempt.

I doubt that they do not understand what they are doing.

Assuming they did know what they were doing, it just proves that SE has no clear direction for the future of the game.