The fundamental problem with hunts

[Moqi]

I really liked your analogy to Black Friday, OP.

For real, yesterday I was minding my business in Northern T waiting for a FATE for a book. It popped, I follow the NPC like I'm supposed to when suddenly BAM! A horde of people appears from behind me, making my fate all laggy. I wondered how come there were so many people interested in my FATE (I never see more than 2-3 people camping book fates) when suddenly I see this Tam Tara HM enemy with a different name that I have never seen before... and yep it was a hunt. Right on top of my FATE mob. Fortunately I got gold anyway, but I was worried I wouldn't. Hitting my enemies had become impossible. As soon as they left, everything went back to normal...

[Lamentations]

I have to agree with Krr on this one, reducing rewards for hunts now would simply segregate portions of the community based on how much time they have had to grind hunts or not.

If they reduce them now those have not's will scream even louder over being left behind and relegated to a lower class status than people have already screamed about hunts.

The balance needs to be found another way, in another direction.

Capping rewards is one thing, reducing them at this point will just cause more rage.

If they do reduce zerg-hunt rewards "and" buff daily bills this will probably only shift focus to those targets, yea they are gated per day, but at prime time in whatever time zone your in several dozen people waiting for those 3 snowstorm goobs to spawn sounds even worse to me.

I still say they simply need to bury Elites as party claim force pop NM's inside leves, they can keep the weekly lockout on them as elites if they increase the rewards for them and limit them to one per week, this would in effect "cap" elite rewards anyway, plus slightly raise rewards on bill kills at the same time for people who cant or wont party hunt.

[Yukiko]

People that are on the path of upgrading to animus and novus require myth to purchase books (animus) and alexandrite (novus) the fastest way to amass myth is by hunts, this goes for soldiery as well.

You can buy alexandrite direct, capping myth with beginner bonus each day anyway, no need to trade in hunting seals...

1st randomness:
If you camp one monster for your achivements its nearly impossible to get it.

2nd cooldown:
The whole server is killing the monsters in rotation because there is no alternative, way too long cooldown for respawn and just one spawns on the whole map.

3rd rewards:
To add new currency and let them begin with the "trading into all" was a bad idea, normally you can trade in old currency to the new one!
Lets say the new one becomes now the main source we can trade to everything (shouldnt that be GIL and the AH?) then lets trade the other currency to the new one...

4th spawn:
In 1.x we had nearly instant respawn on roaming high monsters who made the paths dangerous... thats what we asked for.
Later on they set those monsters offroad, so that you can not be killed when following the path... was a good addition, we could live with.
And finally, they added them on 1.x huntings where you summon the monsters when you have the guildleve for it, bad idea, but still better than we have now.

[Kinseykinz]

Fix this, now.

I'm with you. I don't like how the hunt system and its rewards work at all. Why SE decided to not only over-reward these hunts (seriously, SE they only need to drop Allied Seals, keep the Myth/Sold tomes OUT of hunts) AND then make it so the hunts=damn good gear upgrades without any actual player skill is beyond me. If nothing else, I hope they remove the myth/sold tomes from the rewards. The damage has been done with the Allied Marks=sand/oils...but at least make them earn the gear for said oils elsewhere.

Because, another very bad thing is happening due to the 'low hanging fruit' picking that is hunts. DF queues for everything, suck...even for me on WHM.

So for people like me, purposefully avoiding Hunts w/ the Hoarde, even doing other tasks have become difficult:

Frontlines Queue: 'over 30 minutes'
ST: 5-10 minutes (healer)
EX Roulette: 5-10 minutes (healer)
Hardmode Roulette: +35 minutes (Monk, hubby gave up at this point, logged out and played a console game)
Primals: 5-10 minutes (healer).

EVERY QUEUE I select I wait 2-3 times longer now than I did 3 weeks ago.


And to me, this is the bigger problem. The Hunts, which were designed as side/incidental content(meaning SE's intent wasn't that the average gamer dedicated the majority of their game time towards finding and slaying hunts) is now making the actual bread and butter content harder to queue for/impossible to get in. When this happens, something must be done to address the in-balance. Because unless SE plans on basing the entire game around zerging a bunny to death w/ 100's of your closest friends, it is a broken system, with inflated rewards than needs to be fixed.


As to the 'have vs. have not' gear problem in fixing it:

If they 'nerf' the rewards from hunts, I will be one of the folk who will have 'missed out' And you know what, I'll still be the same player I was before it. Currently, there is no content in game that I cannot heal in my current gear that I can enter (waiting on my friends to catch up to me so we can start T6). Oils/Sands would yes, improve my gear....but for what? I'm have more than enough gear to get me through the next step in my content ladder. If people want to do PF: ilvl 110 only parties and not include me, really that's their loss. All the Hunt system did is make ilvl110 meaningless. Before hunts, to have that gear score implied you had personally bested some of the hardest content currently in game....now all it means is you cast Medica II over and over while eating a sandwich.


...Anyway, since this content made people stop queuing for the content I actually like doing, I guess the next 3 months are my 'DOL' grind months....again....because I didn't do enough of that in 1.0. Or I can do like my husband, and just outright play something else. He actually asked me to change his subscription from 6mo billing to monthly as he's unsure atm if he's enjoying this. A month ago, he loved this game...but now, he can't get into a dungeon w/o me queueing with him.

[Wulfyn]

If you remember any of the tanks names you should report them for griefing, apparently thats how the GM's term that kind of behavior.

[Lamentations]

[QUOTE=Kinseykinz;2305710]I'm with you. I don't like how the hunt system and its rewards work at all.

You wouldn't rage about myth/soldiery being removed from the rewards, nor would I, again had they done this in say the first 3-5 days ok, it is too late now.

More incentive needs to be patched to do the content now "not" being done, SE has backed themselves into a corner with these lavish casual rewards and they need to now extend them to that content as well.

Simply changing those numerical rewards is also probably the very easiest approach of all the suggestions I have seen in now many threads on this issue.

Taking stuff away from players who aren't glued in their chair 12 hours a day and simply haven't had time to do whatever yet in an MMO is always a very bad idea, and it will not end well.

Reducing or deleting rewards from hunts at this point is "not" a viable option, if you think the hunt rage is volatile now, watch what happens if they do this now.

The only way they can fix this well is to increase the raid rewards to get hardcore raiders back to those "and" increase the rewards to daily hunts for casuals who don't have time for raids.

They do "not" need to buff daily bill kill rewards by more than a factor of 3, taking six weeks say to get that 1000 seal GC piece isn't grind imo, this isn't xi, and most dailies (hunts and tribes) don't require more than say 2 hrs of play time tops.

Better yet I would just as soon see them unlock the tribal dailies and let us do 3 for all 4 instead of just two tribes per day, that would double the rewards right there, it isn't 3x, but I can live with it.

Chief's idea about simply balancing rewards across content so people could choose what they want to do or refocus attention to dungeon content will work only if those rewards are raised to make that option attractive.

Reducing or deleting rewards already existing is again a "very bad idea".

Hunts are out of control, they need to be party force pop claim, and limited to one elite per week at 7 times full credit reward per bill, after that you hunt dailies, or raid, the other NM ranks should also be force pop and have similar 7X reward buffs while also being 1 offs per week.

This effectively "reduces" and or "caps" hunt rewards anyway, while also "reducing" the zergfest and community rage by magnitudes.

Inb4 someone states that hunts would no longer be open world content, with the mess this is now, I can handle that.

[Shikiseki]

I only have one problem with the hunts: The Daily hunts are just not worth doing at all.

As for the myth/soldiery rewards - it's people's choice what content to do to cap soldiery etc. If they wanna grind their asses out with hunts only, by all means leave them.
And the sand reward - while it's quite unfair to the raiding crowd, it's a good alternative for people who can't progress that far to get decent gear to start coil with random people. Since 2.4 will feature a new coil with i135 rewards soon, I don't see a problem that SE decides to lighten up the i110 accessibility now.

So hopefully, they'll just make the daily hunt marks worth it.

[Zumi]

Back in 2.0 and 2.1 item level cap gear was just able to be bought by doing dungeons for myth. Now its more or less a 2 step process, get solidery and then the oil or sand to upgrade the piece. Both of these can be accomplished by doing hunts but even so the hunt is way more grinder then 2.0 and 2.1 to get item level cap gear.

[Chocolate_Rain]

All they need to do is make it so that hunts give you similar rewards to other avenues. Make it horizontal to dungeons/myth/sold farming. At this point, there's absolutely no reason to dungeon if you're doing well at hunting.

1)remove soldiery from hunts. Make it the "dungeon" currency as allied seals are the hunt currency.
2)make allied seals have a cap
3)make blood-splattered logs available for soldiery.
4)cap the amount of sands/oils you can buy in a week to 1.

This will allow people to choose how they want to play, and remove a huge chunk of the playerbase from hunts, since they have another outlet. Removing so much of the playerbase from hunts will allow those who want to hunt and couldn't before due to time/graphical issues to be included. Everybody gets to do what they want. All the content gets used simultaneously. Nobody feels left out. EVERYONE WINS!

[Zaiken]

At first I didn't think this was a problem, but as time go on, I just realized that SE have just kill it own game!

Like the OP said, the reward is way too high and it give everything without even a cap on it make The Hunt very unbalance.


* Right now The Hunt give a massive reward for Myth and Soldier Tomb, people don't bother with Daily and Dungeon anymore, making Dungeon que even longer.

* Unlimited Supply of Oil and Sand, no reason to do coil anymore with a lockout.

* People withdraw from que in seconds when que for something and find someone post a <pos> for NM, nice keep seeing the message "A Party Member Have Withdrawn, Finding New Member." This go on for an hour.

* Party Finder is more empty then ever, no one bother with it. Even if you put your own Party Finder up, once someone post a <pos> they left.

* Novus Weapon Grind take a long time to get i110 Weapon. The Hunt can give you that i110 much easier.

* And the biggest problem with The Hunt so far is that it is creating a Toxic Community. I laugh when I saw someone saying they like The Hunt because they are making friends from it. Right now every NM you find you have to hold it or you get Blacklisted, Whisper none stop, and none stop harassment from other Players. Even holding on an B Rank Mob with 50+ People is still not enough, someone will still doing the Name Calling when they arrive there too late.


Nice community and game you are creating with The Hunt SE!