Stays up until 1:30A.M. to read about change to Hunts

[ajx]

Primary issue is the zergfest. During what we might call "peak hours" hundreds of players, all plugged into about a half-dozen full LS, will zerg like crazy across the world, fiercely claiming any mark they find and screaming to the heavens should any filthy peasant not in an LS dare to try and join in. The forums are packed with tales of mass blacklistings, malicious resetting of a mob leading to zero credit for the finder, and so forth.

.

What type of hotfix do you hope addresses this

[Brine_Gildchaff]

What type of hotfix do you hope addresses this

I can't say honestly. Some people have suggested a weekly seals cap (but then people would just zerg A and S anyway in hopes of logs dropping), others want Square to nerf the rewards (removing tomestone rewards is a popular idea), still others came up with the idea of improving the rewards from other content to make them competitive (right now hunts are -far- and away the most efficient and unlimited way of getting at anything that isn't named High Allagan such-and-such).
I'm kind of partial to an idea I came up with that's a modification of the old claim system; instead of making it impossible for anyone but you to get credit, it locks the monster to your party so nobody else can pull it, grants a small "finder's bonus", and then alerts the area to its presence. This allows better control by the finder over what they do and how long they decide to wait for other players. (People that just want to claim the mob for themselves by right of "we found it so it's ours and we say this is Square's intent" would forego the finder's bonus and just attack it without using the tag.)
But really it all comes down to community, and that's something you can't really hotfix, which is why I avoid trying to hunt on peak hours. Too many impatient and downright unpleasant people. I've blacklisted about five people myself since the patch came down for either trolling (one supreme jerk lured hundreds of people into an area by setting up shouts that the zone's S-rank had spawned) or being horridly abrasive to other people.

[Nestama]

What type of hotfix do you hope addresses this

Make them require pop items (Rare/Ex). S'what I originally thought Hunts was going to be like >_>

[Riastrad]

Here's an idea. Make it an actual hunt (tracks, broken branches, beast dung, etc.) in that you need to find these things in order to find your mark. Every track has a small chance to spawn the target a short distance away. It would also allow for more than one mark to spawn thus allowing more to experience the content. They could even drop the myth and soldiery tome rewards from them or decrease the amount you receive.

[Dark-Saviour]

Fully expected this was the only change we'd see. ;-/
Would have been nice to see them make the marks un-resettable for now as well, but I'm not even confident that's going to happen at all as it stands.

They could even drop the myth and soldiery tome rewards from them or decrease the amount you receive.

No. Stop that.

[Abriael]

I knew it was something like that. They said they'd chage "elite marks," not how hunts work. "elite marks" are simply the weekly thing. The wording was pretty clear.

[KogaDrake]

Typical na translation team not getting it correct and now ppl mad, I called this as what we would see, but I was also expecting further tweaks to rendering problems since it was still a little bit off for some

[Akuryu]

Hunts are going to cost them so many subscribers that they'll have to do something eventually. I've been playing MMOs for 15 years. In any MMO I've ever played, if they make gearing up easy and dull, people quit. These games are all about chasing the carrot at the end of the stick. You can't give the whole playerbase a barrel full of carrots and expect them to still care.

When everyone and their grandmother is 110, the population will take a dive. That's when the real patch notes will come out, but by then it'll be too late.

[Jakeson]

All I wanted was just a little increase in daily rewards. But it's good to know that Naul won't pop two weeks in a row again. Nobody is doing daily hunts, SE. I would really like to do daily hunts instead of crybaby zerg-fest, but it simply isn't worth it. I ran across an S while doing Novus map and got 30 seals. I just happened to see the zerg, joined a couple people and got partial credit (cause he phased in and out, so fix that crap, too). That "oh, look" moment was worth four days of daily hunts. You've broken the balance with hunts, and you're not doing much about it. At this point it would be a slap in the face to the people waiting for a fix to participate to remove the insane rewards, just fix the damn dailies...

[DukeBurden]

I haven't Hunted since I heard there was a radar tool people were using. I'm not gonna hunt fiercly while someone else just widescans a small area of a map. This is what's broken about Hunts to me.