Let's talk about Hunts - a detailed rundown of their assumed mechanics

[NoboruSouma]

The only time you experience every server everywhere getting an S rank to spawn is when something out of players' control is spawning it - Croakadile, Mindflayer, Laideronnette, The Garlok. Unless S-E pushed the spawn button on every single server at the same time, this one is 100% weather based, now it's just about finding out which pattern. Finding out it was 200 minutes of no rain for The Garlok was a matter of gathering spawn timers and looking at Excel sheets for weeks

The only S Ranks you can say fer sure where every server get's it are Croak/Mindy, Laid and Garlok are still hidden behind the random spawn timer. Though I wanna believe it's just the weather and the moonphase .. well .. I'm not yet getting onto it fully

[KageTokage]

It was already at the 100+ hours mark when it appeared on Balmung, so unless the respawn windows are really that ridiculously huge, I dunno.

It doesn't usually take a post maintenance spawn that long to show up.

[Leknaat]

Our server's Okinas all popped the same time/spot we had a instance 3 and 1 called at almost the same time. It popped just before Croakadile was poppable.

It popped close to 102 hours in since the Sea emergency maintenance

8:25 am pacific (croak was expected to be poppable at 8:40am)

[Vandesaan]

One theory because of the extremely long spawn is that when they did their emergency maintenance on The Ruby Sea, whatever flags the hunt marks for "spawn with maintenance timer" wasn't set and it was just set to spawn using a regular, post-kill spawn timer instead. That emergency maintenance was at 10 GMT on the 22nd iirc, was over four days ago, or 100+ hours, which makes sense on how long the post-kill spawn timers were for HW.

[KageTokage]

Same deal for Cactaur, though they were all in different places.

I was a little caught off guard by how damaging its tank buster is (Was hitting for about 37K under Shield Oath).

[Leonoire]

So, all 4 marks spawn condition more or less set? Now it's the time for Van to gather data on spawn and death timers and it will take multiple spawn cycles.

See you guys when Bone Crawler and Udum is out for more wild guessing I think.

[Vandesaan]

All right, I think I have got Okina figured out. It makes sense now that it took absolutely forever for it to spawn, and it has nothing to do with what S-E did, but everything to do with how early the timer begins and when it's at it's maximum and will force a spawn on next trigger. I went through the reports we've got so far and built a spreadsheet that calculates the weather for The Ruby Sea using the algorithm we know that works for this and verified it with the skywatcher. Then, I started going back in time and made a list of what had happened all the way to a couple days before our first reports of a spawn and then a couple days forward in time beyond the spawns that happened a few hours ago. What immediately caught my eye was the weather state Wind. Then I added calculating the moon phases of the world into the mix, and added those alongside the time weather switches, which weather, and when we had our spawns. The answer then was just immediately in my face.





That's 175 minutes of no Wind, and the moon is Full or moments away from becoming full. The math for moon phases is not as accurate a science as one would like and sometimes is slightly behind when the game switches, so that one Waxing Gibbous is ignorable.

So you might ask me, how frequent is this 175 minutes of no Wind + Full Moon sequence?
Here's a couple dates and times (in GMT+0) for the future to be looking for Okina:

2017-06-28 05:43:50
2017-06-29 18:40:30
2017-07-01 09:10:30
2017-07-03 01:13:50
2017-07-04 13:00:30
2017-07-09 02:40:30
2017-07-10 16:00:30
2017-07-12 05:20:30
2017-07-17 01:13:50
2017-07-18 13:23:50
2017-07-20 01:57:10
2017-07-21 13:20:30
2017-07-24 16:00:30
2017-07-26 05:20:30
2017-07-27 18:40:30

[Leonoire]

Hm...how about new moon? Have we got enough data to confirm or debunk about the spawn condition at that time yet?

[Vandesaan]

Lacking data for new moon in terms of spawns having happened there and not. There are a couple spots where - given that 200 minutes of no Wind is the trigger - the spawn could have happened on a couple servers. But I have not heard of any, so for now I am assuming it's full moon only.

[Leknaat]

snippy

When was the 200 minute mark exactly...? The time is close enough to say that you're onto something
Our Okina popped at exactly 8:25 am pacific (15:25 gmt+0)

Maybe the moon has to be waxing? lol not on the decline (just throwing out a tin-foil hat theory)