SE wildly irresponsible with hunt reward implementation yet again

[Hiruke]

Many of us remember how ridiculous hunts were when they first came out, with everyone wildly overcrowding them because you could get sands/oils and tons of tomestones. During peak hours, it was very difficult to get full credit even with a full PT of healers and tanks, even on a server where hunts were extremely well organized for the most part, like Excalibur.

Hunts didn't die down until the tomestone reward was less significant and there were other ways to get sands and oils besides Coil and hunts.

Now in 2.5, hunts are once again the only place to get carbontwine other than Coil. Even better, everyone has a higher iLVL average even though hunt marks were not made any stronger to compensate, and there's probably more players as well. Honestly, even in a premade PT already looking for hunt marks and communicating with other parties doing the same, it's borderline impossible to make it to a mark before it dies, and that's assuming 1) good connection 2) PC player 3) SSD (those extra seconds on load times for HDD is lulz).

Hell, I often miss marks even when I'm in the same zone because they die so crazy fast. Don't get me wrong, I don't really care if I miss marks, get partial credit, whatever. But it honestly baffles me that SE stands behind such incredibly poor design. It's bad enough the content is literally just a loot pinata, it has to be super frustrating as well?

Obviously if you put some of the best items in the game behind an "easily" accessible "content", everyone is going to go do it. I liked hunts better when people only did them for alexandrite, so I could get the glamour gear. Now it's like... Hahahaha. People just warp in and attack hunt marks on sight, and they evaporate in less than half a minute. This is really just crazy.

Does the dev team honestly think it's fun for everyone? I mean, it's fun if you like to see people rage in shout about early pulls, but that's about it.

[Xystic]

That's one of the downsides of playing on a large pop. server, in any MMO. Some features will be harder or entirely inaccessible.

There have been a few times where there just weren't enough individuals to do a S rank on Famfrit within 15-20 minutes of the spawn timer. This happens to be one of the downsides of a low population server =d.

[Cfai]

I know someone in my server will talk about this soon. Here I am, one of the Excalibur hunt leaders that will give you a few insight to this from the SE point of view (of course I do not have any reference or link that backs up my statement yet, but see if you agree to this perspective)

Since Final Coils came out, players have been complaining about how hard it is. The pool that plays FCOB is probably less than 10% of the server (at least for us in Excalibur). People that did not clear T9 is still more than 30%. That leads to saying, how will players even get motivated to get i130 gears without raiding hardcore? Na-da. This led to a lot of casual players stopped playing or even unsubscribing. To balance this out, SE had to do something about "farming rewards", which I already predicted correctly they will put this back in Hunt.

[Zohar_Lahar]

I know someone in my server will talk about this soon. Here I am, one of the Excalibur hunt leaders that will give you a few insight to this from the SE point of view (of course I do not have any reference or link that backs up my statement yet, but see if you agree to this perspective)

Since Final Coils came out, players have been complaining about how hard it is. The pool that plays FCOB is probably less than 10% of the server (at least for us in Excalibur). People that did not clear T9 is still more than 30%. That leads to saying, how will players even get motivated to get i130 gears without raiding hardcore? Na-da. This led to a lot of casual players stopped playing or even unsubscribing. To balance this out, SE had to do something about "farming rewards", which I already predicted correctly they will put this back in Hunt.

But i130 gear doesn't do anything about instant death mechanics or add new abilities/traits to current jobs.

[Krr]

This led to a lot of casual players stopped playing or even unsubscribing. To balance this out, SE had to do something about "farming rewards", which I already predicted correctly they will put this back in Hunt.

Except S-E could also put Carbontwine or other rewards equivalent to left-side i130 into:

-World of Darkness
-The "Primal Focus" weekly-style CT gauntlet quest
-any recent Primal encounter, which while difficult, are not as difficult as FCOB

By not spreading out the types of content players are 'motivated' to do, and funneling everything into hunts, you get irresponsible overpopulation. And no, Guildworks does not 'fix' the problem that leaves console players and people without supercomputers that can render the hunt mobs.

I used to hunt on Excalibur TS in 2.3. It's a fun community activity, especially to research and spawn S-ranks, but as battle content design, the state of hunts back then was absolute garbage that should never have been re-introduced.

[SendohJin]

Except S-E could also put Carbontwine or other rewards equivalent to left-side i130 into:

-World of Darkness
-The "Primal Focus" weekly-style CT gauntlet quest
-any recent Primal encounter, which while difficult, are not as difficult as FCOB

By not spreading out the types of content players are 'motivated' to do, and funneling everything into hunts, you get irresponsible overpopulation.

i still have no idea why they don't also let you buy Carbontwine and coats with Wolf Marks.

[Nekodar]

i still have no idea why they don't also let you buy Carbontwine and coats with Wolf Marks.

Maybe because those are not for PvP gear upgrades, where Wolf Marks is for/from PvP.
--

Twine/Coat is not the only reason to do hunts.
Getting Sand/Oil/Alexandrite twice as fast as before is another reason.
The only real problem is that you can actually buy the unstained logs with allied seals right away instead of having that be added in a later patch.

[Hiruke]

I know someone in my server will talk about this soon.

Probably sooner than you think, since the OP (me) is also from Excalibur. :P

Back to the Hunt topic, the only thing that I feel SE for not being responsible is allowing Guildwork clients.

It's possible that GW client contributes to the issue, but it's not exactly a root cause. From what I understand, many (most?) other servers were never able to really rein in their server while Hunts were relevant the first time. Excalibur managed to tightly organize hunts and get credit for the most amount of people without unduly diminishing credit for folks who arrived in a timely manner, but I guess a lot of other servers remained super toxic and ridiculous.

The real problem is:

1) Carbontwine can only be obtained via Final Coil or via Hunts.
2) Most people can't do Final Coil, or at least very well, period.
3) Everyone can teleport to a mob and attack it as soon as they are within range.
4) When you have everyone on the server wanting the reward mentioned in 1), and keeping in mind 2), the percentage chance to get 3) is overwhelming. I even see people in full dreadwyrm rush up to the hunt mark and pull it as soon as they first come within range. Pretty legit.

If there was an alternate "casual" way to get carbontwine (for example, if there was a second weekly to get twine instead of just coat), there would be less people doing hunts (and quickly substantially less as people figured out how stupid it was, never getting any credit).

Prior to 2.5, I personally found a ridiculous percentage of the hunt marks overnight, because I was bored and wanted glamours, so did that for some time. Hunts are pretty fun when people just want alex and glamours. I didn't mind that most people were content to wait for the mark to be found. Then 2.5 dropped and now hunts are packed to the gills at literally every hour of the day. Dead of night, early morning, midday, doesn't matter. So many people.

You just can't jam the whole server into a single content that is non-instanced and hope it will work out. It's wildly irresponsible because we've already seen it before, and besides that, one would hope that the dev team would understand how supply and demand work, given that it's a very basic concept.

(For full disclosure, I still get more than enough seals even with the early pulls to get stuff, but I don't think my personal benefit or lack thereof speaks to whether or not it is a well-designed game system, because honestly it's just not - assuming you are stacking "exclusive" rewards in there that everyone wants, which is presently the case.)

[Cfai]

Back to the Hunt topic, the only thing that I feel SE for not being responsible is allowing Guildwork clients. Guildwork is 100% against the FFXIV EULA. It is allowing people that do not even need to search for the Hunt Mark to get a notification and warp there then get rewarded for tagging. Same mentality: "If I claim it first, I get all credits - aka I will be unique because not everyone can get the seals". Yes most cases it benefits all of us. But to people who wants to play casually, not needing to warp the second someone announces a hunt, or for Console players, it just isn't fair for them because PC players can have this advantage.

Tl;dr. SE tries to balance casual and hardcore players using Hunts. But fails to fix the root of the issue, which is Guildworks.

[Xellos2099]

Tl;dr. SE tries to balance casual and hardcore players using Hunts. But fails to fix the root of the issue, which is Guildworks.

Well Cfai, in a sense, GW system is really no different than the ts group server we use before in terms of hunt. I know obviously there are huge difference in term of technology used but is it really truly different from having someone who is just listening in to TS server and tell friends in fs if a or s pop? Well, I do know the hunt is getting stupid hard last night, a sense of order been lost like in the PBC days back then. But as always, the later in the night it is, a sense of order was restored and people start waiting for people again.

I do agree that I believe final coil is a bit overtune and dps check is rough. Before anyone say that final coil can be clear with 115 gear; It is possible but not everyone is top end high end player that can do world first. To the less gifted player, better gears are needed for clearing coil. I am in turn 12 myself for over a month and the dps for the bennu is rough. To beat the wall of the high dps check people need and desire better gear. Thus the mass hunting going on atm.