Thread: The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

Originally Posted by FizzleofHyperion

I can't speak for odin but i know on hyperion 5-7 groups usually manage to get full credit. To me thats more realistic than 1 person depriving almost 50 others because of egoism. Plus when a mob dies between 8-10 seconds if you have a full 8man group you usually get full credit anyways.

I am on Hyperion. This does not sound right.

Whether or not lots of players can get credit for Hunts during the zerg doesn't change that they're ultimately mindless, invalidated content because of that zerg. They're very clearly designed around smaller groups (ARR Hunts at 50 in Full Parties were a vastly different experience from the one you get during the more common zerg format). The zerg format largely sped up gearing to such a degree that SE doubled the grind in all future implementations of them (and they further nerfed it again by, as far as I can tell, eliminating Mark Logs from the drop tables of HW Marks).

You may not care about how engaging content is and running around mindlessly zerg-slaughtering Hunt Marks may be fun to you, but there are indeed players who strongly dislike zerg-style content and want to see more interesting fights with meaningful mechanics. We're quite wary of SE's ability to deliver on exciting open world content, as they've repeated the same general mistakes multiple times now with FATEs, Hunts (twice, since they were forced to buff HP values for HW marks as if they'd completely forgotten how we behaved with the old ones), and Diadem.

Originally Posted by FizzleofHyperion

I can't speak for odin but i know on hyperion 5-7 groups usually manage to get full credit. To me thats more realistic than 1 person depriving almost 50 others because of egoism. Plus when a mob dies between 8-10 seconds if you have a full 8man group you usually get full credit anyways.

Certain jobs can easily solo full credit on a hunt in the 8-10 seconds. I've been doing this on my SMN since June - and I know DRKs/WARs do that as well. I'm not sure about other jobs.

Despite all of this, either the design of hunts are horrible, or they are being completed in a way that they were not designed for. I believe I read somewhere that Yoshi mentioned how he did not predict hunts to be zerged down the way they were. I submitted a thread not long ago with an idea to prevent the zerg mentality, but it was met with a lot of angst. It seems the general population would prefer to have mindless content with high rewards.

Personally, I find the most interesting part of the hunt to be the prep prior to the hunt. Creating a hunt party and scouting zones. If anything it'd be neat if hunts had some sort of problem solving to pop them. Instead of being on a timer and randomly spawning, you go to a Hunter NPC and chat with them. They can give you a clue about the hunts whereabouts, then you go to that area once solved and find more clues to track down what area of the zone it's in, at which point you perform something to lure it out (using interact-able food or whatever). I think this would add a lot more value to the 'hunt' aspect of it.

Originally Posted by Ibi

How long should everyone wait in order to not "deprive" other people? How many people who might be on the way is it acceptable to "deprive", especially given that it's realistically impossible to know how many people that actually is?

I fully agree, this early pull nonsense is just that - nonsense. Everyone seems to think they deserve full credit, even though they put in 0 effort in to finding the hunt. The way I see it, is if you are actively hunting and searching, then yes people should wait long enough for you to get there (3 minutes is roughly the max time needed for this), but if you are just finishing off your A4 run and racing in, and complain that they didn't wait for 10 minutes, then that's ridiculous.

I wish SE would either do something about allowing more people in Linkshells, creating a hunting chat channel, or providing incentive to not zerg it down.

Originally Posted by Kaurie

I wish SE would either do something about allowing more people in Linkshells, creating a hunting chat channel, or providing incentive to not zerg it down.

Only real ways to do this is limit the boss to the party that claims it, or make the hunts a forced pop via an item. The first option being worse. I could see the second choice happening if they did it right, which I don't have much faith in SE pulling off nowadays.

Originally Posted by Ibi

Having seen how far away from their design intent the ARR hunts ended up and having then kept that design more-or-less exactly the same for Hunts in Heavensward, it suggests they either don't care or don't consider it worth the time that would be needed to come up with any kind of solution.

I imagine it's the latter. Even as they are Hunts have a lot of engagement (that's because they overload them with rewards, of course, but still) and they're a good catch up mechanic for the odd-numbered patches. I assume it would take a lot of development time to really change the structure in any way that would make a difference enough to counter the zerg mentality, and they'd probably rather put that into new types of content, I suppose.

I think it's a shame, as Hunts have been probably my biggest disappointment for this game so far (I'm more bothered by them than I am by Diadem's failure, to be real, though Diadem is definitely a close second).