Etiquette in XIV

[Niwashi]

If there's nobody there when you find a hunt, shout that it's available, and wait a bit for others to arrive. After a couple minutes, shout again to ask if anyone is on the way. If anyone is, then wait for them. If not and there are enough people to take on the mob, then it's ok to pull. It may be considered more polite if you also announce then that you're pulling. On my server, at least for S ranks, people usually announce in advance the time (in Eorzea time) of the pull (though we don't generally bother with that on A ranks unless it's drawing an unusually large crowd).

If there are already other people there, then don't pull unless they say to. For S rank hunts, whoever spawned the mark gets to choose when the pull time is. For A rank hunts (or an S if nobody seems to know who spawned it) whoever found it first gets to decide. In either case, deciding when to pull should be discussed, so that if anyone isn't ready they have a chance to say so. And it should not be pulled (even if the first person wants to) if the rest of the people there aren't ready.

A ready check is a basic enough MMO pattern. If it's a small group there and they form into a single party, you can even use the built-in ready check feature from the party interface. If there are other people there not in your party, then it can be done in /say or /shout. Give people a chance to indicate whether they're ready or not, and if anybody says to wait, then you wait. So long as you've done that, then even if someone arrives later and misses it, nobody is going to call that an early pull.

I doubt your 'mistake' will be remembered by anyone 15 minutes later.

After just this one occasion, no it won't be remembered. But if the same person pulls early on a regular basis, disrupting every hunt they arrive at, that's something people will remember them for.

On Ultros, we rarely have early pull issues. I'm in 5 hunt linkshells and when a call goes out it will usually be around 5 mins before the "hunt dead" call goes out. People will repeatedly ask in LS and in Shout if others are on the way. If they are most people seem to have the courtesy to wait. On the rare occasion that someone does pull early that person is 1.) Called out and questioned by their actions. Then 2.) If they show no remorse as in "I'm not waiting for noobs" the they get blacklisted from the most popular hunt linkshells on the server. This system works and we rarely have early pulls.

That sounds a lot like Coeurl. Hunts are quite friendly and polite. People ask if others are ready. When it seems most of the people interested are there, someone will announce a pull time. When that time comes, we pull. Sure there are still cases where people arrive late. (I've arrived late quite a few times myself.) But nobody gets upset about it, let alone try to blame it on others, because the pull was announced and agreed to.

People (well, one individual in particular) who can't accept that, and just pull without regard for anyone else, are shunned by the rest of the hunting community. (The player who gained notoriety on Coeurl for regularly early pulling, was doing so deliberately to grief everyone else, and bragged about doing so, laughing at anyone who lost out.) But that sort of thing doesn't come up often.

S ranks tend to attract a nigh infinite string of people and virtually no matter when you pull, if someone doesn't make it, they'll start complaining about early pulling. It's a mini drama that plays out after every S rank in particular, even when I know the thing has been up 10 minutes already

Must be a server specific issue. I've never seen that on Coeurl. If it's pulled at the announced and agreed upon pull time, nobody calls it an early pull. We'll get the occasional "Oh darn, missed it " type of comments after a hunt, but without any anger to them.

But yes, it will sometimes take over 10 minutes. The first announcement goes to shout and maybe one or two linkshells, but it's not until the people responding to that get there that it goes out to their other linkshells, and when that second wave arrives, they'll pass it to yet more, and so on. It can take a while, but that's the price of actually being polite and avoiding that drama some servers seem prone to.

Between tomestones and Allied/Centurio seals, an S rank gives around three times as much rewards as a dungeon that you'd spend 20 or 30 minutes on after waiting yet more time in queue. So if it takes more than 10 minutes for everyone to arrive, then you wait for more than 10 minutes. It would still be a great reward for time ratio at over twice that (though I've never known it to actually take twice that long).