Would you all like to see something beyond S-Rank Hunts?

[Vaer]

Did you forget what happened when they dynamically adjusted fates in HW? You know, to scale mob health hp and numbers based on the amount of people that did them, to counter FATE trains?

The current system is complete garbage. It's not even that dynamic. What it seems to do is it tracks the amount of players that were at the most recent FATE completion. The next one that spawns is scaled for that many players. So if 20 people were at the last one, and 15 people leave, the remaining 5 people have to deal with super scaled FATEs.

This ironically actually encourages playing it in large death balls/trains because if you aren't with the group with the higher amount of players you are stuck dealing with a scaled FATE by yourself or with a low amount of players. I haven't done enough of the newer ones, but it didn't seem to change much.

The SB change seems to have modified it where before the game would remember the scaling for each FATE individually, but now it keeps track of one variable that is applied to any nearby FATEs that spawn.

GW2 does it better, it scales based on the number of players currently at the event (based on bodies inside the event circle) which is a better implementation. It has it's own problems (afk/dead players inside the event still scale it) but way better than the FFXIV system.

Actual dynamic scaling would have the opposite effect - it would scale down to the lower amount of players automatically, or scale up to a larger amount of players keeping the difficulty in check instead of it possibly being based on players that are no longer there.

[Remedi]

I want to say something about world bosses and all.
In the past there was a boss that was designed to be unkillable as he would one shot ppl and made to have an absurd level of health .
Said monster was defeated (with some controversies by the devs) thanks to the oldest tactics of all which is simply throwing bodies at him.
That is the destiny of any open world bosses, unless SE creates a boss that requires the whole zone to be filled to be defeated and can defeat the ENTIRE zone if a mechanic is done wrong it simply won't matter how hard it'll be, by throwing enough bodies at him he will die

Blizzard understood that and made most of his world bosses in vanilla and TBC with some precaution.
Kazzak would instantly enrage if he had more than 40 players in his aggro list
The dragons and the doomwalker would put 2 min debuffs on you ON DEATH that would make you not be able to reengage in combat

And ofc the Tap to raid only for loot (also the fact that the other factiojn could interfere on your attempt was another deadly factor) If you think about it, it's less about the monster itself and more about the fact about your group having only one shot at it and possibly beign harrased by other players that made those fights a sight to behold

[Berilein]

I think they should be turned into fates that don't appear on the map, like Odin. I haven't done Odin in about a year, but you have to level sync to I think 53? A lot of people still die there.

[LineageRazor]

Did you forget what happened when they dynamically adjusted fates in HW?

That's passive, not dynamic. The current FATE doesn't change at all - instead, the NEXT time the FATE appears, it's harder. That is not what I was suggesting. Each additional person on the hate list INSTANTLY adds HP to the boss. Like, if one person soloed it down to one percent health, and then forty more people joined, it would gain so much HP that the amount he first player did would be just a sliver on the life bar. That's dynamic - it changes while the fight is in progress, not when it's over, leaving the boosted difficulty for the next group to deal with. By my system I'm suggesting, the next time it spawned, it would be at low HP again, and again scale up as people join the fight.

I want to say something about world bosses and all.

Because Hunts cater to the casual crowd, a zerg strategy is pretty much inevitable simply due to the fact that a large number of the participants will be terrible players. The focus needs to be on making the thing durable enough to weather large groups of players while still allowing each to obtain credit for the kill, rather than to punish players who play by mashing buttons with their face. Due to the function Hunts have in this game, I don't think we'll ever see genuinely difficult Hunt marks; the best we can expect is interesting mechanics that are inconvenient if you fail them.

[PyurBlue]

Something that I've wanted from hunts is for the marks to be threatening. I'm not referring to when you're fighting them, but their presence in the world. The Hunter-Scholars will tell you how terrible a certain monster is, but when you run across one it just stands around and doesn't do much of anything.

I think it would be interesting if they did things like try to attack settlements and the goal of the players would be to drive away the monster rather than outright kill it. This could also be used as a balancing mechanism since just throwing more people at the monster to fight it might not be enough to keep it from destroying a village if people aren't able to deal damage fast enough. If the monster takes too much damage it will leave, but still be alive. If the group is really good they'll be able to kill it before it flees.

[RiyahArp]

That's dynamic - it changes while the fight is in progress, not when it's over, leaving the boosted difficulty for the next group to deal with. By my system I'm suggesting, the next time it spawned, it would be at low HP again, and again scale up as people join the fight.

The idea is a bit more "do you really want SE to muck around with things like they did with FATES?" But your idea...you just made people joining the battle into increasing liabilities. If you combine this with very hard mechanics, you are giving no real incentive for anyone to share hunts or wait, as opposed to have a single FC lowman it as much as possible.

Then you get into the point of "why is it in the open world anyways?"

I think it would be interesting if they did things like try to attack settlements and the goal of the players would be to drive away the monster rather than outright kill it. This could also be used as a balancing mechanism since just throwing more people at the monster to fight it might not be enough to keep it from destroying a village if people aren't able to deal damage fast enough. If the monster takes too much damage it will leave, but still be alive. If the group is really good they'll be able to kill it before it flees.

FFXI did exactly this with their tales of aht urghan expansion. Essentially you had mobs invade a part of the main city's zone, and if you didn't drive them off you'd lose things like teleports and goods. You would have to regain it back later.

The problem is that the culture of MMOs has changed I think. You'd need a lot more of a server awareness and culture to be willling to defend zones, and in FFXI you always used the zones that were under attack. Here i don't think many people would care if the ruby sea was lost, for example.

[LineageRazor]

The idea is a bit more "do you really want SE to muck around with things like they did with FATES?" But your idea...you just made people joining the battle into increasing liabilities. If you combine this with very hard mechanics, you are giving no real incentive for anyone to share hunts or wait, as opposed to have a single FC lowman it as much as possible.

I'm not denying that the proposed system might need some tweaking but single FC lowmans ALREADY have no real incentive to share or wait. Even S-ranks are easily killed by a single party - and because the HP pool of hunts are so low, folks tend to pull early because if they wait for everyone to arrive, there's not enough HP for everyone to get gold credit for the kill, no matter how hard they fight. My suggestion actually takes away this disincentive, since the difficulty isn't increased by more people. It takes just as long for a party of six to kill a monster with 60k hp, as it does for a group of forty to kill a monster with 400k hp. This is especially true if the HP boost takes the player's ilvl into account when calculating how much HP to add.

Then you get into the point of "why is it in the open world anyways?"

I had high hopes for Hunt marks in the beginning as actual challenges. I was hoping for something more along the lines of FFXII's system. Fights tailored to Light and Full parties, where the leader would pick a hunt bill, travel to the zone, and the monster would appear for just that party. The fights would be challenging and interesting, and produce unique and interesting rewards.

That's not what we got, obviously, and what we did get is something tailored to a much more casual level of difficulty, intended to allow folks to obtain catch-up gear. The problem is that it's not doing that very well, because the monsters are too weak. As much as I'd love them to overhaul the system to one more to my liking, that's not a very reasonable expectation; better to make suggestions that will help the existing system do what it was intended to do. As they are, Hunt Marks are too weak and die too fast. At the same time, it's risky to make them too strong, as it alienates players that do not hunt during peak hours. A system for balancing the monsters according to what they're fighting seems reasonable - but done right, rather than the unfortunate system we wound up with for balancing FATEs.

[Remedi]

Because Hunts cater to the casual crowd, a zerg strategy is pretty much inevitable simply due to the fact that a large number of the participants will be terrible players. The focus needs to be on making the thing durable enough to weather large groups of players while still allowing each to obtain credit for the kill, rather than to punish players who play by mashing buttons with their face. Due to the function Hunts have in this game, I don't think we'll ever see genuinely difficult Hunt marks; the best we can expect is interesting mechanics that are inconvenient if you fail them.

Yes but as said even if you make complex mechanics, if you don't restrict how many ppl can partecipate with the kill, there's no way that a world boss won't be zergable. Also to be fair considering what yoshida have said about NMs in Eureka I think that they've been designed so that not everyone are able to kill them in time