Thoughts on how to make the open world maps more interesting

[Nalien]

Please please please add a second method of doing Hunts that utilises Levequests and a XI (oh no, I said the bad) style xNM progression system. I hate the whole "wander around aimlessly" method of doing Hunts, and the fact that you can't do them on your own time, you instead have to wait for them to be up? There's a reason I never do them. Final nail in the coffin is that the whole "wait for the entire server to arrive" culture has just made them into incredibly boring fights... By all means leave the current system in place for those who some how enjoy it, but I'd like an alternative... Masked Carnival is looking to be an alternative means of getting Allied Seals, but I'd actually like to do open world Hunts, just not with the system we currently have...

Something akin to XIs Zeni NM system would be much better IMO. Pick up a Levequest that has you fight the B Rank of a given zone, complete it and it drops a key item. Take that back to the NPC, trade in the key item, now you get a Levequest for the A Rank, and so on. For 3.0+ where we had multiple B and A Ranks, I imagine you could require key items from both to progress up a rank. So something like B1 + B2 = A1 or A2, A1 + A2 = S.

Even basic low level Levequests have mechanics that are more like an actual hunt than what we get with random world spawn Hunts, you could expand those concepts to have something really enjoyable IMO, something where you feel like you're actually tracking a target and trying to lure it out, rather than just flying from spawn point to spawn point... I also think it was a damn shame that we never really got any "endgame" Levequests, and a system like this would be perfect for such a thing while adding some much needed open world content to the game. Heck, you could even flesh out some of the lore behind the Hunt monsters with Levequests, as well as actually make use of these large zones that just have no content in them... How many sections of these maps just have no purpose? No quests involving them, no FATEs, nothing... Could involve those areas in Hunt Levequests...