Regarding cross-world visiting and Hunts.

[Jojoya]

They specifically said at the live letter "you can visit other worlds and do hunts there", so wanderers are doing nothing wrong.

Cross-World has been positive for hunts.

-snip-

Regarding each of your points:

1. People who work might see the call but they'll never make it in time if they're having to travel cross world to get there. S ranks are getting swarmed the moment they're found by pull on sight cross world players now.

2. Coeurl is low pop. You don't need 200 players to kill a S rank so we never struggled with them, thank you very much. Stop making assumptions about what things were like on the low pop servers.

3. Can agree here. If you were in a dungeon or doing something else when the spawn was relayed, there will always be another S rank to catch when you are not occupied.

4. Go back to #1. The potential for more hunts is canceled by the additional transport time involved. Things are dead before you get there.

5. Can agree again here. It has been fun doing Rank A trains with players from other worlds and visiting their worlds in turn to join their trains.

6. SE never said they're going to turn them into FATEs. They stated they were looking into possible solutions and that while FATEs were one thing they had considered, it would be such a major rework of the hunt system that they would be unlikely to do it.

There was some brief cross world drama over Rank As when the servers came up on the 23rd but that died out pretty quick. Since then things have been normal for the Rank As to the best of my knowledge.

The problem is the S ranks, as the hunt community predicted as soon as world visit was announced. SE has allowed isolated problem players to spread outside of the worlds they were confined to and into the entire data center. It has not solved any problems. It has created a larger one.

Sorry, but right now most of the Crystal worlds are getting plagued by a Balmumg S rank hunter that evidently already had a bad rep on Balmung because of his use of a third party program to be alerted to spawns immediately and pull on sight tactics. He even stated in zone shout on Coeurl after one of his pulls that he camps one of the city state Aetherytes then immediately goes to the world with a spawn when his program alerts him, that's it's our tough luck we aren't killing it before he gets there. The drama it is causing across multiple worlds has been ridiculous. Players from other worlds in Crystal were complaining about him in our zone shout at the same time.

Something needs to be done. Making S ranks immune to damage for 5 minutes after spawn would be a big help. Your pull on sight Balmung neighbor could go ahead and pull once the immunity wears off but at least it would give players who rely on linkshell relays instead of unauthorized third party programs a reasonable chance to get there and get their hit on the mark.

[Vnolan]

Making S ranks immune to damage for 5 minutes after spawn would be a big help.

Eureka still gets mass lag from time to time and it's capped at 144 players. Ixion required them to introduce additional instances to deal with the load and that was one server. 5 minutes would have everyone from all 8 servers trying to cram into a zone anytime an S rank spawned on any of the servers.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ed-an-instance

Just happened on Odin as well. Noone got anything except one guy now being one Stygian Ash lighter.

That's just too many people in one instance. Happened the other day on Cactuar when Foxy Lady spawned in one of the Yanxia Instances. Over 400 people in there trying to do the FATE, and most of us ended up red-dotting the majority of the FATE, so we only got bronze. Sadness.

Why would you ever attempt to spawn a hunt when there would be a chance you'd get no credit due to other people cramming in? Why would you ever help spawn a hunt when you'd have to go out of your way to miss it?

You'll be complaining just the same that players from other servers are preventing you from being able to do hunts when you're locked out of the zone.

As far as fixes go, invuln screams "I want hunts without putting in any effort". Just come out and say that so a more honest discussion can be had.

[Jeeqbit]

1. People who work might see the call but they'll never make it in time if they're having to travel cross world to get there.

4. Go back to #1. The potential for more hunts is canceled by the additional transport time involved. Things are dead before you get there.

I've had time to make them all the way from zones on other worlds myself and seen them alive for quite a good amount of time in most cases, but my PC is specced to load fast.

2. Coeurl is low pop. You don't need 200 players to kill a S rank so we never struggled with them, thank you very much. Stop making assumptions about what things were like on the low pop servers.

I'm not making assumptions. I'm always told by people that the reason SE won't increase health is because of the effect it would have on low population worlds that already struggle to kill hunts. I don't know if they actually said that ever.

6. SE never said they're going to turn them into FATEs. They stated they were looking into possible solutions and that while FATEs were one thing they had considered, it would be such a major rework of the hunt system that they would be unlikely to do it.

They went over several ideas and shot them down before getting to the FATE idea, which they said would require adding spawn conditions to the FATE system, something that is too much work until after 5.0. They didn't actually shoot down the FATE idea but rather said they can't do it before 5.0. Since they didn't shoot it down it looks like this is what they are minded to do in 5.x.

Whether they will still be minded to do that or something else by then, keeping up the pressure is good because they might not bother at all otherwise.

[JowyAtreides]

They should just make the spawn requirements stricter (for some) and make the spawn rates spammable.

This will ensure players have to put effort in to spawn it, but they will know it will spawn eventually. This will also remove the "has it been killed recently" dilemma of scouring a map for 30 minutes for no clue if it's ready or not. Yes we have Ariyala's, but only the organised linkshells use this. If a random level 70 player found an ARR/HW A rank and killed it alone, likelihood they will report it is low.

Some examples:

Southern Thanalan: Emerge victorious from all fates in a time period. This is an example of a good requirement to spawn something. Not one I'd change as there is dedication to this one
Mor Dhona: Do maps for a chance to spawn, alternatively every 20th (or any other number) map in the area spawns the S rank
Northern Thanalan: Kill earth sprites for a chance to spawn, alternatively every 250th kill spawns it
Western Thanalan (I think): Fish Glimmerscales for a chance to spawn, alternatively every 10th Glimmerscale spawns it

and so on.

[KageTokage]

On the subject of Ariyala, the amount of people trolling by misreporting kill times has skyrocketed ever since World travel opened.

Someone has been mismarking the entirety of the Aether DC's S ranks every few hours like clockwork and it makes me think they have a macro running just to troll people.

Thankfully, there are better trackers with functional blacklists to prevent such behavior.

[-Mira-]

So far I do struggle to reach the S ranks on time especcially ARR ones. Except if per chance I help spawning them or join a very early server. But then still they often get sniped before I can even inform my server locals of the hunt on time because it is dead before people from outside the zone can even reach. Same for I can't even get to S ranks on other servers because the queue is so long since all the hunters swarm there.

Current S rank count is a little over 360 (in 4 years, a lot of calls happen when I'm in some dungeon or other party so I can't just drop all and the party for something that mostly gets sniped before I can even /pet it's head) I doubt ever getting the chance to even stroke the tail of that tiger mount on my character ... except for people more fortunate to actually agressively make it on time to snipe before others can reach.

Malboro had it's snipe moments in the past, but also the times of peaceful waiting (in which I thrived whenever I had the time and energy)... well that clearly is over. Especially when the swarm happens.

[Jeeqbit]

So far I do struggle to reach the S ranks on time especcially ARR ones. Except if per chance I help spawning them or join a very early server. But then still they often get sniped before I can even inform my server locals of the hunt on time because it is dead before people from outside the zone can even reach.

Most of the time, there are local calls and since people have time to make it from other worlds, they should have enough time to make it from their own. Regrettably, informing locals is occasionally not successful before it gets pulled (in some cases they all seem to be asleep).

The 64 people in my CWLS say they are getting far more S ranks in the limited time they have to hunt than they ever did before. It remains true that if you load too slowly, you either need to consider installing an SSD or you need to try and pre-empt when hunts will spawn to make them. A lot of them spawn at specific times, and you also won't miss them on other worlds if you are the person that spawned it. You could also just go for Stormblood calls since they often last long.

(We need to be in more than one CWLS and they need a larger capacity so we can better get the message to locals)

[HKagemusha]

There is a reason folks are making it from out of world first, they're part of CWLS and Discord servers that call it for their own folk. They have no incentive to call it out to locals and let it spread through local LS first they want their people in there.

Furthermore Wanderers have absolutely no incentive to wait patiently for locals to gather they want to pull as soon as they are ready so they can move onto the next pull on whatever server. Locals are only gathering for local spawns they aren't planning to travel to other worlds for the same S rank x amount of times.

Locals on small servers are the ones who are getting screwed, we have fewer players and fewer ls to spawn and report spawns compared to big cross-world groups. The pattern is too obvious every time it's a wanderer that pulls it early and every time it's locals complaining about missing the pull, not wanderers.

One possible solution is to bar wanderers from pulling hunt mobs. They can show up, party up, and participate but it has to be a local that pulls. While it's not a perfect solution by any means it makes for less headaches and if a local pulls early then it's a different issue, less obvious animosity for wanderers.

I suppose you could also put a CD on a player when they get credit for killing a particular S rank. Make it so they can't kill that same S rank on another server within a day or two. That seems like an extreme solution to me though.

[Jeeqbit]

There is a reason folks are making it from out of world first, they're part of CWLS and Discord servers that call it for their own folk. They have no incentive to call it out to locals and let it spread through local LS first they want their people in there.

A balanced CWLS will have 5 or so people from each world who can relay it to their world's linkshells. If many of them are also those world's spawners or relayers, they often get the message to them because of that as well. The purpose of the discord servers are to get the message to people unlucky enough to not be in a CWLS (given their limited capacity). If locals aren't at least in the discords then perhaps they don't want those hunts enough.

Furthermore Wanderers have absolutely no incentive to wait patiently for locals to gather they want to pull as soon as they are ready so they can move onto the next pull on whatever server.

On Crystal that depends. If it's a hunt that spawns on all worlds at the exact same time, they will pull almost as soon as they get there so they can get all of the other ones before they die. This is understandable. If two hunts happen to be up at the same time, that usually signals that it's time to pull the one they are already at. If there are no other hunts up they will usually wait 2-4 minutes, unless there is a scenario like low level proximity aggro.

Locals are only gathering for local spawns they aren't planning to travel to other worlds for the same S rank x amount of times.

If they care that much about hunting then restricting themselves to their own worlds is shooting themselves in the foot, and sticking in the past. If they are happy with the fewer local hunts they make it to now, then that's fine. The important thing is to adapt to the new climate in one way or another.

[Inddie]

If hunts are alive for too long, the game will experience issues from all of the players zoning in. If the hunts live for only a little while longer, why ask for it under the guise of having more being able to participate?

this would be solved by disallowing visitors from participating as dramatically less people would be zoning in. Without being able to participate, they wouldn't have a reason to come.

and im not saying this based on hunt getting killed quickly. i can usually get there in time. but the sheer amount of people makes the hunt not render. I'm not lagging, i have a beefy computer with fast inet. I can zone in really fast. But if enough people are near the hunt then it just wont render.

And before you say "just aoe around it you'll get credit" I (and everyone else) shouldn't have to settle for "credit" because the game's limitations wouldn't let them actually get full credit. It's no fault of the players so why should they be punished or get a lesser reward because the game wont render the hunt because there are more people preset than the game was designed for DUE to the ability to cross world hunt.

Another possible solution would be to do what SE has already claimed they've done but has remained to be seen; Giving render priority to hunt mobs over other players ESPECIALLY players not in your party.
IMO the render priority should be Player>Teammates>Hunt>other players>Non hunt enemies>Chocobo>minion>everything else. And Homeworlders should get priority rendering of hunt over visitors. This is fair to everyone in that anyone visiting would then have priority in their respective world were I to ever visit to hunt.

The system as is is broken. A lot of people can't participate due to no fault of their own. They are there on time, they have good connections and good computers, but due to the sheer amount of people still can't participate or have to settle for partial credit when they could do more if simply the hunt would render.