Hunts and Trains; please fix the Hunts!

[ACE135]

I would take a Mudman's hunt instead anytime, it is way more funny to still see so much people being flattened by mechanics who have been around for more than one year XD

I think it is also possible that AoE's aren't visible for everyone when too many players are there. Happened to me in other situations, where they sometimes were shown and sometimes not.

[Shougun]

The issue being is that hunts are not well designed when scaled with the number of people that attend them. There are plenty of stories of people not being able to see hunts; players not loading into the zones quickly; character and animation culling.

There's also the question I feel often gets overlooked: "Are Hunts actually fun?". Sure, you are rewarded quite well for your time, but I feel a good measure of a fun system in an MMO is would you go do it if there was little to no reward for doing so? Take the Hero's Gauntlet for example, the dungeon is exciting to do, so I've done it several times knowing it is not an efficient use of my time. I've played Rival Wings mainly because I find the game mode fun and accessible. Would you undertake a Hunt because it is entertaining though?

Hunt train reminds me of FATE trains, which reminds me of mindless zerg-ing. Good opportunity to chat, but opportunity, imo, to 'play' the game itself. Pros and cons lol.

I still think it might be good to encourage the 'hunt' part of the aspect while taking down the mass zerg into smaller waves. Concept was something inspired to some Dark Souls mechanics, but basically hunts would when alive be worth more in some fashion (perhaps an extra drop) but they wouldn't scale anymore (except perhaps purposefully designed for chaos world bosses). Then once a hunt is killed the leave behind a mark, which can be interacted with to gain a rough idea of how old the death is, and also to engage the hunt in a phased duel (would create a sphere phase around that area where you'd then fight in that space). I liked the idea of kindling to help purify the spirit or what have you, and how old the death was would determine the maximal scale you could kindle to (but optionally you can always go to lower scales). Each reduction in scale reducing amount rolls, so if there was normally x, y, z drops, a tier down might be x, y or z rolls (meaning you have one less roll and that second roll is shared, step down from that would be x or y or z, instead of two you've only one and it's shared cross all groups). Purpose, besides time, to reduce the tier would be for different group sizes and levels. If you're a solo max rank player fighting an S rank level 50 you might go full power, but if you're two players level 50 you might go to half strength (reducing hp / damage of the hunt). Another concept might be special items you might gather that turn kindling up a notch (kindle the fire demon with a special stone that drops from Ifrit and suddenly you've hunt EX).

Now you can make hunts an activity at pretty much any time of day or situation but also you would gain more from finding the hunt alive, so there is that bonus for players who are into the search. Meanwhile the info of death is relatively public knowledge. Also due to greater accessibility I feel it would be fair to add some crafts or special drops to them without it causing more old school mmo problems. At the same time might as well turn the current hunt log which has been abandoned into a hunt log that relates to hunts, rewards for that as well.

System that encourages active hunters, doesn't greatly punish others, especially preventing issues where some high level murder solos your content that is considered active for you (or from other servers), allows tighter gameplay balance (if you joined a hunt party you'd almost always have up to 8 players fighting mini bosses, rather than 200). Etc.. The reward rate would roughly be what a good day of hunt trains are of as of now (as you could go from hunt to hunt to hunt non-stop, but each battle experience would be more specific to you and your group rather than a giant ball of death, important that the hunts balance is adjusted to that otherwise it would actually be a lot slower lol).

Of course I think world boss experience has it's place, I just don't think normal hunts are anyway where equipped to handle that experience without it being basically "brain off, make as much credit awarding moves as possible as fast as possible, then teleport to the next location you're told to as quickly as possible". (which is basically just reiterating what you said lol).

On world bosses it would be cool to see some greater systems into it- I recall some GW2 systems for some of their zone bosses that were pretty cool. Before we were so popular I had thought it would be neat when a world boss happens there was a staging camp that was built up as more players joined, you could do some pre-fight prep work (including DoH/DoL stuff), and then the area would go into multi-phased fights basically- many big chonkin FATEs. Such that you might have 1,000 yalms away cannons firing shackles into a giant boss which helps those under foot climb up, etc (makes me think of one of the first trailers of ARR when 1.0 was still active, with that HUGE Adamantoise in the background of shroud). System that gives you the opportunity to help out in a number of different ways and purpose gain credit at multiple points too. Rather than maybe a 5 minutes to kill Odin it's like a 45 minute ordeal, with opportunity to get credit a few times for those who need to bounce or cannot complete certain tasks (maybe some tasks are more level friendly than others). Like for Odin he's on a Horse so it would make sense he gallops around the battlefield and obviously wields Gungnir (his spear thing). Might be some group to make the fight much easier is trying to find his spear and damage it like a nail in Ifrit fight, with loads and loads of demons spawning around it. Meanwhile great aether shields that create condensed barriers (reducing Odin's galloping distance, and number of times) need to be constructed and supported. If you didn't keep him settled to an area he might literally jump half way cross the map and 1 shot everyone on the way. Anyone below a certain level, not in combat, perhaps just gets slapped hard for the memory or perhaps is revived by some moogles or something xD (no point in murdering a bunch of level 10s who were in the wrong place at the wrong time lol).

[MoonPhaseAlpha]

Even if nothing is done now; My hope is the developers will put some limitation next major patch to reduce this kind of thing.

Seeing as though the congestion dies down after a week or two, I don't think this will happen.

[ItMe]

It melts my PS4.
I have to heal to contribute because the bosses never load in.
On PS4(not even an OG one) even TPing from one side of an area to another can take up to a full minute to load.
Not even TPing between areas, from the Ostal to Fort Jobb can take a minute to load.
Lately the hunt trains have been waiting a bit before shouting the coordinates of the mark, and it's been super helpful and they've been getting thanked like nuts.
If it weren't for the community being understanding this would be pretty impossible on console.

[ClaudeHerel]

The Hunt was a mistake

[LaylaTsarra]

The Hunt was a mistake

There is nothing wrong with hunts other than they're too popular at the moment. People complain about one less dungeon but if you spend any time with hunts you'll see that many many of us cap our characters with hunt tomes and use other rewards for minions, mounts, materia and now upgrades. There is nothing special to running a dungeon after you've cleared and run it a few times. I think SE recognizes that and has adjusted the content accordingly. I cap my main and all my alts with A rank trains and run experts when friends are doing them and want company.

Many servers right now are going private and only letting local linkshells know about the trains during high pop times. This congestion will pass soon enough and then we'll be back to many trains not having enough people and taking much longer than some would like.

Locking one upgrade token a week to the Puppets Bunker and makiing you run Copied as well isn't helping when upgrade tokens have no limit when it comes to nuts.

[Jojoya]

Unfortunately there's nothing that SE can really do at this point short of entirely changing how the Hunt works (at least with respect to current expansion Rank As). The only decent solution I can think of would be for SE to put a timer on how often a player can kill a specific Rank A (similar to how we can only gather one treasure map every 18 hours). That still gives players to go cross world to get credit if they missed the train on their own world (either due to timing or congestion) but takes away the incentive to do more than one train a day.

This congestion is normal for the first couple of a weeks when a major patch is released. This was true even before world visit was added. It will clear up as players get their augment tokens and go back to doing other things.

The congestion problem has been discussed by many of the conductors on Crystal. Many of us are affected just as badly as other members of the train. But we are at the mercy of spawn timers and conductor availability. We do our best but there's always going to be someone left unhappy.

As for trains being conducted by players from other Crystal worlds, that's usually happening either at the request of or with the consent of the main conducting teams from those worlds. Rin (most likely to be the off world conductor you'll run into) has been a huge help in making certain trains are getting run on a regular basis and always keeps other conductors up to date on what's been scouted and ready to run in the conductor cwl.

From experience the zone lets you in after 30 sec at most or so. Calling the aetheryte first gives everyone that bit of time to get in and barely extends the train more than a few minutes or so.

Either way, they got impatient and stopped calling aetherytes first on Light DC. I'm not sure why you'd take the time to scout a train, announce it on all your linkshells and share it with the community, then not let half of them in, but train conductor sets the rules so I'm not complaining.

Problem with calling the Aetheryte first is that you leave the train stuck right at the Aetheryte, causing congestion at that location and preventing players from loading in.

It's better to call a location a short distance from the Aetheryte so players move away and others are able to load in. That worked much better when I was using that system back in SB. There would always be those few players who already knew the mark location and would take off but generally people would manage to load in and make it to the kill (assuming instance capacity wasn't hit).

As for players not being able to get in at all because too many players know about a train, conductors can't control who gets the relays. Everyone has their own set of linkshells and cross world linkshells they relay to, then the members of those linkshells spread the word even more. There's not much that can be done under the current system.

[DrWho2010]

it doesn't really matter if hunts are "fun". it has a reward for currency that people who can't run savage or are tired of doing so want (glaze/twine). and it's not weekly based locked out like savage or 24 man coins. this goes to show that something that can be acquired ad nauseum people will gorge themselves upon it. until that need gets satisfied, the situation is what it is.

also to answer your question re: would you do hunts if there was little to no reward for doing so? there's the hunt mount rewards, titles, and clusters, but if you've completely exhausted all avenues of compensation i'm not sure i would continue to hunt as it wouldn't be necessary other than an it being an alternate method to cap weekly tomes. there is a social aspect to hunting as well.

[Halobump]

it doesn't really matter if hunts are "fun".

And this is perhaps the problem. There appears to be a focus on doing what is easiest through game design that encourages a homeostatic approach, punishing variance.

[KatCnaa]

There could be other solutions to try and mitigate the massive surges that these trains cause; perhaps decreasing the spawn time of the A ranks at a minimum to reduce the need for the trains in the first place or provide alternative ways of getting hunts. I don't know what else can be done on the technical side of things, but giving the history such as restricting access to the firment, SE should look at least look at a temporary restriction.

I have posted about this issue with some suggested fixes. https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-Hunt-Proposal