Hunts and Trains; please fix the Hunts!

[Ardeth]

The easiest least effect on players doing it fix would be to remove their ability to get credit for the hunt mark. That would be the best solution. Either that or restrict the Wanderers to main city's and housing districts and to me that kinda destroys the social aspect of it. I think removing their credit and contributions to hunts would solve the issue 100%.

[LaylaTsarra]

There is no need to restrict wanderers. The conductors have the option to keep their trains private and not ping them crossworld. We go through this everytime they have an upgrade token.

[Jojoya]

Cross World already borked them. I can only imagine how awful Cross Realm will be.

We aren't expecting Data Center Visit to impact hunts much because of the additional delay in logging out, requesting the data center transfer, waiting for it to be done, then logging back in. That will make it useless in the case of S ranks (unless someone is going cross data center to try to spawn), and probably not worth the effort in the case of trains when there's likely a train ready to run on the player's home data center.

I think a CD on world visit might be in order to mitigate this issue but I'm sure the playerbase would disagree with that.

A CD would be a step backwards in what the visit system was created to accomplish. Players are using world visit for far more than just hunts.

With respect to hunts, world visit isn't really the problem. It's also offered benefits to the community since players are no longer tied to being online at a certain time to join the train. If you miss your world's train, you can always join another world's train. If you play in off peak hours, more players will be attending so the train only takes 30-40 minutes instead of 2 hours.

The problem is how lucrative trains are when it comes to getting clusters, nuts and tomestones. There's no effective limit on how much you can earn in a day or week (outside of the weekly top tier tomestone cap) so there are players that will chain run 7-8 trains a day to gear up alt jobs faster and to make gil, which causes the congestion.

If we were limited to rewards once a day per Rank A, train congestion would reduce considerably because there would be no point in running the additional trains unless someone was farming kills to get their hunt mounts (which is a relatively small percentage of those attending hunts). There would still be the heavy congestion during the first 2-3 weeks of a major patch because a lot more players who normally don't take an interest are trying to farm their gear upgrades and/or clusters for their overmelds but that's nothing new.

It's amazing how many long time members of the hunt community have forgotten the same problems existed even before world visit was added and that some of the things we do now to deal with congestion were tricks we developed to deal with congestion when worlds were still isolated.

[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).