It's Time To Reconsider Removing Crossworld Hunting

[Faafetai]

I am unsure what could be done, but the few I have participated in was possibly the worst experience. I have not gone since. I asked that people remove their chocobos possibly pets if they may make things less congested, many said to sod off until one person said what I said and no one told them to sod off. The person I went with has a better computer than I do, could never see the hunt targets due to the numerous amounts of people. Many started to get stuck behind due to the 'congestion to location' message. People saying stupid things like 'maybe you shouldn't play on a toaster' 'don't complain' 'you should have caught the football'. I had an easier time with all of my setting turned to low, I figured you just have to aoe and prey you get the credit on the invisible target.

I know the hunts are important to many, and they wish to rush it and get it done with, but not waiting for people to get there and understanding the high volume may cause a huge amount of people to miss almost everything, it is just not very enjoyable. I have just resigned to the fact that I should wait for the day or night it is slow or just accept not being able to participate in this content apart from the ones on the hunting board. Also maybe it is not always like this, and I were unlucky on these days.

[Jojoya]

World visit is not the problem with hunts. It's solved some of the problems that existed before world visit was added. The problems that remain are problems that we had before world visit existed.

Remove world visit and none of the current problems are solved while all the old ones return.

The problem is the lack of a daily/weekly cap on hunt rewards. That encourages players to attend multiple trains/S-ranks each day because they're so lucrative for the relatively small time investment. Limit the rewards and there's no benefit to attending multiple trains/S-ranks.

I am unsure what could be done, but the few I have participated in was possibly the worst experience. I have not gone since. I asked that people remove their chocobos possibly pets if they may make things less congested, many said to sod off until one person said what I said and no one told them to sod off. The person I went with has a better computer than I do, could never see the hunt targets due to the numerous amounts of people. Many started to get stuck behind due to the 'congestion to location' message. People saying stupid things like 'maybe you shouldn't play on a toaster' 'don't complain' 'you should have caught the football'. I had an easier time with all of my setting turned to low, I figured you just have to aoe and prey you get the credit on the invisible target..

Most trains, especially on reset day and prime-time, are congested enough that dismissing minions and chocobos will not help. Again, this was something we experienced pre-world visit and found that dismissing them didn't make enough of a difference in the long run. There's a point where the number of players present alone is going to overwhelm your system.

We were getting the congestion messages pre-world visit. It's especially awkward when I get that message as the conductor because I waited the extra few seconds to make sure everyone had been raised and so I miss out myself. I learned to shrug it off. There's always another train or another S rank if I miss one.

Ignore the comments from the idiots. At the same time, there's no use shouting at people because that's not going to change anything. It's just going to provoke the idiot comments.

How to have a better train experience: avoid trains on reset days completely. You've got an entire week to cap, no need to do it all the first day. Avoid prime time trains as well if it's an option for your schedule. Go as a healer so AoE healing your party will get you on the mark's enmity table. If you don't have a healing job leveled, use a job that has an AoE that doesn't require a target (MNK Arm of the Destroyer as an example). Having aggro lines enabled in your character settings will let you know where the mark is even if you can't see it.

Avoid going to worlds that run their trains on a set schedule. Turn out at set schedule trains tends to be crazy because everyone knows to show up at that world at that time.

Find out which worlds on your data center have less organized hunt communities and attend their trains. Because relays for those trains reach fewer players, there's a smaller turnout.

[Faafetai]

Extremely amazing and helpful post

If I try the hunts again, I will keep all of this in mind. I was on dark knight so I just aoe'd were I seen a bunch of people punching nothing >.< I am unsure if it was reset day but it was around 3am est, so I was hoping it would be less active, but I think our server has just been extremely active at all times recently. I think my views of the experience were more jaded because of my friend on discord getting really sad about the whole thing. It is also super useful to know the chocos and minions not being summoned would not help. I believe it, at that point the people alone were not even spawning in, so I doubt it would have done anything to save anyone from the server load. I just remembered someone saying it one of the times and honestly assumed it was something to warn people about. Thank you for the advice, I hope if I partake again it will be less of a horrible experience.

[Bacent]

Personally I wouldn't mind if S ranks were special instances you could sign up for once every few days, instead of the 'first come first serve' they have now. I've missed S ranks I've helped try to spawn for a good chunk of a day before and I'm at the point of only doing them if it's the middle of the night so I know I have time to get to them.

[Moonlite]

Personally I wouldn't mind if S ranks were special instances you could sign up for once every few days, instead of the 'first come first serve' they have now. I've missed S ranks I've helped try to spawn for a good chunk of a day before and I'm at the point of only doing them if it's the middle of the night so I know I have time to get to them.

Or something Free companies earn and activate. Still instanced though kind of like treasure maps.

[Felien]

They really need to remove it. Now in the hunt train we sometimes can't even change zones because is full. They need to do like the restoration.

[Rokke]

hunts were not designed to be killed by trains fullstop.

[Jojoya]

They really need to remove it. Now in the hunt train we sometimes can't even change zones because is full. They need to do like the restoration.

The Restoration is in its own separate zone. SE is not going to block off access to open world zones when the purpose of world visit is to allow players to play with friends and to help players move to less congested worlds to get content done.

hunts were not designed to be killed by trains fullstop.

Very true but as usual players worked out a "most efficient" method for doing content and they want to stick with it. SE would have to do a major overhaul of the Hunt system to get the communities to stop running trains. Every time the community has proposed changes to the Hunt, the response has been "we're not going to change it".

I've always wondered if they were hoping that cross world free hunters would break trains.

[Rokke]

Very true but as usual players worked out a "most efficient" method for doing content and they want to stick with it. SE would have to do a major overhaul of the Hunt system to get the communities to stop running trains. Every time the community has proposed changes to the Hunt, the response has been "we're not going to change it".

I've always wondered if they were hoping that cross world free hunters would break trains.

imo communities are completely fine to create trains. They're easy tomes, I don't fault players for working together for shortcuts. The issue is more that the community then tries to enforce rules that don't exist. No one needs to wait on stragglers. No one needs to call out what they found. Its nice to do those things...but its not necessary- if an S rank is killed by 3 fc mates and a chocobo then there were enough people there. Nothing needs to be changed when hunts work as SE intended them to work.

Balmung has never really been a train server, even now its often folks from other servers that lead them here. I'm kinda grateful I started back when I did cause the regulars beat the entitlement out of us haha. If you wanted guaranteed full credit you got out into the world and spawned/scouted for yourself.

[TaleraRistain]

The Restoration is in its own separate zone. SE is not going to block off access to open world zones when the purpose of world visit is to allow players to play with friends and to help players move to less congested worlds to get content done.

If it's possible to code it, they could treat it like FATEs you're too high for. You can't hit FATE targets until you level sync if you're over the level. So if they can code it so you can't hit Hunt targets unless you're from that server, they could still allow others to play with friends and experience the rest of the open world content together but put the power back into the server's hands on how they want to handle Hunts.