It's Time To Reconsider Removing Crossworld Hunting

[LisSquid]

I can't say what it's like on other data centers, but Primal hunt trains are pretty civil about waiting on people to load in. If you don't see BULLET TRAIN in the call, then you know there will be a 1-4 minute wait for changing zones just for those people.

Actually, I'm very thankful for cross world hunt trains. I was not usually able to be online when Hyperion ran their hunts, but I can always make one when I want to due to cross-worlding. As for too many people, all I can really say is party up and go tank. Generating enmity for your team is so appreciated, and no one will care that you can't tank. You're not really tanking anyway.

[iAxX23]

Remember we're getting Cross-Datacenter travel soon.

Those hunt trains get announced 30 minutes an hour in advance in those discords. You'll have triple or quadruple that amount of people doing hunt trains.

And I can't really think of a way to solve it.

[DrWho2010]

From what they're saying about Data Center Travel is that you'd have to completely log out, choose the different data center, then log back in. By the time you do all that, the S rank will be dead. A Rank trains might be feasible but only if everyone waits for that action, and it would probably be too inconvenient to do.

[Payadopa]

hunts were not designed to be killed by trains fullstop.

I have to agree. I prefer a (however minor) challenge over this whole zero rush thing.
Killing mobs within 5 seconds sucks all the fun out for me. Leave it to players to min-max the fun out of everything.

[Justuas]

It's not the fault of players that you have to kill thousands of S marks for mounts.

[Infindox]

Remember we're getting Cross-Datacenter travel soon.

Those hunt trains get announced 30 minutes an hour in advance in those discords. You'll have triple or quadruple that amount of people doing hunt trains.

And I can't really think of a way to solve it.

Not sure what DC you are on but on Aether, they don't. They are usually called 5-10 mins before they start, and most of the time they will delay if there's congestion, but that's it.

Then why do achievements for thousands of A and S ranks exist? Especially before crossworld, the only realistic way to complete these was by linkshell, relay, trains, and hunt communities. Why do current content A and S ranks have so much health that at the start of the expansion you require at least 50+ people? Why does the SS rank involve 4 high-health adds that must be found and killed within a time limit?

The idea that Hunts are intended to be occasionally found and killed by small 4-8 man parties or the handful of players in the zone at the time is a myth conjured by the playerbase. They are a community activity and have always been designed as such. It's not the players fault that we've just become way better at it than expected.

Personally I'd be ok with cross-world losing Hunt access. Sure easy tomes feels nice, but it's made other sources of tomes almost irrelevant, trivialized the mount achievements, caused congestion issues, made combat materia worthless and killed that sense of server community. I'm not going to lose sleep over it if it stays the way it is, but I liked hunting a lot more before cross-world.

Yeah, back when it was server only you STILL had to find out about the hunts through a hunt linkshell or a discord group. Only ones that were a few people were ARR/HW hunts in Stormblood. There's no way the Shadowbringers SS hunts were made for as few people as possible with the SS hunts. But it all feels like just a zergg fest now.

[Evergrey]

I still think hunts would've been better/more fun if they made hunts into a mini-scavaging game.
You pick up the bill from the board and depending on difficulty you can either do it solo, group of 4 or 8.
Then you head out to the zone your current hunt is located, then you need to search for a trail and from there follow it until you reach something like a nest or recent feeding area.
There you plant a trap and that will spawn the hunt.
This would ofc all be a personal/instanced fight only you and your party members can take part of.
B and A ranks would both be daily hunts while S ranks would be weekly.

This is something I've been thinking since Hunts were first introduced.
I know it won't change. I just think that this would've been better/more fun. personally at least.

[Deceptus]

I still think hunts would've been better/more fun if they made hunts into a mini-scavaging game.
You pick up the bill from the board and depending on difficulty you can either do it solo, group of 4 or 8.
Then you head out to the zone your current hunt is located, then you need to search for a trail and from there follow it until you reach something like a nest or recent feeding area.
There you plant a trap and that will spawn the hunt.
This would ofc all be a personal/instanced fight only you and your party members can take part of.
B and A ranks would both be daily hunts while S ranks would be weekly.

This is something I've been thinking since Hunts were first introduced.
I know it won't change. I just think that this would've been better/more fun. personally at least.

Not a bad idea. Make them similar to maps where only your group can attack them.

Easiest way to solve the hunt train issue is reduce the grind itself. That seems pretty obvious to me.

Seriously this. Whoever thought of requiring thousands of A / S ranks for the achieve needs to get their head checked. Especially when the S ranks are on a timer.

[LaylaTsarra]

Nothing wrong with cross world hunts I use them all the time to cap my main and many alts on numerous data centers. I don't support this in the least.

[Mithina]

By the way, I think it's too early to pass judgement on how fast/tedious data center transfer will be until we actually get to use it. It could be near just as fast as normal server transfer, or in some special cases even faster, or it could be significantly slower. It likely will be a bit slower and more tedious, but possibly not by as much as you might think.

It could be the same as current server transfer really, with instead of teleporting to one of the three main city aetherytes, you instead use that time to log out. Unless you're aetheryte camping, in which case maybe the new way of hunt camping might become the login screen. As sad as that might sound lol, I'm sure some people will do that.

Also, what if in-game transfer queues and login queues happen to be two separate things and don't happen to be shared? In which case if you're slow reacting to a call out, then logging out might even be faster.

Maybe you will be able to select the server directly instead of it putting you on a random server on that data center.

We will see soon enough how it all works though.