It's Time To Reconsider Removing Crossworld Hunting

[Kuroka]

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.

Im on your side on many things but full stop, its more like, ppl used hacked tools to find and relay em even faster, you notice even more when you see some of them use the predesigned messages for ress etc that come with those hacked clients lol
-I didnt realize that and wondered how they could tell by marco how many sec exactly are left for some stills... and why some had exactly the same messages, it was only due a friend who told me about it.

[ReynTime]

introducing a 5 min invuln window when an S rank/A rank first spawns to allow people to catch up

Hahahahahahaha!!

Listen, do you know how long the world visit queues were going last night on Aether?

10+ mins. And I was told that was considered fast currently. Some people had 40min queues.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[TaleraRistain]

Sorry, but you can't "reserve" hunts for a later train. Hunts are kill on sight by SE's design. SE not only never intended trains to exist, they dislike the trains immensely.

If someone finds a hunt now and wants to kill it now, they're doing nothing wrong. The moment you scream at another player for killing something outside of train is the moment that player can report you to SE for a 3.2 violation and you get yourself a ban. No group of players "owns" the hunts.

I completely agree here. There's nothing right about doing this. But it's like having fights within a family. You can bicker all you want but the second an outsider does it then everyone jumps on them, whether they were just fighting or not.

We absolutely had these fights on Jenova among ourselves. But like a family, we can take measures. We can pass the word around the server about jerks trying to claim things and run people off. We can tell their FC they're being jerks. That's not as easy with some random mook from another server.

The lag issue is another good one that's been brought up. The area around the Hunt is just awful for anyone trying to do non-Hunt things there, but the zones themselves get bogged down as well even in places not around the Hunt when tons of people just port in. You could still get lag if a lot of people from the server showed up, but there is an upward limit of who is on the server at that time to keep that in check. And when someone complains, I've often seen them tell people to just deal with it, we'll be gone soon.

[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.

[Rokke]

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.

Trains =/= the end all be all to hunt communities or to hunting overall. The achievements are meant to be long term goals, they aren't limited or seasonal races. I was nearly at my 3000 A's before world visits and my server straight up did not do trains ^^;

There is no A that requires a massive train worth of people. Not at launch, and certainly not now. In the first few weeks of SHB we were bringing down the new A's with 2-3 parties of our server's hunters, the ones that actually enjoyed going out into the world and fighting mobs. Nowadays I can grab 5 FC members and we can bring them down with the only casualties being our chocobos.

S's do not spawn frequently enough to run a train on them. SS's are even less frequent. Both melt before the full horde of offworlders can make it over, if area chat bellyaching is anything to go by. I will not deny that current max level ones need more people, but I'm not against LSs as much as I am the train crowd trying to enforce rules onto hunting.

[Mithina]

We just had three Shadowbringers S ranks pop on primal and each one I checked server transfers queue when it died. The queue was still at over 50 for all of them on death. This isn't even quite prime time yet. But yeah, I'm sure you get the point by now. :P