Quote Originally Posted by Liam_Harper View Post
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.
No, it isn't. Yoshida more or less admitted that was the intended design all along when asked about increasing the HP of ARR hunts. He specifically said that would make them impossible for at level players. If they were meant to be a community activity the entire server could partake in, then it'd make little sense to consider at level players since max level players will mow them do in seconds.

The community simply decided to treat them as server wide "events" because of their sheer efficiency.

Quote Originally Posted by Liam_Harper View Post
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.
The problem is by doing this, you almost render hunts themselves irrelevant. A single Expert gives 90 relevant tomes. With A ranks on a per six hour cycle, you'll have to wait twelve hours to get 120 tomes. Combat materia was made worthless through Eureka and Bozja, though I'll admit, hunts are a little too generous. Then again, I don't actually mind that , personally because overmelding sucks enough as is.