It's Time To Reconsider Removing Crossworld Hunting

[Mithina]

There have been several issues with the current hunt system throughout the Shadowbringers expansion. A number of the issues have come from one main major thing, and that is overpopulation. And I'm going to tell you right now that those issues are going to get significantly worse soon.

With FFXIV getting a big surge of new players lately, soon enough they will hit max level and start doing hunts. Individual servers have been getting maxed out, login/transfer queues have been getting longer, the game itself even sold out at one point there, and I imagine they will be adding in new servers soon. On top of this data center visit is coming soon which is for sure going to increase hunt attendance by a significant amount, even if it's just going to be limited to regions only at first. And to top all of that off the new expansion is coming out near the end of the year which in itself will easily increase the hunt population by at least 2-4x, trust me, that is what happened for several months after Shadowbringers launch.

Let me highlight several issues majorly or partly caused by the current overpopulated hunt scene.

The obvious one - PS4 & low spec PCs users not being able to participate or enjoy hunts as much. Sure, you can be one of those people who respond to these people with "LOL just get a better rig", or you can recognize this is a legit issue. A large number of people have completely given up on hunting, which they previously found fun, due to this. On nearly every hunt train you will see at least one person complaining about the train going too fast or the amount of lag. You will see people who constantly miss out on the first mark of each zone, or land in time to only do one or two hits in which doesn't feel good. The same of course goes for S ranks.

Hunts in general are not designed for the current number of people that do them. From enemy abilities constantly not hitting due to AOE ability caps, to the hunts themselves not having a chance to use all of their abilities before they die, to A ranks not rendering in, and to multiple people constantly literally yelling at others at nearly all S ranks, including "current expansion" S ranks, to stop DPSing because it is dying too fast. (which again doesn't feel all that great gameplay-wise having to hold back) Not to mention the actual difficulty level of the hunts is designed around fewer people.

In general, things currently seem more reward-focused rather than fun-focused or "hunt" by definition focused due to overpopulation. (and also technically due to scaling reasons for previous expansion hunts)

(Continued below due to 3k character limit)

[Mithina]

Speaking of which, partly due to overpopulation and hunt availability reasons more and more hunting has been pushed onto Discord rather than being done in-game. This has had some positives, but also some negatives, which some negatives I'd like to point out.

Some negatives being in-game relays have become less common, even though that is where the majority of people are and always will be watching. A lot of the same people are getting and controlling the majority of the hunts, whereas there is a ton of people in-game who constantly miss out even on their own server's hunts. Discord groups are actively trying to control people and everything hunt-related, witch-hunting and blacklisting isn't uncommon to see. Some Discord groups even going as far as creating, promoting, and selling botting software, which on top of being able to bot farm various things, also instantly automatically relays hunts to their group. In general, you see a lot more drama and toxicity on Discord due to not being able to be banned in-game for actions done on there, and again just people trying to control others.

"Early pullers". Yes, we know you can pull whenever you want and such. But it does annoy a significant portion of people, which is worth looking into. Personally, on my data center this year, there have been two notorious people who camp the world transfer aetheryte all day long waiting for a bot to ping them about a hunt, in which case they immediately rush over to it and instantly pull it followed by everyone else jumping in. Which often really triggers spawners or can make them miss out on something they worked hard to happen, who then often complain about the bots, and of course drama ensues. The point is without cross-world hunting most servers wouldn't have to deal with said notorious people, pulling earlier would be way less effective and drama-inducing, (think of the beefier world FATEs for example, and how much less drama is attached to them) hunts would be up for longer, and the value of each individual being there and teamwork increases.

Some other minor points are that each hunt has become less special due to how frequently you will run into it if you do cross-world hunting. Or how server-specific groups, community building, and teamwork are less of a thing than they otherwise would be. Or how overpopulation has caused more drama and toxicity in general to happen, especially during periods of high amounts of hunters. Shadowbringer S ranks can sometimes often even die when there are still 30+ people in the world transfer queue too.

There are of course other issues with hunts right now too. But in general, I know several people would enjoy or get back into hunting if there wasn't such an overpopulation issue that is only going to continue to grow on the current track. In general, if cross-world hunting was removed, hunts would then be more fun and less stress-inducing at times in my opinion.

[ItMe]

(Continued below due to 3k character limit)

Fun fact: if you edit your post you can get around the character limit~


But on topic, the booming population may lead to hunts becoming even more difficult to be a part of, but I don't think removing a feature (crossword hunts) is the best way to address the problem.

[Tsumdere]

There is a lot of problems with the hunt which is why I have slowed down on my hunting of late, despite being one of the most active scouters.

However, I don't think that removing cross-world is the solution.

I think there are some good solutions as having the hunt master tell people if an S rank is able to be spawned, introducing a 5 min invuln window when an S rank/A rank first spawns to allow people to catch up (I cannot count how many S ranks I have personally spawned and missed because of leechers who wait and insta pull), and scaling health based on the last time it was killed (this would not PREVENT people from sniping, but discourage it).

None of these options would reduce the integrity of the hunt and still allow it to be more stable for a growing population and increasing game size. There is a lot of people who are very active in the hunt, spawning S ranks and scouting A ranks, but are completely missing out on things they WORKED for because some people think they are more entitled to than others.
I could spend all my leves on Lampalagua and leave the area to do Bone Crawler, have Lampalagua spawn and killed within 30 seconds before I can port back, and end up with nothing but a f**k you for my time.

[Puremallace]

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

[Mithina]

There is a lot of problems with the hunt which is why I have slowed down on my hunting of late, despite being one of the most active scouters.

However, I don't think that removing cross-world is the solution.

I think there are some good solutions as having the hunt master tell people if an S rank is able to be spawned, introducing a 5 min invuln window when an S rank/A rank first spawns to allow people to catch up (I cannot count how many S ranks I have personally spawned and missed because of leechers who wait and insta pull), and scaling health based on the last time it was killed (this would not PREVENT people from sniping, but discourage it).

None of these options would reduce the integrity of the hunt and still allow it to be more stable for a growing population and increasing game size. There is a lot of people who are very active in the hunt, spawning S ranks and scouting A ranks, but are completely missing out on things they WORKED for because some people think they are more entitled to than others.
I could spend all my leves on Lampalagua and leave the area to do Bone Crawler, have Lampalagua spawn and killed within 30 seconds before I can port back, and end up with nothing but a f**k you for my time.

While something like a 5 minute invulnerability shield would be nice, it would instead create another problem for prime time current expansion S ranks and that is zone congestion. I'm assuming zones are still hard capped at 300 players total. A number of ShB S ranks during peak times have gotten extremely close or have hit that cap numerous times throughout Shadowbringers, especially when there was actually ample time for relays to go out in-game. A shield like that would cause the zone to hit congestion more often, and that's on top of the hunt population already increasing. And do we really need that many players at a single hunt?

[TaleraRistain]

I'm going to give this one a thumb's up because I've always thought cross-world hunts should never be allowed. Hunt trains and "reserving" the hunt for it are bad enough, but at least that's people from the server. When you get people on other servers coming to your server warning people against killing a target because the train has "reserved" it for 6 hours in the future, then there's a problem.

I used to happily join Hunts on my server when the word would go out and we'd all gather. There were early pullers here and there, but for the most part everyone tried to wait for as many people as possible. I barely bother with Hunts anymore, except the solo ones, because the assembly line scheduled Hunts killed the former spontaneity and that has only gotten worse since you can get an entire train of people not even from your server coming to kill your server's targets and telling you you have no right to them.

If SE isn't going to do something about this, they need to find a way for those solo Hunts to give you slower and minor but regular progress for the achievements.

[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.

[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.