It's Time To Reconsider Removing Crossworld Hunting

[Jojoya]

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.

Maybe on your data center's Discords. Not on Crystal. We only relay when the train is ready to start and give people about 4-5 minutes to arrive before first pull. We've got one world that runs trains on a set schedule; the other worlds run whenever someone feels like doing it (assuming the marks are up).

It's unlikely that data center travel will have much impact on trains considering how frequently trains can be run (only once every 6 hours per world assuming there has been no free hunting happening in the meantime). Running to another data center for a train will likely mean you're missing out on the train that's happening on your own data center. Why would you bother going to another data center in that case?

It will have even less impact on S ranks. By the time you log out, select the data center, wait for your information to get transferred, log back in and get to the location, it will be dead.

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.

Rank As were definitely intended to be done by small groups. A skilled tank has been capable of soloing them all along (though you need Nari at certain spawn points to solo).

It's the S that are intended for larger groups.

The achievements were there for those chose to make hunting their primary end game and had lots of time to do it. Players were getting them even before trains became popular. Trains have only made it easier to get those achievements and cross world trains have made it even more so.

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.

Exactly. Hard enough when you're just trying to use world visit. Not going to happen via data center travel.

A 5 minute invuln window isn't going to change anything. People are still going to complain they're missing out.

Players were never intended to be able to get to every kill. That's what a part of the community keeps failing to understand. If SE wanted the entire community to be able to get to the kills, the system would have been designed differently.

Keep in mind that what we're experiencing now is not going to be what we're experiencing with Endwalker hunts when Endwalker releases. There won't huge numbers of players at level cap for several weeks. The gear most players have will be the equivalent of the Ronkan gear at the start of Shadowbringer instead of far more powerful end of expansion end game gear. Things will be dying more slowly.

[ForteNightshade]

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.

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.

[owopeachy]

A 5 minute invuln window isn't going to change anything. People are still going to complain they're missing out.

Players were never intended to be able to get to every kill. That's what a part of the community keeps failing to understand. If SE wanted the entire community to be able to get to the kills, the system would have been designed differently.

Thank you. There will ALWAYS be that one guy who appears 10 minutes after the mark dies and shouts lfg, then shouts "thanks for waiting :/" These are the people that make threads like this.

The fun of hunts is the rush to arrive before it dies, they're notorious marks, meant to be rare and elusive, cross world hunts makes this even more apparent; i love the nuke trains that happen after patches with new mark currency items, and its SO nice to be able to easily cap weekly tomes in an hour with a couple of trains. They happen often enough that you never ave to wait too long for another one. Imagine you miss your world's train, and then have to wait another 6 hours (!) to do it again? Removing cross world hunts is going to cause even more complaints than we have now, simply because hunts will be a lot more scarce

[Liam_Harper]

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.

Yoshida has said a lot of things in the past that just don't apply any more. Besides, he said that he had considered the idea of making S ranks similar to Fates or Eureka NM's, but it would just be too much developer work for now. SS ranks and the mount achievements are definitely designed with linkshells and community relay in mind. It's also a reason we get a zone message when an S rank spawns now, so players without addons aren't at a disadvantage. They aren't blind to how we operate hunts.

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.

I have no fears over this really. Stormblood A ranks were highly relevant and I both organized and joined Hunt trains constantly. Hunts drop older tomes, materia and Hunt currency which has multiple uses. Hunts would definitely be fine without cross-world.

[Commander_Justitia]

Hunting system has a few bottlenecks that are not pleasant to experience - worldserver queues, zone limit of 300 players?, then teleporting into the next area only to potentially hit the zone limit again... And you often wont even see the hunt mob or any mechanics with that many people.

If they would change who is allowed to the hunt it would better. Atm the majority of people probably never spawned or hunted a mob themselves, it is a passive participation activity. If people had to group up and do certain activities to spawn the hunt for their group or alliance and only they could attack it then... it sounds a bit more fun to me. But the spawn conditions would have to change and made easier, the mobs wouldn't be on a global servertimer but people would have a personal timer for them, so they can only get rewards from a certain S mob every 3-4 days (in accordance to current spawn rates, but the mob could be spawned plenty by other grps who meet the conditions). It would reduce the server hopping because you already have a cooldown on a certain target. It is way more casual than tryharding a difficult condition for days.

But I expect we just get 3 or more ID's for every map, instead of a change to the hunt system. It is way less troublesome for devs.

[ReynTime]

Hunting system has a few bottlenecks that are not pleasant to experience - worldserver queues, zone limit of 300 players?, then teleporting into the next area only to potentially hit the zone limit again... And you often wont even see the hunt mob or any mechanics with that many people.

If they would change who is allowed to the hunt it would better. Atm the majority of people probably never spawned or hunted a mob themselves, it is a passive participation activity. If people had to group up and do certain activities to spawn the hunt for their group or alliance and only they could attack it then... it sounds a bit more fun to me. But the spawn conditions would have to change and made easier, the mobs wouldn't be on a global servertimer but people would have a personal timer for them, so they can only get rewards from a certain S mob every 3-4 days (in accordance to current spawn rates, but the mob could be spawned plenty by other grps who meet the conditions). It would reduce the server hopping because you already have a cooldown on a certain target. It is way more casual than tryharding a difficult condition for days.

But I expect we just get 3 or more ID's for every map, instead of a change to the hunt system. It is way less troublesome for devs.

If they'd be fine with limiting the appeal of hunts, sure. Personally I wouldn't mind, I'm of the mentality that accessibility doesn't mean everyone is entitled to the same rewards regardless of effort they put onto it, and that there should be content that requires more dedication than others.

But I don't know what SE wants. I say this because what you're proposing would certainly filter out a lot of people due the effort required versus reward. Specially the ludicrous achievement reward.

[Commander_Justitia]

I say this because what you're proposing would certainly filter out a lot of people due the effort required versus reward.

It would be a bit more like treasure maps then I suppose. Feel like the game could profit from more open world content as the zones look good in smaller groups, barely have reason to stay more than a minute nowadays before you teleport away again.

[Mithina]

Thank you. There will ALWAYS be that one guy who appears 10 minutes after the mark dies and shouts lfg, then shouts "thanks for waiting :/" These are the people that make threads like this.

The fun of hunts is the rush to arrive before it dies, they're notorious marks, meant to be rare and elusive, cross world hunts makes this even more apparent; i love the nuke trains that happen after patches with new mark currency items, and its SO nice to be able to easily cap weekly tomes in an hour with a couple of trains. They happen often enough that you never ave to wait too long for another one. Imagine you miss your world's train, and then have to wait another 6 hours (!) to do it again? Removing cross world hunts is going to cause even more complaints than we have now, simply because hunts will be a lot more scarce

To be fair it's not black and white and about completely stopping people from complaining or getting triggered as obviously that is impossible, it's instead like most things about the "degree". The greater an overpopulation problem there is, the greater the degree of complaining and drama you will see. That is the way it's always been with hunts. The more you let the population problem grow, the worse it is going to get.

If someone knows there is an invulnerability shield and they still miss out, then that would obviously be far less triggering for said person because they can more easily tell that they were just late to the party. It's also again worth mentioning that a number of the people constantly making it to S ranks right now are the ones benefitting from botting software, which again make the people who are not cheating more triggered. (and often causes a number of them to start using it too, making the problem worse)

But again like I said a 5 minute invulnerability shield would just create another problem and that is zone congestion. Each day now on Behemoth we are getting 200+ players in the zone for at least one thing. Yesterday we had 200+ players (player search was maxed out) in the area for the South Shroud S rank, and that was only with a dozen wanderers. Even without cross-world hunting an invulnerability shield would cause constant zone congestion.

There are also ways to retain the rush and other feelings you speak of without cross world. For example nerf the health of the hunts (would make random call outs more common too which quite evidently a lot of people enjoy) and make the hunts respawn faster.

[Lauren]

S-ranks 5 min invul window.

Instances should give priority to people FROM that server. I'm on a pretty beefy PC and it feels bad when I teleport as fast as I can and then it gets denied due to congestion when I only see a SEA of wanderers. If you;re hunting on your home server, you should be given priority access to any instance/map over players from other servers.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

Hunts should be revamped entirely.
Make them a localized FC effort. Someone wants to hunt? Join an FC, each FC has it's own monster callendar and goes to a map, fills the conditions and spawns and kills the thing. Done and away. All S rank in a week's work of an FC if they work hard enough. Maybe allow for FCs to organize their own trains, obviously all linked to the Homeworld of said FC so you people don't uses the World Visit for this anymore. And so each day you will see at least ONE FC per server trying to spawn certain S ranks, they might invite people on maps to participate when they are there, if not, well, it becomes a hunt you see and back to be a community collaborative effort, also more niche than go arround hunting from server to server.


Instead of Hunts for "overworld content", give actual FATE/World Bosses real teeth and rewards beyond a mere achievement title. Think about GW2 world bosses. Crap, those should be part of several relic item quests. Don't be afraid of dropping some "Red Chocobos" on overworld.