Hunts - Preventing prepulling and sniping

[Sylin77]

The problem:
People put time and work into spawning S-Rank Hunts. Then they organise themselfs in Forums, Discord, Linkshells etc. Then they call out their spawned S-Rank there.
And while it get's relinked and runs through lots of Crossworld-Linkshells, FCs, Linkshells etc. one person comes there and pulls it as soon as they arrive there. (I speak here about pulling the S-Rank before even 1 minute is passed after it being called out the first time)

The Outcome:
1. Many many people get sad, that they just ported, transfered to another server, ported again only to arrive to an already dead Hunt.
2. The people who do spawn those Hunts mostly do it for those many people, not only for the first who arrive there. So they get sad about it, that their work gives only some very fast people and the one prepulling guy the rewards.
2.a) Maybe even the Spawner themselves doesn't get any reward because the one guy prepulled it and it died too fast. That's not really fair.
3. --> Those spawners don't have fun spawning those Hunts any more, so they make it more reluctantly or even stop at all.
4. One person alone can bring an entire Datacentre to not enjoy Hunts nearly as much as it could be without him prepulling... That's some wide range of spreading frustration...

My personal suggestions:
1. Let there be a rule, that only the one person spawning it, is able to attack it. For 10 minutes maybe. After that it may be free for all. Maybe something like everybody can target it, but it is imune to damage the first 10min, if not the spawner himself does damage to it.

2. Give those 50s and 60s S-Ranks more live. If the group is nearly decently big, the 50s die in under 1 second. If SE wants those Hunts to be enjoyable for everyone, not only people who are leveling in that area right now. Then it should be also scaled to survive longer than that. If you can't kill the S-Rank alone (especially sadly possible for 50s and 60s. With EW soon it will probably be 70s too), you can't cause so many problems.

3. Buff those S-Ranks over all. So they would do enough damage on one person alone, that this person would either need 30min to kill it alone or simply die in the process. S-Ranks are even described as something you would definintely need a party or more people for. It would be a solution to the problem if the one guy prepulling just dies while attacking the Hunt, when 20+ people are already standing there and wait for 50 others to come there.

Do you have other suggestions or ideas how to solve this problem?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Hunts are first come first serve, that's how they are designed. The whole "hunts for everyone" thing isn't how they are supposed to be

[Vahlnir]

Early pulling isn't really a thing when these things are first come first serve. It might be frustrating arriving too late but...no one is obligated to wait. Not even for a second. Personally, I feel that having a little patience would go a long way, but I know not to expect that from other people.

[Rowde]

As someone that was an avid hunter in ARR to SB... I have many thoughts, pre-pulling and sniping are the least of them.

The main problem with the Hunt is that it has been too thoroughly solved and players have mostly optimized the fun out of the activity.

In regards to S Ranks, early in Shadowbringers the methodology for what determines spawn points was solved. This is part of the reason why pre-pulling and sniping is even possible... a spawn notice is now broadcast to everybody, but some players are then looking for the S Rank, and some players already know exactly where it will be. Personally, I think they need to rework this completely. At the very least, the spawn point should not be decided until the S Rank is ready to spawn in its current window. Ideally it would be completely random.

In regards to A Ranks, I'd have to look it up, but I feel like Yoshi-P has been asked about this before in previous Q&A sessions, and they resist making changes to A Ranks because they intended for them to be Full Party, or 8 player content. Well... we've gone through two expansions now with an "A train" hunt meta. The system falls apart under the weight of trains. Fun or not, trains completely trivialize the difficulty, so the major issue now is that the rewards no longer match up with the difficulty of the content. Personally, I think major changes need to happen to A Ranks, moreso than S Ranks. If they don't want to do anything with them at all, at the very least they should up the pop-in/draw priority for A Ranks so they improve the visibility for all players.

If they want to fix the system and embrace trains, then A Ranks (and perhaps S Ranks) need to have some sort of dynamic scaling to respond to the number of players that show up to them, similar to Skirmishes/CE in Bozja/Zadnor. Like for every 8 players that are present within a certain circle of influence (invisible FATE circle) around the Hunt mark it gets a stacking buff that increases its HP/Def. However, if they decide they want to stick to their guns with A Ranks being intended for Full parties, then perhaps the amount of tomes/seals needs to scale down if a mass amount of players participate. Like it shouldn't be possible to get full credit at all if 60 ppl are smacking the mark and killing it in 15 seconds or less.

[MPK]

Sounds like a you problem. I'm sure most of here are against having arbitrary rules for stuff like that.

[Aurida]

I'm for it. S rank hunts should spawn in with a buff that drops damage taken by 95% for 5 minutes, and talking to the hunter-scholar for information about an S rank should tell you, in system text, the last time it was killed

[Poporito_Popoto]

Play on a Japanese server.

[Canadane]

SE never intended these to be shared by the entire server and I'm sure their network infrastructure isn't happy about it either.
When it gets to the point where peoples character models are being culled and the zones fill up preventing normal residents of that server to be unable to go about their business because they can't enter a zone, it's a problem.
If I happen to be around an S rank that's spawned, I'll join in the hunt. I'm not expecting to make it to every call, nor should anyone.

If anything we need people to stop being salty about what they consider an "early pull" (which by design isn't a thing), and to stop trying to witch hunt people that do initiate combat. Using bully tactics and accruing a mob mentality over these players is anguishing at best. Downright griefing at worst.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Hunts are basically the NMs and HNM's for this game. Basically like they said first come first served. The difference is that these don't have special rare drops that require "ownership" of the monster during the kill to have a chance of obtaining them. I've killed A rank hunt targets solo in various areas just because they were in the way when I was doing something else like lvling other jobs. I'd have probably killed an S rank in ARR or HW areas solo if I came across one.

I pretty much only kill them when it's convenient. I'm not one of these people trying to claim every single one to get that mount reward which I suspect is the whole cause of "early pull" complaints to begin with.

[KageTokage]

I do feel like they should do something about the current state of older hunts if they're going to keep attaching relevant rewards to all of them, coupled with the fact that there's an abundance of people using third party programs that can instantly locate and automatically relay the S ranks to everyone else using it as long as one person with said program is present in the zone (Usually a bot, of which many have hunt detectors built into their basic functionality).

The overall hunt attendance is higher then ever due to crossworld travel and the aforementioned automated hunt relays and it really sucks to be the one who actually spends the time spawning something then not even getting full credit for it because those people who just AFK at the aetherytes waiting for bot relays showed up and swarmed it before you could even find it.

Putting a hard limit on quickly they can die via a buff that limits how much damage they can take per hit would probably be the most simple way to accomplish that, though also making it so you can check if a hunt's spawn window is open/closed at the hunt NPCs would remove the two main grievances I have with the system presently.

If they have level sync to prevent FATEs from getting deleted (Ignoring BLU, though even that got mostly addressed by adding consistent instakill immunity to FATE bosses from HW onwards), it doesn't really make sense to not have a similar mechanic in place for something that is both rarer and much more rewarding.