Hunts - Preventing prepulling and sniping

[KageTokage]

One good idea I can bring here from wow is this.
When the S rank is spawning make it non-targetable for 5-10min upon discovery. That way, people have time to gather and get a fair chance to get in on the action

That's basically what the TC suggested but was subsequently ridiculed (Just refer to all the stupid tags that were added to the topic...) for daring to want S ranks to actually live long enough for people to locate them in the first place.

I've already stated it previously, but I would not be against the "first come first serve" mentality if not for the fact S ranks are almost always immediately detected/relayed across the entire data center to a few specific channels by bots and this has the potential to get even worse with cross DC travel being a thing soon. It's already not uncommon for me to see upwards of 20 people at a S rank within about a minute of it spawning, which at times is how long it takes me to even find the things in the first place.

This isn't simply a matter of being fair to slower players anymore so much as it is being fair to everyone who isn't using third party programs either directly or indirectly via the relays that are posted on specific websites. This has been a problem since the introduction of hunts, but it's become more and more pervasive as the programs are repeatedly refined and knowledge of them is spread, whilst those who are not aware of them are even more out of the loop then ever. It's just made hunting a considerably more stressful and less entertaining experience as time has gone on...though crossworld hunting in general was probably the biggest contributor to that overall.

Player rules are not TOS if i see an A rank i can clap solo i will.

We had a situation in which someone from our fc wanted to do Mudman for his blue spell (which is a beyond stupid idea as its a bloody lv 80 A rank and you have a 25% chance to learn the spell) so they formed a small party and started doing just that. Like 2 min after they started someone from a known hunt discord popped by and was antagonising them for being selfish for like 10min ... constant shit talking.

Now i understand that the train is efficient, and i myself use it, but the moment you raise claim over a monster ... in a open world ... for something that will happen an hour later.

Nope GTFO its gonna be a 11/12 train.

Besides all of this, what do you think happens when dataserver travel is a thing and their bonkers enough to credit you for hunts ... S trains? Do you want to see Limsa/Gridania/Uldah flatline the moment someone says an S popped because it will or clog the queue for ppl who want to visit friends.

Overly possessive players like that are thankfully a minority. Picking off A ranks really isn't a big deal because they only take four to six hours to respawn anyways.

It's the S ranks that annoy me due to how insanely variable their spawn windows are coupled with spawn conditions can be extremely tedious, but still possible to fulfill accidentally (IE, the treasure map spawned hunts). If people want to pick those off, fine, but they really need to add a way to check their spawn windows in-game to know whether or not you're just wasting your time and/or gil trying to pop something that has zero chance of showing up.

As far as the hunt flooding goes, it's basically always going to be a problem unless they either make offworlders unable to hunt at all or do something about the hunt radar programs that are allowing information to spread far faster then the devs ever intended.