Disabling Hunt for CW players

[Liam_Harper]

Cross worlds hunts prevent a tiny group of players controlling the hunts on their world and locking out the rest of the community. We already see that on worlds that run trains on a strict schedule. Those who can't be online at those specific times of day miss out. With cross world, they have the option of joining other available hunts.

Congestion is always going to be a problem during new content releases. It happened before world visit was added in Stormblood. It will continue to happen as long as players have a virtually unlimited source of currencies they can farm with little effort required on their part.

True. Although from experience it could vary, we never had any problems on our World but I heard other Worlds had issues. If CW hunts didn't exist you could justify lowering the respawn timer a little for more frequent trains, for example every 4-ish hours instead of 6+ would give most players a chance to find a window. I can understand the concern but I don't feel it affects enough players or would be a big enough issue to justify needing Cross World hunts and I imagine there would be solutions even if it was restricted to your world only.

I feel congestion is going to be a bigger issue moving forward. In ShB trains would often see congestion or bad lag even late in the expansion during reset day, when a new beast tribe or major quest was released in a zone, or when tome gear upgrades were released. The game is more popular than ever and is set to remain rather popular, while they're likely to add more Worlds in a few months it's doubtful that they'll increase the player limit within individual zones. So we could see possible congested trains all the way through Endwalker.

Removing the rewards is one way. Although you might be in danger of killing the hunt off if you removed too much, which would be a shame because it can create a sense of community.

[Eriane_Elis]

Cross world hunts are great. The hunts themselves aren't challenging in the sense of like if you were hunting in a Witcher game as an example but they do hit really hard and have super high HP so unless you go with a big group, you won't be killing it. Join a CWLS for hunts and have fun. If someone kills your hunt while you're killing it, you still get credit so it's not a big deal, if anything you should be happy. Imagine having to hunt 3000+ hunts just to get an achievement mount. It's not fun, but it's an encouraged part of the game by the devs and rightfully so. If the achievement number for hunts wasn't stupid high, then it wouldn't be a big deal to keep it local but it's stupid high.

[Besame]

I would like to see CW's disabled for a few weeks after something like an xpac. After Endwalker hit, the A rank leet bosses have been innudated with 80+ people mostly CWs on my server. Bosses took like 30 secs maybe to kill in a mad cluster F rage of humanity. The last few days I have been running with a guy that does some smaller boss kills on our server only, we even did some search and destroy of our own ) and I actually got to learn the bosses mechanics. Been a pleasant experience.

[KageTokage]

Crossworld hunts are really not that fun presently when the challenge is just getting to them before they die; an issue that's exasperated by the prominence of the hunt radar apps/relay bots. I've yet to even see some of the S ranks like Narrow-rift rotate through a full cycle of their mechanics with how quickly they're melting.

It also doesn't feel right for locals to be missing out on their server's own spawns because the instances are getting flooded with app users before manual relays have time to spread.

I feel like they should implement some kind of countermeasure where if a S rank drops below X% HP before it does a certain number of mechanics it'll gain a massive defense buff to ensure it lives long enough to make the effort to reward ratio appropriate.

[Zedix]

There are so many ways to make this whole experience better, with the sheer number of new players I can only imagine how long we are going to have instances for. And with hunt trains putting them to their breaking point I would agree, either disable CW hunts and making CW only available for main cities while instances are implemented, or just utilize a queuing system for instances, I feel this would be a decent enough middle ground, that way you dont need to spam click and check every 2s if you can hop, that would make these hunts quicker and more enjoyable for all, and help others actually be able to hop and participate. If you missed the fight but clicked on the aetherite to hop first you should get prio to hop, idk how many times I would get denied hopping in time because I missed the window by .5s while my menu was disappearing or reappearing.

[AriesMouse]

I personally think CW players should be locked out of current expansion locations for a while, just a month or two. Let them visit the server, let them into older areas. Keep them out of the new areas so the actual players on the servers can do hunts and fates. Multiple times now I have been blocked by "area is congested" trying to get to an S rank and a rare fate, all while seeing dozens of <wanderer> tags all standing at the zone's aetheryte. If nothing else, there needs to be a system in place that makes residents of the server take priority when trying to get to an area, and put wanderers at the back of a queue.
Someone should not be blocked from content on their own realm by people visiting from another realm, literally because rng put them in to the wrong zone instance to get to a hunt/fate.

[QueenVanraen]

honestly they should just move the cooldown for the hunt marks from server to players.
if someone wants to spawn an s rank? let them - but incur a cooldown *for them* instead of all players.

it's an antisocial system to have like 20 players be able to spawn an s rank and cuck everyone else for 60 hrs.
add a personal timer per a/s rank in the timer menu like there is for any of the other timed stuff.

nothing changed for people on a personal level, the timers are still there, you won't get your rewards any sooner & your mounts will still be shiny & take effort to get,
but then at least everyone has a shot at it instead of only the hardcore hunters that will wake up at 2am cuz the s rank window is up.

[Hustensaft]

There is effectively a CW-Hunt restriction in place during prime time, on EU that's anywhere from 16:00 to 23:00. WT is not available during this time as all servers have a full queue. Therefore, a restriction would do absolutely nothing to help the hunting situation. The problem isn't even that the zones can't handle 500+ players. They can safely do that, yet more often then not, hunts are killed when there are only 150-200 in a zone. The issue lies within the fact that only a extremely limited number of players can be transferred to a given zone per minute. If you watch the player number when trying to move between zones, you can see how low that number is (~50 players per minute). A simple short term solution would be to give each hunt a spawn protection, to at least allow the maximum number of players a zone can handle to kill it - you could compare it to the SS-Rank spawn condition.

Generally, S-Ranks are simple are an outdated system that didn't change since ARR, while the whole ecosystem around it changed. Significantly more players on each world, crossworld hunts/linkshells, achievements that require 1000 kills (if you get 10% of all CW spawns on EU, you'd need more then three years for the ShB achievement), etc. Long term, a proper solution therefore would be do rethink how hunts work, e.g. spawn timers, rewards, loot restrictions, respawn mechanics - e.g. hunts respawn quickly once triggered, but can only be looted once in that window