Are S-hunts spawn shield a necessity now?

[Kranel_San]

Based on multiple observations in the last few months. I have decided to write a topic discussing if there should be a spawn shield for S-hunts or not.
S-rank hunts are special bosses that spawn after a certain one or multiple criteria are met, and they're by default difficult to solo and to kill with a couple of players. Their kill rewards are tomestones, hunt currencies, and a chance of materia clusters, which are sought out by some players for various reasons.
The difficulty of S-hunts from spawn to kill and to respawning again is intentional to make it a community effort and not a single-player experience. Because of that, the S-hunts spawn cooldowns are in real-time days, making it impossible to encounter the selfsame S-hunt without world-hopping. With that in mind, it can be really frustrating to miss or not arrive in time for the S-hunts, which caused the community to establish means and norms to avoid such eventualities, like discord notification servers and waiting minutes before attacking to give chance to as many as possible players to arrive and participate.
As is the case with norms and community cooperations, not everyone shares the same willingness to cooperate with others due to different points of view and opinions. However, trolling proved to be the worst negative behavior that can happen during S-hunts, wherein a player would early-pull for malignant purposes such as ruining it on others and gaining infamous.
While such behaviors are totally expected, they become a problem when they keep occurring over and over again. Such is the observed case in Light DC in recent months, where a group of players are still intentionally early-pulling S-hunts as soon as they spawn, making it difficult to reach old S-hunts from previous expansions such as ARR and HW in time.
As stated previously, this has been going on for months in Light DC, and there can be no doubt some other DCs are having the same issues in their S-hunts. This brings to mind the question of whether the time has come for a spawn shield to be activated on S-hunts to prevent trolling activities. Especially with the game having a sharp increase in the number of players with no change to spawn cooldowns, which increases the frequency of such activities to happen that negatively impact many players.
My personal recommendation would go to supporting the implementation of a spawn shield on all S-hunts that lasts 5 minutes, which is time enough for all players to get the notification, world-hop even with high queues due to all players world-hopping, teleport, and form parties in front of the boss, without actually forcing players to wait long. This would be greatly helpful on old S-hunts that can't last 20 seconds.

[Rokke]

My recommendation is to leave hunts as is.

[FoxyAreku]

Kinda sad such a thing feels needed. Early pulls suck, but if the 100 other people standing around didn't follow up, then the person who pulled would just die and it would reset.

This never happens of course...so it's the community as a whole's fault.

[RitsukoSonoda]

S rank hunts are basically the game's version of FFXI's HNM's. They aren't meant to be a content the entire server comes to claim when spawned. If you're in the area actively trying to spawn it then you should be able to reach it before it's killed. However people are under no obligation to stand around and wait for 200 people to teleport into the zone and reach the area it spawned at before killing it. There is no need for invincibility timers or shields to allow people to jump to a different world then teleport to the zone then run to the spawn location because the people doing it have no ownership of the spawn. They aren't entitled to claim rewards on it. Being in an Hunts LS does not give you claim to any hunt spawns at all.

[Kranel_San]

Kinda sad such a thing feels needed. Early pulls suck, but if the 100 other people standing around didn't follow up, then the person who pulled would just die and it would reset.

This never happens of course...so it's the community as a whole's fault.

It feels terrible when even EW S-hunts get early-pulled and die quickly while a lot of players are still on the way. It's an on-going struggle that is on for long.

S rank hunts are basically the game's version of FFXI's HNM's. They aren't meant to be a content the entire server comes to claim when spawned. If you're in the area actively trying to spawn it then you should be able to reach it before it's killed. However people are under no obligation to stand around and wait for 200 people to teleport into the zone and reach the area it spawned at before killing it. There is no need for invincibility timers or shields to allow people to jump to a different world then teleport to the zone then run to the spawn location because the people doing it have no ownership of the spawn. They aren't entitled to claim rewards on it. Being in an Hunts LS does not give you claim to any hunt spawns at all.

Unless people actually stand next to an aetheryte in wait for a spawn. It's increasingly becoming very difficult to reach S-hunts in time. I have personal experiences when I couldn't even reach ARR S-hunts when they were in my world.
They're not a content for the whole server, but they're also not a content for a couple of players. Saying you don't have obligation to wait doesn't give you the right to negatively ruin it on 100 other player. Its not a content for you, its a content for us all.

[Thi]

No.

XIV's community is already carebear and mostly waits for organized hunt trains.

Every other MMO I've ever played world bosses are killed on timer by guilds who know when and where they are going to spawn. Want to kill a world boss, have to beat out other people who want to kill it. In those games bosses give more than a common currency as well, so there is reason to actually care.

[Hafu]

No.

XIV's community is already carebear and mostly waits for organized hunt trains.

Every other MMO I've ever played world bosses are killed on timer by guilds who know when and where they are going to spawn. Want to kill a world boss, have to beat out other people who want to kill it. In those games bosses give more than a common currency as well, so there is reason to actually care.

The community mostly sufficiently waits for organised A-rank hunt trains because of the way they're ran, S ranks is a whole other matter in my experience.

Unless you yourself are directly involved in working to spawn it, often they've been engaged and are dead within ~2 minutes of any shout-out going out in link shells and discords etc.

[Thi]

The community mostly sufficiently waits for organised A-rank hunt trains because of the way they're ran, S ranks is a whole other matter in my experience.

Unless you yourself are directly involved in working to spawn it, often they've been engaged and are dead within ~2 minutes of any shout-out going out in link shells and discords etc.

That sounds fine to me. If your not working to spawn it or know the people who are, you shouldn't be entitled to it.

[Canadane]

S rank hunts are not designed for everyone to be there.
Stop trying to clog up zones to the brim with people before pulling. Once there's a sizable group it's fine to pull imo. It's open world content, they shouldn't be gatekept on some virtue that doesn't really exist. Witch hunting people because they pulled an open world mob before someone else deemed they be ready is a terrible thing that happens.
Not to mention you may end up keeping people not hunting from even entering zones because most instances are gone now and look man, I gotta catch that big fish. S ranks are back up in a couple of days some of those fish take weeks to respawn.

tl;dr: early pulls don't exist, late arrivals do.

[ACE135]

There are no early pulls, only people who are too late.