Shb/EW: Canceling minions leading to Ker/Forgiven Rebellion

[YutoShazaar]

When a Shadowbringer or Endwalker S rank dies, there's a ~10% chance that they trigger an event where 4 B rank minions appear on the map. After killing them, Forgiven Rebellion (Shadowbringer) or Ker (Endwalker) spawns, giving even more rewards (nuts/tomes/materias) to the players.

About those minions: they spawn with a 5min buff, that disappear when you pull them. If they are not pulled and this buff runs out, they disappear/flee. As long as they have a target, they will not flee.

Some players have been abusing this mechanic, and while having top aggro on those B rank minions, run away from the spawn point of said minion. Once the minion reaches a far enough distances, they return to their original point, but they don't have the buff anymore, and thus they disappear.

This falls under the Square Enix prohibited activities listed in ◆Obstruction of play・Obstructing Gameplay Using Combat, as they use enmity based interactions to impact the gameplay of hundred of other players; yet some people still do it.

Why does this 5min buff feature exist? Why don't the minion get back their buff when they return to their spawn point? What does it take to get any GM action on those players?

[Jojoya]

I've assumed the 5 minute limit was to present a challenge to the hunters in the zone to earn the SS.

Unfortunately, it lacks any challenge once players upgrade from the initial level cap gear into the tomestone/raid gear. Either the minions melt or someone does something to despawn them as you say.

You can report those who cause the minions to despawn and the GMs will investigate. They're not going to take action unless they can find evidence it was done intentionally, though, and that can be difficult to prove. There's always the possibility a random player in the zone was the one to aggro and then try to get away because they had no idea what they were getting into.

[YutoShazaar]

The 5min challenge itself is fine, but the fact that you can drag the mob away from its spawn area and make the whole event fail on purpose is a bad design in my opinion. And sadly trolls can abuse that and go unpunished for weeks. I've reported with 1 strong evidence of them resetting a minion, but nothing has been done, and this has been going on for weeks now. It is incredibly hard to get more proofs because you can camp the minions spawn points in case the event trigger, and make them disappear before even anyone else fly it in time. It might takes months to catch someone who knows how to do it while never being recorded, but this would only take one in game GM to notice if they follow that player.

SE in game automated support is not really helpful despite several players reporting with different proofs, always getting the same automated reply telling people to use the forums to raise their concern. After posting this thread I found more people in this forum mentioning similar minions issue, so it looks like SE doesn't care about this issue as long as it doesn't happen to JP servers, and EU/NA people have to suck it up.

[KageTokage]

The nature of how the minions randomly target anything on their enmity list means that the resets don't always even happen as an intentional act, and rather any player who has hit the thing but is now outside of its leash radius is risk of resetting if it targets them with an AoE and goes chasing after them.

I see a lot of people who scurry off before the minions actually die because they're afraid of missing out on the SS spawn, only end up denying themselves of it entirely.

[YutoShazaar]

The nature of how the minions randomly target anything on their enmity list means that the resets don't always even happen as an intentional act, and rather any player who has hit the thing but is now outside of its leash radius is risk of resetting if it targets them with an AoE and goes chasing after them.

I've never seen that happen for any of the minions :O I've always seen them targeting players in their radius... So moving them outside of their leash radius was for me always done on purpose by the player holding aggro

If what you're saying is true then it's another design flaw... :/

[Jojoya]

I've never seen that happen for any of the minions :O I've always seen them targeting players in their radius... So moving them outside of their leash radius was for me always done on purpose by the player holding aggro

If what you're saying is true then it's another design flaw... :/

I can't say I've seen it happen with the minions but I have seen it happen with A ranks (players that have run out of range getting targeted so it resets, that is) so I wouldn't be surprised if it's happening with the minions. Players are there for their own self-interest and there's no reward for helping to kill the minions while there is for killing the SS - and a lot of players camp the SS spawn point instead of helping with minions.

It would be better if the SS had a few scattered spawn points so a massive crowd couldn't congregate on its spawn point while minions are still being killed.

[vanillavanitas]

The nature of how the minions randomly target anything on their enmity list means that the resets don't always even happen as an intentional act, and rather any player who has hit the thing but is now outside of its leash radius is risk of resetting if it targets them with an AoE and goes chasing after them.

I see a lot of people who scurry off before the minions actually die because they're afraid of missing out on the SS spawn, only end up denying themselves of it entirely.

I've actually seen this in a slightly different way: someone dies to the minion with a small group around it, returns to the aetheryte in the area, and the Minion...still has them on their aggro list, I guess? And randomly starts running in the vague direction of an aetheryte, despawning itself presumably running after that resurrected player. I saw it happen twice at the deader hours of early Endwalker, once in particular at the Thavnair southeast minion, and had to tell people not to return if they died and instead wait for a raise so that it might not happen again. I'm not entirely sure I'm correct, but it's the only thing I can think of as a reason. I don't remember if we reported it as a bug, per se, but I never saw anything about it...