Make S ranks hunts more engaging and "fair"

[MarcoZorn]

I have been participating in The Hunt for a while now and I love that kind of content, the idea that up to hundreds of people engange an overworld mob is just very appealing to me. But over time I have identified some areas that could be improved to get more people involved and on an equal footing. But also reduce the possibility and effect of griefing or gatekeeping for this type of game content but at the same time making it more engaging.

While this post was inspired by a recent surge of hunt "drama" on the light data center I feel like the ideas here transcend the drama and hopefully make the Hunt itself a better experience AND provide less opportunitys for griefing.

This will be quite a long list of points but I thought I post them together (even if it makes the post actually 3 posts long) instead of making a series of posts because I think having them all together provides a more coherent picture of what I think could be done to improve The Hunt.


Equal playing field
===

When an S rank spawned in your area you get a message "You sense the presence of a powerful mark..." but you don't know where it is and have to go looking for it. That's the theory.
But the reality is: people use plugins (that show them in-game where the S rank spawned), or 3rd party websites (you see an image where the s rank spawned in your discord/browser/app), or are in the "right" linkshells (with in-game flag). People without those resources have a significant disadvantage.

There are two approaches that come to my mind how to give people an equal chance to participate in the hunt:

1.) Make it impossible for plugins to extract the coordinates for the S rank from the game client. This would at least reduce the inquality between plugin users and no plugin users.

However this solution suffers from a few drawbacks. The first is that the render distance for S ranks is map-wide, that means the information where the S rank is has to be somewhere in the client for it to render on the map. So it seems like the render distance probably has to become smaller or this will just be a cat-and-mouse game.

It also doesn't address that to be a really active hunter you need some 3rd party websites/apps or be in the right linkshells to get notifications about spawned S ranks that someone wants to share with other people. If we're sticking with the idea that we want to promote in-game tools for this purpose we probably need significant increases in linkshell capacity (currently ls 128/ cwls 64). Just thinking out loud a capacity of 256 or 512 (for both kinds of linkshells) could make sense.

2.) If we're stuck with the fact that plugins will be able to get the coordinates across the whole map and we cannot have a meaningful increase in linkshell members: Could it be a solution that if you're on the map that you see an icon on the map (similar to FATEs) - or at least a direction in the mini-map (similar to unspoiled/legendary nodes)? Furthermore it could also be useful if the whole world gets a chat notification (opt-in or opt-out like system messages, etc.) that an S rank spawned and on which map.

This would give people without external resources or plugins the means to more easily participate in the Hunt.

It would also be nice for A ranks/B ranks that when you're in close proximity to get a visual indicator on the map. Like with those rare FATEs in newer expansions that get only visible if you're actually very close.


Old expansion hunt marks are getting stomped
===

The A ranks and S ranks for older expansion just have too few HP and don't do any significant damage. A small group or even a single person can easily kill those by themself. This will get more pronounced every time the level or item level increases. As I've understood the Hunt: the B ranks should be something you can do solo, A ranks require a few people, and S ranks require a few groups.

One idea that comes to mind is to handle them similar to FATEs, that you have to do synced. For the hunt marks I would think that an item level sync (without a level sync) would be ideal. You can use the full range of spells and abilities but your stats aren't totally over the stats of the S rank. That makes for more interesting and engaging fights. And personally I would love to have a real fight against some of those older A and S ranks!

An out of pocket idea would be to use the item level of the x.0 patch of the next expansion (still a meaningful advantage over the S rank, but you cannot stomp it anymore) except for those of the current expansion which sync to the item level of their x.0 patch. That would be:

A Realm Reborn: item level 160
Heavensward: item level 300
Stormblood: item level 430
Shadowbringer: item level 560
Endwalker: item level 560

One downside with the suggestion is that the item level sync would have to be either like for FATEs (a bit annoying) or automatic when you're in close proximity (could be surprising). I have no good idea what would feel good and be easily usable.

This item level sync could be complemented by an additional HP upscaling for A ranks and S ranks when a lot of players (say above 100) are in close proximity (or on the map). I think eureka zones Notorious monsters have a similar system. Seeing a hunt mark die in a few seconds makes the Hunt feel a brain-dead boring event instead of an actual engaging encounter.

Jumpy hunt marks
===

There are some marks (looking at you Ophioneus) that like to reset themselves when they do a dash/jump. I fail to believe that this is actually "working as intended" and I think there need to be some changes so these hunt marks don't jump themselves to full HP. Or if that's not possible please don't add more S ranks that do these kind of jumps.


SS rank minions
===

Remove the fact that you can fail the SS rank spawn by resetting a minion. This has lead to occurences of intentionally griefing but also for unintentional accident. There is currently a time limit in which the minions have to be engaged otherwise the event fails, why not build upon that and make the event fail in case the 4 minions haven't been slain within 5/7/10 minutes but remove the "reset fails the event" condition.

Killed S ranks
===

The playerbase theory crafted the respawn timers and the respawn windows for the S ranks. This allows for educated guesses when attempting to spawn an S rank. However this requires knowing when the S rank was last killed and this is information is not available in-game. I think it would be a very handy addition if the hunt NPCs in the region actually would indicate if the S rank in the area is currently on cooldown (for example: "The hunt mark was defeated recently, it's probably recovering right know and biding it's time before it will strike again").
The intent of that message shouldn't be that the S rank will garantueed spawn, the message should just be present when the hunt mark is actually impossible to spawn (this could be some random amount of time: e.g. 24h, 48h or the full 84h for current expansion S ranks). That would give people some indication that it may be worth it to attempt a spawn, especially with some of the more time-consuming spawns (e.g. kill 300 mobs) this would be very useful information.


World travel queue
===
This is a more general point, it is a secondary issue that is probably less impactful (*if* some of the aforementioned points were integrated). But it could be something that would make it a better (or at least less frustrating) experience at the moment.

Most of the time people "miss" S ranks because they are stuck in queue or have long loading times (PS4 *cough*). I'm not saying that people are entitled to getting to the S rank. But if more people could switch worlds more quickly the time spent in world transfer doesn't feel quite as bad. Waiting for 3-5 minutes in world transfer just to see the S rank die before you get there feels like a lot of time wasted and is just a bad experience.
I don't know how many people can swap worlds in a certain timeframe currently, but my best guess would be it's like 4 players each 10s. Is there no way to improve that?

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Wow, you stuck around till the end? Do you think there might be some merit to (some of) the ideas? I would welcome your feedback!

[Jojoya]

(tip for the future: you can put everything into a single post by editing it after posting an initial part within the character limit. There's no character limit on the edits)

The Hunt already is "fair" beyond what SE intended for the content. They aren't especially pleased by the extent the community has chosen to organize by the content but they don't seem to be interested in interfering with it either.

There's nothing stopping you from joining Discords and linkshells to get relays. There's also nothing stopping you from signing up with the 2 tracking websites most commonly used. The purpose of the community using these tools is to try to get information about spawns shared with as many players as possible, not to give anyone an unfair advantage.

The third party tools are a slightly different situation, of course. They were originally designed to give only their users an unfair advantage. To counter that, reports from one of those tools has been added to what's probably the largest Hunt Discord for the game so that information gets shared more widely instead of being limited to just users of the tool.

If people feel disadvantaged, it's because they're refusing to use the community based tools available to them. That's their choice. Some don't like doing their Hunts as part of a larger community. They want to go solo and there is nothing stopping them from doing that.

On your individual points:

1- Likely can't be done without taking away map coordinate function from all players for all content that relies on it. If it could be done without disrupting intended use, SE probably would have already done so. Imagine trying to make it in time to a S rank without any coordinates to navigate by other than "it's east of Tomra".

SE could go ahead and remove the long distance detection for S ranks (already true of the other hunt elites that aren't engaged) but it's not going to change things from your perspective. The players who do the spawning on a regular basis will already know where it will spawn in most cases (spawners generally call it "mapping", some Faloop members call it "sciencing" trying to make it sound more difficult than it is). There's no illicit tools needed to accomplish that, only a willingness to spend a few hours chasing B ranks around a zone to eliminate what spawn points the S rank cannot spawn at.

On the subject of increasing cwl capacity, join the club. The Hunt community has been asking for that since cwls were added. Until such time as SE is able to increase the member limit, Discord remains the best tool for the community to reach the largest number of players though we'll still continue to use linkshells and cwls.

The other modification we'd like to see is for cwls to have an indicator of when a member was last online. We sort of get that information for the world based linkshells via the search information but we have nothing similar to use for cwls. If we knew which cwl members were inactive and could be removed, that would create more room for new hunters in the established cwls with dependable relayers.

It would also help if more of the active members of the hunt community would assist in the ls/cwl relays. Relays can't be sent out by people not online, visiting another data center, in cutscenes, etc.

2 - you're trying to remove the "hunt" part of the Hunt. Might as well not have the content at all.

People without the external resources have the same opportunity to participate in the content as those of us who are doing the hunting and manually feeding the information to those external resources in the first place. While there is a small percentage of hunters that rely on a plug-in, most of us dislike them and don't use them. The one plug-in that shares info on the Discord is tolerated only because it is sharing the info with the wider hunt community and any user identified as being disruptive to the hunt community gets banned from using it.

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Old hunts getting stomped by solo players - did you know that the newest hunts also get stomped by solo players on occasion? Mechanics aren't difficult and tanks have plenty of self-healing so all that is required is patience and time. One player on Materia even solo'd Ophioneus last year. Obviously it's much easier to do with the older hunts but it's nothing new and not something SE is interested in changing.

The community has suggested switching hunts to a FATE style system but SE has said it would take too much time away from other content development to be worth it. It would also effectively remove The Hunt from the game just to add more FATEs that the player base tends to ignore.

If you want the older hunts to feel more challenging, you can always get a group of friends together and equip gear of the appropriate level for the hunt mark instead of using your highest level gear.

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Resets - that's easy to solve. Don't be standing at a great distance from the spawn point. Don't be standing on a ledge that would force the hunt mark to run a long distance to get to you. Don't briefly attack a hunt mark then run away to do something else before it's dead. Some hunts will target the farthest player for the "jump" mechanics. If I see a hunt getting pulled too far from it's spawn point, I place the spawn point between me and it so the next time it goes to jump, it's more likely to target me and won't reset.

Causing a hunt mark that's already engaged by other players to reset can lead to a temporary ban of your account (or even permanent if you're a repeat offender) if the GMs have reason to believe it's been done intentionally. Please do report it if you see it happen and something was said that makes you think it was intentional.

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SS minions - the community pointed out the problem when the SS rank was added in Shadowbringers. I don't think we ever got a direct response from SE but our guess is that since the SS spawn is intended to be rare, the chance for the minions to despawn is intentional and won't be changing. Some local communities organize minion squads to protect against resets.

Again if you encounter someone that you believe has intentionally reset a minion so the SS spawn doesn't happen, please report it.

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Timers - is it really that hard to check one of the 2 trackers commonly used by the community to see when something is due to respawn? Few people like to see time wasted that could have gone to better use and the trackers help the community make better use of their time (assuming the last kill was reported to one of the trackers - they aren't always).

That's the community working together to problem solve, which is part of what makes a MMORPG feel like a MMO and not just a RPG.

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World travel queues - SE never intended for every player to be present at every kill on their home world, let alone on their data center or their entire region. No one is owed the right to be present at a kill, not even the spawner.

Accept that sometimes you're going to miss out. No one wants to sit around waiting 20 minutes for a 20 second kill and for some S ranks the spawners have already put in an hour or more of their time to get it to spawn. There are more hunts out there waiting to be killed.

Be aware of what the relay is for and how long it's likely for you to get there. Sometimes it's just not worth trying. If you want to be part of as many kills as possible, then turn the hunt into your primary end game and help with the spawning, scouting and/or conducting.

[JellaW]

Some interesting points, as Marco mentioned some issues come not from regular players engaging with Hunts freely as open game content, but from a few specific players choosing to grief others for whatever reason.
A small, organized team of 2 or 3 players can now quickly kill ARR/HW S ranks before the dozens of people on the way arrive. If done repeatedly and on the entire DC, it can deny content to interested players. Particularly to PS4/HDD players, or people who moved away from the Limsa aetheryte for a second. This is not a hypothetical: it has happened.

Some proposals like level sync, or HP buffs depending on the people in the map, not only aim to combat the quick kills, but more importantly, to make the Hunt content more interesting. All A/S ranks reward uncapped tomes, and EW marks capped tomes too, making them always relevant. Even more so with the current EW relic system. Quick kills trivialize this. Making players actually fight the marks instead of killing it with tomahawks only would help balance this part of the game.

Extra linkshell/cwls member slots are greatly needed, or at least being able to check when a member was last online. I can understand if making linkshells visible DC wide is complicated to code, but there is no excuse for the small number of member slots.

On the issue of resets/minion resets, the comment above suggested reporting them. Currently on the Light DC, and I assume Chaos too, reports are completely useless. Some griefers have been reported by dozens of people for repeatedly resetting marks just before they are killed, or purposefully resetting minions, with witnesses, with no result whatsoever. So we would like some clarification by the GMs or SE on this. If repeated resets/minion resets are not against ToS, please say so and we can stop wasting everyone's time with reports. If they are against ToS, then why the inaction? The GMs have said they cannot act without proving the intention to grief, which seems fair on the surface. But if they can only prove intention through chat messages, then the griefer only needs to not say anything, and they are good. That's an absurd situation. If SE is, understandably, not willing to overpolice the game, it should at least be designed to minimize griefing.

Anyway, we are always told to post suggestions like this on the official forums. At some point, we would like to see a response.

[DrWho2010]

You will never see a response because the dev's response is and always will be that the hunt is a free for all.

There are no rules.

The only "rules" are the ones that the player community has placed upon itself. And the devs can't plan appropriate responses around that so they don't.

[JellaW]

I am not talking about any community rules here. Repeated resets/minion resets are nominally against ToS (using enmity related actions against players, killing players on purpose/making them lose credit and interfere with gameplay). My question is if it's ever enforced, and if so, how can players report it effectively.

"The Hunt is free for all" until a small group of organized players make it impossible for a sizeable amount of interested players to participate in it. By quick or unreported kills, for example. The suggestions above would help to balance the issues, in my opinion.

[DrWho2010]

Using your example, "reporting kills" is a player imposed thing. The game doesn't record this data anywhere accessible in game which is intentional. Just because people are "interested" in it doesn't make it fall under some kind of "we must make it easier to manage" kind of rule.

[JellaW]

Not sure how much hiding the times of death is intentional or just an oversight, since ARR Hunt marks have a much quicker respawn rate than expansion marks. But that's not the issue here.

Consider Eureka NMs. From the moment they are defeated, they can be farmed again immediately. And once their hidden timer comes up again a couple of hours later, they will spawn. So in this case having the ToD is less relevant: just farm for a while and wait it out. Your effort still counts.
But that's not the case for S ranks. Once killed, you have to wait days to attempt a new spawn. Some are trivial to spawn (Tyger, Safat,...), others take hours (Nunyunuwi, Senmurv) or a lot of resources (Agrippa, Pale Rider). If any of those were recently killed without a community report, your effort is completely wasted. And there is no way for you to know before trying.
Having a vague indication that the mark won't spawn soon serves to balance this part of the game with similar content.

[DrWho2010]

Eureka NM's are completely different than the Hunt though. You are not supposed to know what the status is before trying to spawn them, that's the point of the Hunt. It doesn't need any "balancing".

[JellaW]

"You are not supposed to know" I believe that was true for ARR S rank conditions, as many can spawn via random player actions. But let's be honest, that is not true for many expansion S rank conditions. Most modern marks require specific, coordinated actions. Players *have* to share information of the correct spawn spots for Armstrong/Burfulur etc, try for hours on killcount spawns and even get 10 friends for Narrow Rift. We are supposed to know some of that information, even if it's on the community side.

Also, you don't know what the Eureka NMs status is before trying. The point is, it doesn't matter! Your effort still counts! But it doesn't for S ranks already killed.

[MarcoZorn]

@Jojoya Thanks for the edit tip!

Regarding your points:

You mentioned that the purpose of these trackers (discord/websites) is to share the information with as many people as possible is a good thing. But on the other hand you think that having world-wide chat notifications about spawned S ranks and where to find them would remove "the hunt from the hunt". It seems like having the information gated behind another app/website is somehow more appropriate than having the information in the game. I can't follow this line of reasoning. Wouldn't making the information available to more players with less barriers be "better"? On the other hand it seems we agree on the fact that ls/cwls are too limited and that tools that extract the locations are "bad", although it seems you have resigned to the status quo.

I have also heard of people killing current expansion S ranks solo or with small groups, but that's not what I would call stomped (what I heard that seemed like 20-30 minutes of hard work). But I didn't know that FATE style hunts have already been suggested and denied - do you happen to know where I can read more about their reasoning? However my idea of having engaging fights wasn't just for "a group of friends that equip level appropriate gear", I was thinking that very old S ranks (ARR/HW) are just brain-dead content, there's no challenge, it's just ticking a "one s rank less until i reach achievement x". In generally in boils down to 1 minute to get to the location, 1-2 minutes of waiting and 10-20s of hitting the target dum ... I mean S rank. If you believe that's interesting and engaging we just have different opinions - which is fine with me.

You also mentioned that resets are reportable. But wouldn't it be better if the system would be more robust against griefing than just reporting the griefer and hoping a GM will warn/ban them for their behavior (on the light datacenter that rarely happens even if the person is a multi-offender)? The game can facilitate good or bad behavior ... shouldn't they make it easier to do the good behavior and harder to break the rules in the first place?

For the timers: Yes, it's easy to check the apps, but why do we need this information hidden? I'm not saying the game should tell you when an S rank is coming off cooldown, just when it would be a waste of time to attempt to spawn it. The apps could serve as a more in-depth and accurate (provided most people participate with them) picture while the Hunt NPC could give you some rough ideas, this is already true for the spawn conditions, the hunt NPC gives hints, the apps tell you what exactly you need to do.

Regarding the world-travel queues: It seems like you're not in favor of the suggestion but would faster world-travel (higher player throughput) be a bad thing in your opinion? I think wasting a few minutes in the queue is bad independent if you get the S rank reward or not. Even though it feels worse for those that don't get there in time.

Sorry i haven't had the time to address all of your points and also don't want to side-track on singular points too much. And even though it seems like we disagree on a few points I really appreciate your response and the different point of view!