The Hunt is garbage and needs to be fixed

[LianaThorne]

Hunts went from this cool, player driven thing to a Discord ping. That's my issue with Hunts. I know it's still player driven, but before you kinda had to know the people on your server and get into a Linkshell and there was effort on the player to Hunt. Now it's join Discord server mute everything but the ping you want and follow the ping. The social aspect of it has just evaporated. It's another example of cross world travel killing an aspect of a server's community.

It's definitely way more accessible now. I'll give it that. No longer do you have to try to get into the secret club, but at least to me, it felt better when it was Linkshells. It gave it purpose. Now, hunts are just low effort tome caps and gear upgrades.

I find myself participating way less than I did before. That's my TLDR.

I mean, to be fair, there are way more people now doing hunts than before. It would be pretty inefficient to try to get like 100-200+ people organized with just word of mouth. The devs also made hunts the most efficient way to grind tomes for relics so that's probably also making things feel worse than before. It might not be ideal but I understand why people ping rather than just run through servers shouting for hunts or relying on just linkshells. People want to get into as many trains as possible and Discord allows for cross-DC hunt attendance.

[Ardeth]

I mean, to be fair, there are way more people now doing hunts than before. It would be pretty inefficient to try to get like 100-200+ people organized with just word of mouth. The devs also made hunts the most efficient way to grind tomes for relics so that's probably also making things feel worse than before. It might not be ideal but I understand why people ping rather than just run through servers shouting for hunts or relying on just linkshells. People want to get into as many trains as possible and Discord allows for cross-DC hunt attendance.

I understand why it's like that I do. I'm not advocating for some way to limit people from enjoying it. That old system had its own issues as well. It's just that the more and more we can connect, the less we actually do. We've turned Bill's Hunt Train into The Dynamis Hunt Train. Bill's still running it, but he's been knocked off the card. He's just some guy now. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. That social aspect of it is dead. I just don't connect with it the same way as I did with it before. It has become a lesser thing to me now. Meaninglessly cheap content to cap with. And maybe it was that way before, but it felt like more. It had heart, and you can't really fake that.

So yeah, we have more people than ever doing hunts than ever before, but socially, it feels like less. Now, don't get me wrong, you can still get those people who make it worth it, but it's so sterilized now. Hell, if you don't know that there's a Discord for it, you'd never even know the hunts were even happening. It's just ironically a flawed system that works too well in the wrong direction. You take people away from the game for a feature in the game. Content in the game. You can't hunt without Discord, and that's bad.

Your only other option after that is constantly checking the Party Finder or being lucky enough to have someone in your FC relaying it. And why would someone willingly handicap themselves? So they go to Discord. I'm not one man crusading on Discord. We all use it. You have to now, but we shouldn't, and that's my issue. Skype wasn't required back when I started in 2012. We used it, but it was limited to actual friends. It had more soul to it. Now you join Discords left and right and cheapen the point of it all. It's social media, not anti-social media.

Anyway, this old man is going to go yell at clouds.

[Reinha]

The devs also made hunts the most efficient way to grind tomes for relics so that's probably also making things feel worse than before.

If the current relic wasn't a tome weapon, this wouldn't be an issue. It wasn't an issue before. A rank trains gave the same amount of tomes in previous expansions, but the people who were doing relic quests were doing them in other content because they had to.

So imo the problem with the efficiency is not because of hunt design, but because of relic design.