square enix: we need to talk about hunts and why you refuse to address the HP issue

[KageTokage]

I'm gonna drop a controversial take as someone who used to enjoy hunts in Stormblood.

The zergfest trains are the problem. Players from other servers should not be able to claim credit on hunts outside of their home world.

I am fully aware that many are gonna hate this message, but hunts used to be a great community activity until every A-rank turned into a 200+ player zerg with the advent of world visit.

It's an awful system and puts you at the mercy of your platform being reasonably fast, not having potato connection and praying to gods you've never seen that the instance doesn't start having a stroke.

I understand it is incredibly efficient this way which is why I think rewards would need to be adjusted accordingly for the reduction on available hunts per player.

But zerging sucks and I'm tired of staying silent about this. World visit ruined the community aspect of hunting in favour of efficiency rushing.

I've felt this way from like...the first week cross-server was introduced.

It's now further exasperated by all of the hunt detecting add-ons making their locations/spawns public knowledge to everybody on the DC nowdays.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

@KageTokage: Tell me about it... using radars of any kind used to be frowned upon back in Odin (server) hunts. Part of the activity was scouting and relaying it with hunt linkshells.

Now you use discord to coordinate and basically just read game data for coords. Absolutely nothing about what was a community act remains.

Yet people all just go scaling this, scaling that... BRÖTHER, you guys don't see the bigger picture.

[BigCheez]

Hear me out.
It's almost as if Hunts aren't designed for the entire data centre to show up and nuke it from orbit.

It's essentially emergent gameplay. It doesn't matter what hunts are or are not designed for, the only thing that matters is the actual gameplay experience of the actual players. The developers should take into account how the game is actually played, not adhere strictly to their original design.

Hunts are data-centre level activities at this point. Their design should take this into account.

Hunt marks should either just have more HP or scale based on the number of players who are in combat with them.

S rank hunt marks should have a buff that prevents them from being pulled for a few minutes after spawning.

[Bonoki]

The issue with trains isn't necessarily the trains themselves, but rather the abundance of different third-party radars that turn trains into overwhelming hordes. Over time, trains have become so good at relying upon this information resulting in overcrowded "bullet trains" because there are too many participants to wait. It's so bad that if you die and don't get a res immediately, you will be late to the next mark before it's dead. Hunts were not designed with cross-world/cross-data center travelers trying to weasel their way into every hunt.

[lolnotacat]

I stopped enjoying hunts once cross-server travel was instituted. And not just because they're usually bullet trains that won't wait at all (though that's definitely a big reason). But the fact I'm practically forced to play tank to make sure I get credit and am able to eat mechs I'll never learn because it dies so fast just makes them more of a tedious chore that I get alerted to in my linkshell.

[EponaTBHSMH]

is OP's goal to have people use their full rotation on hunts? because I believe that's already mostly the case, people that just tag aren't really the majority

[Ramiee]

im just mad nuts are now the de facto hunt currency.
Couldn't it of been Centurio Seals instead of something with a dumb name, I don't want to be doing hunts for "Bags of nuts."

[KisaiTenshi]

I've felt this way from like...the first week cross-server was introduced.

It's now further exasperated by all of the hunt detecting add-ons making their locations/spawns public knowledge to everybody on the DC nowdays.

This is why people using them should be banned, that is blatant cheating. Players even benefitting from people broadcasting that, are also bad faith joining the hunts, know they are cheating.

Anyway Square Enix should randomize the hunts and scale them differently. One other MMO basically made it impossible for players to "nuke every field boss from orbit" the second it spawns from people flipping channels/shards/servers by making it so that there is a cooldown on the actual transfer, and that the actual cooldowns are longer than the fights.

So:
1) Scale based on players in the zone when hit, rescale at the half way point to make it harder or easier
2) Don't reward for one hit and running off. Players who don't do 2% of the damage just don't get credit
3) CD the boss and then respawn in different locations and make the boss "roam" once spawned. Spawn in different places on different servers.
4) Prevent zone-in's near the hunt. (eg Aetheryte's closest to hunts are disabled once the boss is pulled)

But I digress, I think the amount of complaints are people just complaining about being unable to get the free-easy hunts because others poach them first from using cheating tools.

[Eyrilona]

4) Prevent zone-in's near the hunt. (eg Aetheryte's closest to hunts are disabled once the boss is pulled)

That wouldn't work, I'm afraid. It has no consideration for Gatherers and people doing quests or Treasure Maps or, you know, any other reason to use an aetheryte to get to a zone/area.

Your points 1-3 also come riddled with problems I'm afraid. For one thing, requiring a 2% contribution means that most people will never get the reward at all. Even a theoretical math optimization means only 50 people can do damage to the mark, and in reality because nobody can manage their output anywhere near that accurate, you are effectively limiting hunt groups to maybe twenty people (let's say 24 because one alliance worth of players is a nice size) ... but without any way to make sure no more than that many players arrive at the scene in the open world. So people will be angry with everyone else for making it impossible for anyone to get 2% for themselves, and toxicity would destroy the hunt scene entirely.

To accomplish what you want, you would need to not have the Hunt Mark on the open world map, but instead make it an instanced event that only lets, say, 24 people inside at a time. Congratulations, you have invented single-boss alliance raids.

[Venarius]

This is a community made problem. Hunting stopped being fun the moment they opened cross server travel. Those encounters were never designed to be merged down by literal trains.