Another rant about S ranks

[KenMan]

S rank hunts have too long of a cooldown to allow the playerbase to police ourselves over it. Something needs to change. There is ALWAYS someone pulling it the instant they arrive, and with a few hundred players in the zone it sets off a chain reaction. Everyone else is forced to run in and kill it for their credit.

I've read all the dismissive replies in other forums. That's all it is too, dismissive. This COULD be good content if we stop telling everyone to just suck it up.

Transfer times between worlds goes up to 5 minutes as soon as any A rank train, special FATE or S rank is announced. In a perfect Eorzea, everyone would wait 5 minutes before pulling the mark. It's really unfortunate that one or a handful of impatient players can force everyone else into following.

I'm suggesting a few changes that would greatly help the player experience. Any of these changes would be great.

1. Allow more world transfers at a time in high traffic. Any increase would be noticeable.

2. Cut the achievement requirement for S ranks in half. Instead of needing 1000, make it 500 for the final achievement per expansion.

3. Add more S ranks to the game. The 24+ hour cooldown for 1 respawn is insane when we're trying to get 1000 kills. Double or triple the number of S ranks to each zone. It would be nice to see more creative spawning conditions to match the extra marks.

Make the experience for everyone better

[EiraWoqiso]

The only thing I think really needs significant changing is maybe tossing an invuln timer on fresh S spawns. If you're struggling to get to S ranks, consider helping spawn them

[EponaTBHSMH]

The early pulls are definitely an issue but this is truly the single piece of content that has really not been changed by SE despite world travel and DC travel being a thing, which are the main causes of people missing out on S ranks

I do think the cooldown on non ARR S Ranks are fair because its 84 hours to 132 hours compared to post maint windows that are shorter,
I do also believe that their numbers are okay for the 1000 cheevo simply because DC/World travel make a lot of them available

but I have no idea what it would take to get SE involved in this, early pulling Atticus, the Heritage Found S Rank is definitely a huge issue when you come late because of the range of one shot attacks that can even kill you in the air

[EiraWoqiso]

My understanding was that early pulling has been brought up before, with their statement being "working as intended". Their position is that this is open-world content so there should not be restrictions on who can pull or when (same applies to people who scout ahead mid-train or snipe A ranks). As much as I'd like an invuln timer or something, it's been made clear that they do not intend on making any changes. In a similar vein, GM rules imply that directly asking somebody to not early pull, calling somebody out for early pulling, or asking somebody to stop sniping a train is a bannable offense under Harassment, so currently the TOS are on the early puller's side. Genuinely the best way to get around this is to get involved with your server's spawning/scouting/conducting group. If you spawn an S, then chances are that you're going to make it to the hunt before anyone else.

[EponaTBHSMH]

My understanding was that early pulling has been brought up before, with their statement being "working as intended". Their position is that this is open-world content so there should not be restrictions on who can pull or when (same applies to people who scout ahead mid-train or snipe A ranks). As much as I'd like an invuln timer or something, it's been made clear that they do not intend on making any changes. In a similar vein, GM rules imply that directly asking somebody to not early pull, calling somebody out for early pulling, or asking somebody to stop sniping a train is a bannable offense under Harassment, so currently the TOS are on the early puller's side. Genuinely the best way to get around this is to get involved with your server's spawning/scouting/conducting group. If you spawn an S, then chances are that you're going to make it to the hunt before anyone else.

Thats what I suspected regarding SE stance

In that case aside from getting involved with the spawning/scouting, the DC travel lockdown removal might also help since from experience on NA region, most of the early pullers come from my datacenter (Crystal) I've noticed that I can make it to a lot of Primal, Aether and Dynamis S
rank hunts simply because over there people actually tend to wait 5mins before pulling

[Sida]

I kind of understand SEs stance on the complaints because if they gave the hunt trains free reign to blame anyone who happens to infere with their planned course they could make the life miserable to people who were not aware they were unconveniencing them. While early pulling when people are gathering around is pretty easy to point out as done while knowing others are at it too, especially pulling other hunts elsewhere is not so clearly purposeful action and should not lead to being piled on by annoyed folks who feel they're entitled to all hunts.

[Silberzerox]

"Early pulls" YES that the big issue with S Ranks. Not that the whole thing is not worth doing. S Ranks are lazy made. Give 100 DEV-Teams the challenge "Rework the FF14 S Ranks" and in one week you have at least 10 functional solutions, working with this spageti-code that FF14 is, that are better in any way than the S Rank-Hunts we have now.

[Toutatis]

1. Allow more world transfers at a time in high traffic. Any increase would be noticeable.

This is temporary only and I’d rather they leave it like this. There’s too many people atm and you end up with annoying congestion on your own world and instances remain locked and you miss marks. I’d rather they give very low priority for instance transfers to everyone not on their world.

[Jojoya]

"Early pulls" YES that the big issue with S Ranks. Not that the whole thing is not worth doing. S Ranks are lazy made. Give 100 DEV-Teams the challenge "Rework the FF14 S Ranks" and in one week you have at least 10 functional solutions, working with this spageti-code that FF14 is, that are better in any way than the S Rank-Hunts we have now.

It's really sad how the Hunt worked just fine until content creators started publicizing them as excellent sources of tomestones and all the leeches came jumping out of the woodwork.

There is no such thing as an early pull in content that is intended to be Kill On Sight.

SE could add an invuln period and there would still be people complaining about early pulls because they have no clue when the hunt was actually spawned. Was it spawned 10 seconds before you got the relay, or was it spawned 10 minutes ago but the spawner held off starting the relays because they knew that players were at another S rank and then that S rank triggered SS minions? You don't know. Unless there was someone else in the zone with a hunt bot, no one but the spawner and whoever they tell know.

Adding an invuln period won't keep hunts from dying fast. The more players given time to show up, the faster the hunt dies. The more players that show up, the greater the chance that someone present will miss out altogether because they can't get into the zone due to congestion or see the mark to hit it even with an AoE that requires no specific target to execute. The more players present, the greater latency becomes so target and aggro lines may be enabled but they'll be showing where the mark was 5 seconds ago.

I find it hilarious that most of the recommendations that get made about how SE can fix the Hunt would either change the Hunt into content that players say they hate (leves, FATEs) or do nothing to fix the attendance problem.

Even back in Stormblood, we had complaints about early pullers and people missing out. The complaints back then were more understandable since players were limited to the hunts on their single world instead of entire data centers. If you missed a S Rank, it could be hours before the next one would spawn instead of another popping 5 minutes later. We had complaints about hunt bots and sniping.

But hunters took those things in stride. They knew it came with the content and they made the best of what was available.

What we didn't have was all the entitled leeches coming out of the woodwork who don't care about the actual Hunt and are only looking for a piece of the end game tomestone pie. If the Hunt stopped existing, it wouldn't mean anything to them. They'd go looking for the new easiest way to get tomestones.

That's why I would love for SE to remove endgame tomestones from the Hunt. Let the Hunt be for those players who actually enjoy it as content. Who share the work in spawning, scouting and conducting instead of just showing up after a relay.

All of you complaining about the Hunt, be honest with yourselves. Would you still be doing it if there were no endgame tomestones to be gained? Do you even help spawn or scout or conduct?

[EiraWoqiso]

(snip)
All of you complaining about the Hunt, be honest with yourselves. Would you still be doing it if there were no endgame tomestones to be gained? Do you even help spawn or scout or conduct?

Thank you for this! I started scouting and conducting during ShB, and I remember when Asmongold was giving the game a try things were insufferable. We had someone constantly pestering him and his chat to get into hunts, and some of his chat DID get into hunts and made things awful for a while.

Then in EW, a combination of the congested instance system and third party tools to scout ahead of trains/ping people when and where an S rank spawns before the spawners even find the mark really ruined my interest for a while. Luckilly that's mostly died down in DT, and the worst we have to deal with are world travel/dc travel people early pulling.

Aside from world/DC travel, hunts haven't really gotten worse (or better, for that matter). They're more or less fine as they are, and if you want to have much say in how your server handles them, join the groups that organize the content.