Fix outerworld elite hunt to make it scalable

[Gurgeh]

It's been really good, really vindicating, to see that I'm very, very far from the only person that hates hunt farm sprint one hit tank and spank type content with almost a 'passion'.
When I think back to all the borderline gas lighting crap that I put up with on this forum, months back, when I complained that the entry to savage was just unacceptably un-fun for this casual enjoyer , most of which came back to hunt farms one way or another, mind numbingly representative gil farming, or start enjoy crafting (without add-ons).
I knew my own mind, but it was still pretty unpleasant.

Fix the elite hunt marks SE and make them scalable.
-logarithmically. Diminishing returns as more and more people join the fight.
-scales immediately. Elite Boss tracks how many people are engaged and scaling responds immediately, and retroactively. Boss down scales similarly, if people one hit engage and then wonder off.
-if you have people joining who are not bringing average dps the boss will actually get harder with scaling not easier.
-logarithmically tuned to flatten out something just under theoretical map instance limit.

There will be gains for ever larger parties. But they will be diminishing. And they will need people to bring good casual DPS.

Or don't and develop expensive new outerworld content to add to existing content.
Or do absolutely nothing and leave the mindless hunts and fates as the brain dead outerworld content that people currently just can't wait to tell their friends about.

[Asari5]

'hunts are not supposed to be done like that'

thats their take on anything related to hunt trains.... except of course the achievement. xD

all these people putting their work into trains and the community coming together... and yet the MMO doesnt support it.

[Jeeqbit]

This issue has been brought up for over 10 years, many times even on these forums. It's been brought up so many times that SE actually acknowledged it and said how they understand that when you go to fight an old S rank, it melts. But they also said that they can't just make them FATEs easily because it's different code, and FATEs don't have the spawn condition code. They didn't seem to rule out addressing it, but they evidently didn't decide to.

There was also concern about it being an issue with the release of World Visit, but Yoshi-P's theory was it would improve after the initial hype went down. Which it actually did, because people got their 2000 or 5000 achievements then we reached the next patch lull. Currently it's the sort of thing that wavers depending on time and patch lulls. Sometimes a cross-world hunt train can still have under 15 people early in the day during a patch lull, yet it can have as many as 400 after a raid release from just people on the same world as the train.

Rather than FATEs, I think a better idea would be a sort of Reprisal status effect on the boss itself that converts received damage and scales it based on the Player's level difference, and then converts damage dealt based on the Player's level difference. Then it could also reduce the incoming damage further based on the number of players in its enemy list. It could sort of reduce it by dividing the incoming damage by the amount of players over 24.

As I said though, they've never bothered with this so it's easier to just do hunts later in the week, during patch lulls or in the morning.

[Gurgeh]

I get you Jeeqbit, and I appreciate you genuine full engagement. However, it's just smoke and mirrors. Another person who's been drinking the coolaid.

Everyone, and I mean 'everyone', who has reached end game says the outerworld zone experience is just irrelevant (bad). (Yeah, there are tribal fetch quests)

Now, you can either 'do' 'something' and it 'might' get better.
Or you can do 'nothing' and it will 'definitely' stay shit.
(or, 'do' 'something' and it 'might' get worse, but you can still 'do' 'something' again, and it will be better eventually)

If you do something, you can look to spend a lot of money on doing something, or do something without spending a lot.

Everything else: smoke, mirrors, excuses, obfuscation, reverse rationalisation, illogic for convenience.

As for this...

...But they also said that they can't just make them FATEs easily because it's different code, and FATEs don't have the spawn condition code. ...

And I just don't know what to say about a game 'developer' that tries to claim "we can't do anything about it because if we did, then our developers would have to do some development."

Just when I start to feel sympathy, and want to appreciate the effort they put in, I read something like that, I 'do' believe it, and that sympathy is just murdered. I simply can't do the mental gymnastics needed to have patience and sympathy for them while that kind of thing is probably still going on now.

FFXIV is probably the 2nd biggest MMO. Its monthly sub was once massive. Yeah it might not be as profitable as Genshin, but I've got no sympathy for gross greed, profiteering, and exploitation. The only excuse is if they drove themselves into a hole with a miss spend on server expansions, and they had years when that was not the case. The rest is just unacceptable incompetence with their reinvestment decisions. Which is some top execs fault, that may 'not' be the top exec that made the investment decisions, but the top exec that pressured that top exec. A lot of management is just about having a fall guy to deal with the 'details' to keep the merry-go-round going around for as long as possible. NFTs, for fks sake.
Yes, someone needs firing and it is NOT Yoshi-P. Although, his flexibility, and expectations of demanding flexibility could use a little improvement - from where I'm standing.

[ShariusTC]

Well don't bother, this being ask every year but seemlike devs prefer making new content that only last for couple of year then turn dead like island sanctuary than fix old content that many player continue to run past 10 years

Bet with you there will be a dude come and explain to you how hunt train suppose to be and it doesn't intende for cross-world hunting even several hundreds of play doing it everyday

[mallleable]

I actually think reducing the respawn time of A, and S ranks by a significant amount (5 or so minutes for A ranks, and an hour or so for S ranks) could help improve the hunt system as it would reduce a lot of the pressure to world hop, and data center travel, and therefor reduce the number of players hitting an individual hunt mark.

[Kranel_San]

'hunts are not supposed to be done like that'

thats their take on anything related to hunt trains.... except of course the achievement. xD

all these people putting their work into trains and the community coming together... and yet the MMO doesnt support it.

They'll go to insane lengths to justify the absurb achievements we have. There's a reason why not a single other MMO does anywhere near this game.

[VeyaAkemi]

I actually think reducing the respawn time of A, and S ranks by a significant amount (5 or so minutes for A ranks, and an hour or so for S ranks) could help improve the hunt system as it would reduce a lot of the pressure to world hop, and data center travel, and therefor reduce the number of players hitting an individual hunt mark.

This would also require them to nuke the reward per Mark, Hunt Trains, when they are consistent, are already one of the best ways to farm tomes, can you imagine if they basically never stopped spawning so you could functionally have hunt trains going 24/7?

[mallleable]

This would also require them to nuke the reward per Mark, Hunt Trains, when they are consistent, are already one of the best ways to farm tomes, can you imagine if they basically never stopped spawning so you could functionally have hunt trains going 24/7?

Well yeah, and that would further disincentivize players who are just there for effortless tomes from participating. They would likely have to buff, and increase the amount of hunt specific rewards to make hunting worthwhile for players that isn't just brainless tomes. And yeah, a fast respawn rate would be a pretty big wrench thrown into mega trains. That would be the point.

[Jeeqbit]

There was a time when I genuinely worried if SE would continue the hunt system. Before many worlds had hunt trains as a concept, participation was not exactly great. It was extremely niche content, and the rewards were mostly not worth it.

Expert was the main way people capped tomestones, and hunts were mainly popular among a tiny minority of achievement/mount hunters or at augment release at odd patches. And a small amount of people who used them to get materia or tomestones to make lots of gil, particularly if they were good at making S ranks before they died, which as you know many people struggled with even before world visiting.

So when hunt trains spread more and more across worlds as a concept, it gave us a selling point to the masses. We could say "come do these hunt trains, it's better and faster than expert roulette". Before we knew it, hunts were super popular, and there was no longer any chance SE would discontinue them due to how popular they'd become.

So I certainly wouldn't want hunt trains to stop as a concept, or the rewards to be changed.

Also, really, we can have hunt trains almost around the clock already due to world visit and DC travel (and we do in the NA region at least on Aether/Crystal/Primal). So the issue isn't how many hunts we can fight; it's the congestion that occurs and the fact the game struggles to handle it on multiple fronts, including entering the area and the lack of sync.

They'll go to insane lengths to justify the absurb achievements we have. There's a reason why not a single other MMO does anywhere near this game.

Many achievements in this game are absurd. The hunt ones are not. Why? Because of World Visit, Data Center Travel and the amount of expansions we now have.

Back in Stormblood, I would have agreed with you that 5,000 S ranks and 10,000 A ranks was insane because you literally couldn't world visit for it, and just getting 2,000 S ranks took almost a year of having no life. That just isn't the case now, and a busy person can get lots of A and S ranks while missing hundreds or thousands of them each month due to world and DC travel. I got the Dawntrail S rank achievement in just 2 months, despite missing lots of them...