How will SE address hunts in this coming maintenance?Follow

Thread title says it all. Let's make our projections and see who is right once the maintenance hits.

My prediction is there's going to be a cap placed on allied seals per week. I've reached this conclusion for two reasons:

1) Without completely nerfing the rewards from hunts (which Yoshi-P has seemed to be against doing), a weekly cap is the only thing that will reduce the constant demand to do hunts above anything else. Some people have suggested limiting the number of oils/sands you can get, but that wouldn't solve anything. People would still spam hunts to get seals for glamor gear or Alexandrite. With a weekly seals cap, people would spend maybe two days in hunt groups getting their seals, then leave the content until the following week.

2) The maintenance is happening at the start of a weekly tome reset period, which would be the logical time to implement a weekly cap.

The other alternative (which Yoshi-P has supported) is finding a way to make hunt NMs live longer so more people can get credit, but to do so in ways that doesn't require giving the NM more HP. The big problem with this, though, could be server load issues. There are already so many problems with server stress during S rank fights... if you gave more people more time to arrive, that might just make every A rank fight like an S rank fight. That's my only concern... and trust me, I'd love it if these NMs took significantly longer to die so more people could get credit for fights.

What's your prediction?

I really don't think radar is the problem. It may have been a big issue at first, but now everyone systematically keeps track of which zones are open for A-ranks, and the spawn windows for each zone are only two hours long. It's incredibly easy for a hunt linkshell to scout multiple zones at once and locate NMs within a minute of them spawning... sometimes within seconds, if only one or two zones are open and those zones are being heavily camped.

I would be kind of surprised to see a weekly cap implemented at this point. The reason being that people with enough time on their hands who've been spamming hunts since day one could have easily maxed out one or two jobs in nearly full i110 gear, and implementing a weekly cap now would hinder the ability for people who didn't to be able to catch up. My guess is that SE won't try to fix the situation by limiting those who didn't take full advantage of the situation beforehand.

If I were to guess, I'd say it may be QoL changes such as attempting to make it so all hunt mobs will appear on your screen, some possible location changes for some hunts (giant S ranks that spawn in a tiny cave), and maybe either further upping the HP or lowering the amount of contribution necessary to get credit so that the content can at least come closer to meeting the demand.

I can see where you're coming from. I'm just not sure if it's the route they'd want to take. Making hunts more appealing so that players who didn't want to deal with it before might be able to catch up just seems more likely to me than making hunts more appealing by placing new restrictions which locks those who've been doing the whole time further along in terms of progress.

Short of a massive redo of the hunt system -- which shouldn't and won't happen-- I just don't see how you can fix the systems problems without curbing demand.

Fundamentally, you're right. The root of the problem is that spam-killing random, bill-less marks is incredibly lucrative, and until that can be tapered off in some way, things will never improve. Maybe once people have slaked their thirst for sands, oils, alexandrite, and whatever else, demand will taper off, but once they add the next round of rewards (presumably for 2.4) we'll be right back where we started.

This happened to me for the first time during an A rank yesterday. I was shocked - I have a top of the line gaming system with everything running on max. I've never even lost sight of Odin. (We took a break from Hunts yesterday to kill Odin, too. Fun.) But there was an A rank that had so many people swarming it that it disappeared. Everyone crept closer and closer to it trying to get it to reappear and as a result, face-pulled prior to the called time.

I agree, the radar users have got nothing on a full linkshell with a well documented Google Docs spreadsheet with last kill times. I got 500+ seals over the weekend. Unless SE considers a collaborative spreadsheet a "third party program" or something silly. Since it's all manual data entry, they really can't stop it.

Our problem on Lamia has been griefing by specific players. For the most part, hunt groups are polite and will wait if someone has said they have more party members arriving, and someone will shout a reasonable pull time in Eorzea minutes (e.g. the mob of people arroved at 6:00 AM ET, so they shout they will pull at 6:30 ET to give the rest of the parties a chance to filter in.) Well, some butt-holes have decided that they don't want to play nice, and they pull early. Thanks to some heroics by well geared tanks we sometimes manage to reset the mobs so everyone gets credit, but it doesn't always work. Most of us blacklisted the primary player responsible for it yesterday (his name is Google Chrome, haha irony) and we'll continue blacklisting anyone else who does it, but the blacklist just doesn't have the power it did back in FFXI in terms of labeling the server's dirt bags.

I also think a weekly cap of allied seals is a likely solution. Probably 200-225 because they are jerks and think you should have to wait two weeks for gear upgrades, based on the 450 set for soldiery.... Should be fairly easy to program, and will solve a lot of the demand for hunts.

Edited, Jul 28th 2014 4:07pm by Catwho

This seems to be the most likely prediction that I have seen. I would add that the weekly and daily hunts will give more seals and the s and a rank will give less seals. I also predict that the weekly hunt will be different for each person, to avoid the naul situation we all had on week 1.



I can't imagine trying to run these on ps3... The s ranks should have the hp of Odin / Behemoth and the clipping and spawn requirements that those guys have.



Guys like Geon on our server run two to three groups over mumble using the spreadsheet. The problem with Geon is that he pulls 30 seconds into finding it, just like that guy Google Chrome was doing all day yesterday... Best you can do is contact all the big linkshells and have them booted, but even that doesnt prevent them from joining up a party in df.



I contacted about 4 linkshells and their leaders and got him blacklisted from at least a few shells.



I think Susanoh is right about the reason not to put in a cap. Too many people have already spammed the system, and after X amount of sands and oils, there really is nothing left to do except buy the vanity gear. They would also need to lower the cost for the vanity gear because 1700 seals = 8 weeks for a lvl 70 gc coat = no thanks... So those people who exploited the no cap system are running around geared, with no need for sands on their main or even second characters, but now we are supposed to punish folks like you Kat, who only just picked up on hunts? To wait 3 weeks for a sand when you can get two sands in a day right now with a few hunt log drops? That would just hurt people like you, not the guys who spammed it from day 1. I dont think they will do that.


Edited, Jul 28th 2014 4:13pm by Valkayree

"Yakkity Sax" will play every time a hunt zerg passes by you in the open world.

Basically because it's our server and that's how we decided we wanted to do it. 90% of the server is okay with politely waiting for people to gather. The other 10% are not. Well, we don't want them on our server.

It's like the jerks who ignored the Dynamis schedule I worked my *** off to maintain in XI, and ganked scheduled Xarcabard runs. Is it against the TOS? No. Did the rest of the server want to deal with people who can't play like grown ups? Hell no. We blacklisted and broke up entire Dyna shells for going outside the schedule. (New shells who didn't know about The Schedule usually got a tell from me and after some explanations, fell in line with the rest of us.)

We can't report them for griefing precisely because it's not against the rules. But we can make them stop the behavior outside of our server norms, or drive them off the server.

Sadly, this is a social norm I don't entirely agree with as it really punishes all players involved. The more you wait for, the less participation the group as a whole receives, and on a server as vast as Balmung, the seams in the ability for the Hunt's innate mechanics to support this much load has well past been busted.

What I am hoping is some what to alleviate that primary issue, so that if there are going to be enforced social norms such as that, that it does not harm the players to do so.

Otherwise, I'd like that sort of mechanic cut out completely as it's really creating some unneeded negativity among the player-base. I firmly do not believe this was the intention of the developers.

Other than that, the spoken adjustments to Allied Seal rewards for doing Daily hunts would be greatly appreciated - I'd like to have a viable alternative to the heated competition if they are not resolving the flooding issue any time soon. And if they are, it's just nice to have another daily that's worth the time spent.

I think it's on SE if they want to remove the 'free-for-all' aspect of hunts. I have no problem siding with the majority on it because I personally feel it's boring regardless. I'd rather see other changes.

As for the comparisons to XI, we did what we had to in order to maintain civility and it actually promoted what everyone touts as one of the best communities in any MMO. XI taught you that you'd need to be courteous to other players long, long before you could even think of setting foot in dynamis. The problem that XIV faces here is that it's an almost non-existent entry barrier. You're not forced to cooperate with other players at any point before you can access hunts.

I don't think they will implement a cap. They felt it was time to allow everyone access to sands/oil without a restriction (since 2.4 will bring higher ilvls). This is supposed to get people ready for 2.4. There are a few things I think they can do though.

They might decrease the amount of contribution necessary (preferably to the point even a solo player can get credit since these die in 10 seconds anyway).

I'm betting on them drastically increasing the daily rewards for hunt bills, as well as making the weekly hunt either give more seals or turn it into a daily as well.

Increase the HP of B and A ranks again (I'm thinking they won't do this).

In my opinion the major problem is the contribution and HP of enemies. Contribution should be full even if all you did was auto attack one time. Not everyone has a healer to spam AoE cures. Anyone who hits the mob should put everyone in the party on the hate list (I have forgotten to hit them before using medica before resulting in 0 seals). Finally the HP of monsters should perhaps be scaled to how many people are in the current zone. 500 people in the same place? Cool give them HP like Odin. Only 20? Give them normal HP.