How will SE address hunts in this coming maintenance?Follow

Who are you calling a horse?

I still believe firmly that there should be some content that isn't accessible to everyone right away, but hunts were never meant to be a part of that. I'm not suggesting that solo players should be included(mostly because I think 'solo' and 'world spawn' contradict each other), but where is the auto-group feature? SE borrowed on the RIFT event system, but completely forgot the key element of the event that made it accessible. Y 4?

Not to disagree with your overall position, but there are in fact differences. Not everyone is a DD beating directly on a mob.

For example: Medica II. I can't buff individuals the same way I can people in my party. That directly (and greatly) affects my contribution potential depending on whether I'm in a party or not.

I missed a week of this being out of town.

Could you summarize what was changed? Or is that still coming?

Which is kind of what I figured was the reason - healers need a party to maximize their contributions. OK, fine. Healers can party up with friends, but I still don't understand why that has to penalize a lone dps beating on the mob by himself.



Because as we've said before, it's not always convenient to drop everything to party up if you've been waiting in the DF for a long time or something similar. Or to give another example, I've seen situations where a full party forms up to do Primals or Coil or whatever, and while they're getting ready maybe a couple players go AFK to bio or whatever. 2-3 members may port somewhere to chase the mark, but those afk players who don't are going to prevent them from getting full credit. Sure, they could just drop the party and jump into a whole other party for the hunt but that seems like an extra step and a pain in the butt to do when it's really not necessary in the first place.

I don't want to do hunts solo. I don't want to do hunts *at all*. Whether I'm in a party or by myself I'm still going to find them boring, tedious, repetitive, and pretty much the exact opposite of fun. The whole problem I have with the system is that it's pretty much the only reliable way to get sands at the moment, and that sucks big time. If I had the option to do them solo it might at least make them somewhat more bearable as I do one here and one there in between doing all the things I'd much rather be doing, but I'd still hate them, I'd still think they were messed up, and I still would never actively focus on hunts alone.

I have to say I couldn't agree more with Raylo on this. Any event that rewards some kind of "contribution" points needs to be handled fairly delicately if you're going to prevent players from simply finding out what the game deems most worthy of those points and spamming the hell out of it. Hunts are paper thin mobs that are currently being treated as server wide world bosses. Inevitably, players find the best way to bend the system to their advantage within the few seconds that they're able to receive credit. If that means you have a bunch of healers who join together spamming mega AoE heals on a group of players that has not and will not lose a single HP the whole fight, then that's what players decide to do. If instead the best way to receive credit was to use Esuna on players who had no negative status effects, players would do that. If it were jumping up and down while you had a minion out, you'd see a bunch of players doing that. But none of these methods are what I would call good gameplay, they're just silly rules, and they don't actually contribute to the fight. All they really contribute to is you and your group getting rewards because you hit some completely useless metrics dictated by the game.

I would welcome some more real party content in FFXIV, where being in a party actually aids you in completing your task, but I can't praise a system that rewards players for being in a party in content that really doesn't need it, simply because it's on a little check list of things you should do if you want to receive credit.

I've already answered this, but I will again.

The content is designed for party play. The logical assumption about greater rewards for parties is that, because the content was designed for parties, the developers wanted to encourage people to form parties. Seems to be a pretty simple assumption, don't you think?

The problem that we can all agree on is there are too many parties participating in the content, making the NMs too easy.

That said, this content is not designed for solo play. Even if there were fewer parties participating, it would still not be designed for solo play, unless SE reverted B ranks back to how they were at the patch... at which point, only B ranks would be designed for solo play.

No matter what you think or what you're hoping for, the likelihood is that A and S rank NMs will never be designed for solo play.

EDIT: Raylo, what you should be arguing for is an entirely new system that's just meant for soloing. Sometimes, that sounds like that's what you want... but other times, you sound as if you're expecting to be able to brute-force full-credit rewards from content that's not meant for soloing, and that's where the problem is.

Edited, Jul 31st 2014 3:29pm by Thayos

As I said, this is party content that is being overloaded with too many parties. It's still not solo content. Once the zerging dies down -- and eventually, it will -- it will be great open-world party content, and still not solo content.

I understand what you're saying, but removing the encouragement of party play might open a big can of worms. Changing the system to be designed for soloers would require a bunch of other changes that we're not even thinking about.

This is party content, designed for parties. There's no good reason to change that... lots of people are having fun with this content.

Edited, Jul 31st 2014 4:34pm by Thayos

Hunts would be even more of a madhouse if they were a free-for-all for soloers, and anyone who disagrees with that is in denial.

People who dislike the zergs still wouldn't like them, because there will still be zergs, only they'd be much more chaotic and toxic. People who don't like the /shouting would be unhappy, because there would be even more mayhem. People would still fight and bicker over how soloers should be rewarded for their contributions, and I guarantee that many people would NOT be happy.

Plus, you'd be ******** over the people who get it and form parties. Because this is party content. For parties. For people who don't want to just run around alone all the time.

I'm sorry that you soloers don't have content that produces equally lucrative rewards.

I seriously don't understand what you guys are trying to convince me of.

This is party content that's currently too popular for its own good. SE needs to reduce the demand on the system. The answer, in my opinion, is a weekly cap on seals. That would solve the whole problem. After one or two days, there would be far fewer parties roaming about, and the hunts wouldn't be the massive zergs they are right now. This party content would be played by a good number of parties.

It's not solo content. With a little luck, though, SE will roll back the changes on B ranks and possibly buff daily mark bills... THAT was the content SE originally designed for soloers.

You guys keep forgetting this is Final Fantasy. This franchise has always been rooted in party play. Always. That is never going to change, and least not until SE's next FF MMO several years from now, if ever.

Edited, Jul 31st 2014 4:51pm by Thayos

People would be more angry if more people were able to properly receive credit for what's effectively a 30 second fight? Sorry, not following.

I'm not seeing why easing up on this would suddenly make this content any worse than it already is.

Soloers can receive credit, just not as much.

Look at the daily mark bills... One seal per bill! That's how much SE intended soloers to be part of the hunt system. One seal. Not 20, not 50. Just one.

You can already get more than that by soloing in B, A and S ranks.

Again, I don't see what the problem is, other than you're just upset you can't solo everything.

SE clearly designed this content with the goal of people forming parties. Based on the differences in rewards between elite marks and daily hunt bills, this is an incredibly obvious concept. There is simply no way to deny this concept. SE wants us forming parties. The hunts are something for us to form parties for and get rewarded for it.

And if you can't imagine how opening the floodgates to soloers would completely demolish this content (which many people actually enjoy), then there's no point in me trying to explain it. If you're so fixated on this content being opened up for solo play, then there little point in trying to reason about anything else.


Edited, Jul 31st 2014 5:24pm by Thayos

That's part of what design is.

The A and S ranks were designed from the ground-up to be party content. While it may seem arbitrary to you, SE clearly wants us forming parties and being a community out in the open world. That, too, is part of the hunt system's design.

Edited, Jul 31st 2014 5:27pm by Thayos

Actually, if hunt NMs were tackled by the amount of people they expected to tackle them, there would be no problem for each person to get full credit even if they were all unpartied. The only reason they have to party is because they apparently drastically underestimated the horde that would be chasing after these, and none of these mobs, even the S ranks, last long enough.

It's basically the same idea with FATEs, except for the fact that FATEs actually scale up in difficulty if there is a swarm of people doing them so that they don't tend to just die in 30 seconds beyond the first iteration, giving the soloers the chance to still get full credit. I mean, that's essentially what hunts are -- unmarked, unscaling FATE NMs. FATEs were presumably designed this way so that people could just jump in and get credit without having to organize a group for it, which is really the way hunts ought to be too. I've leveled every class at least part of the way on FATEs, almost always solo, and assuming I did not show up late to a FATE, I generally have not had significant problems ever receiving full credit from them, even from ones that had hefty crowds there (not necessarily to the extent of crowds that show up for hunts, but still big enough that I would notice the lag that resulted)

If they want us taking the time to organize proper parties and party play, they need to do it with content we can claim on our own, like with peisteskin maps. Like I said, with hunts just being glorified FATEs which people already used to treat as "jump in and go" content (with Odin being the only real exception, because he's actually tough enough most of the time to *warrant* having the ginormous crowd there), what we have now is a joke, what with things like people just going WHM and spamming Medica 2 over and over simply because that gets them the most enmity in the shortest amount of time, which is the sort of thing you need when hunt NMs die as quickly as they do.