This is in regards to my experience of hunts over the past year or two. Keep in mind I'm on the Behemoth server of the Primal data center, and depending on where you are you might have had a slightly different experience than mine. For more context I've also been at hunts for quite a while - I've personally spawned over 1000 S ranks, ran probably around 250 trains, and /shouted out hunts and FATEs in cities & popular areas to my server countless times in hopes of getting more people to them. I'm also apart of a group that spawns around 80%+ of all the S ranks on the data center. I've even conducted a number of various tests to see how to get more people to hunts. All of this has provided me a view on hunts that very few people see.
There has been a lot of ongoing drama in the hunt scene over the past year. Yes, I know drama in hunts isn't a new thing, but it's more about the degree of it and the core issues that have been causing it to grow that probably should be addressed. There is the normal "early pulling" type drama that I'm sure everyone is aware of, but I wanted to more so go into different things that most people don't really realize or think about.
Let's start with Xivhunt. If you are not aware, Xivhunt is a 3rd party program that reads the client's memory, checks if there is a hunt up in the area, and if so figures out where exactly that hunt is and instantly relays it to other people using it and one of the hunting Discords (Centurio Hunts) on Primal. Whether it's good or bad has been debated both ways for a long time, but I'll give you my opinion on why I think it's pretty bad.
In essence, Xivhunt sounds good - it's built to try and get the word out about a hunt to a number of people at once. One of the biggest issues however is who it relays to - a completely unmoderated source unlike LS's and other forms of communication often is. In fact, if you observe where all the consistent early/instant pullers and trolls have been coming from over the past year or more you will quickly realize that 90% of them come from both it and the Discord groups, where again there is no moderation. What often ends up happening, as a result, is that the vast majority of people who make it to the hunt are mainly just the same people who use said 3rd party apps, whereas everyone else in-game often doesn't make it in time, or way more often than not gets sniped from. The people who use it often end up controlling all the S ranks for themselves and said people almost never bother relaying hunts in-game at all especially because they just expect that Xivhunt will do all the relaying for them, which in turn causes mass sniping. Even worse this tool has caused certain well known early pullers to quite often be either the very first person, or one of the first, to the S ranks. Not to mention this 3rd party app has created an insane amount of drama in the S rank hunt scene and has divided the community.
If you are not aware 90% of the S ranks require you to actively go out and do something to spawn them, and you will often be at it for multiple hours until something spawns. These S ranks also more often than not don't spawn directly on top of you and you have to go find them. Well, another big issue with it is how it can often pick up and relay the exact location of an S rank the same second it spawns. This has caused a number of spawners to miss out on the S rank that they have spawned, and also often results in the spawner not being able to get the people they wanted to get the hunt in time. As you can imagine this has caused a ton of frustration and drama over the years.
I've even personally missed out on 100+ S ranks that I have spawned because of this. This is partly because whenever I spawn something I like to take a couple of mins in /shouting it out to different cities & popular areas, as do some others on Behemoth to help reduce all the sniping that constantly happens all the time. And yes I understand the risk of leaving and shouting for even just a couple mins, I still do it anyway, and how fast something gets picked up by Xivhunt determines how much shouting I can do. I would have easily missed out on way more than that had I not realized Xivhunt was a thing and what it causes. There have been several reported cases even of people who spawned something who just couldn't find the spawn in time because they didn't know what Xivhunt was and that people were notified on it.
On top of all that there is all the normal ToS related stuff it breaks too, how it gives you an edge over all other players, how PS4 players can't use it, and that sort of thing.
The good news is that Xivhunt has actually been terminated for around a month now and is no more. This has been one of the reasons why we have been able to get so many more people to S ranks on Behemoth as of late, and why you probably haven't seen much of any drama related to it which used to happen multiple times per day. The bad news is the Centurio Hunts Discord group is working on their own version of Xivhunt called FFXIV Sonar, ( https://discord.gg/K7y24Rr ) which will likely cause the same issues all over again and cause history to repeat itself. The Discord group is also now currently using a certain piece of 3rd party botting software, which I will avoid mentioning the name of so it doesn't get exposure, for all it's bot relays. ( https://i.imgur.com/QTWvE4s.png ) ( https://i.imgur.com/nwAPqFL.png ) The software in question being something against the ToS on a whole new level which also allows you to bot crafting, gathering, FATEs, hunts, relics, and quests among other things, and also allows you to teleport hack by clicking on the map where you want to instantly teleport to. ( https://i.imgur.com/00FTMsg.png ) A number of people on the Discord have tried getting others to use it so that they keep up their automated relays, though thankfully it costs money.
Now let's switch to cross world hunting in general and the hunting Discords. Right off the bat, I'm going to say there are too many people with cross-world hunting, and the issues caused by such a thing really shows...
As of right now on Behemoth we haven't had a consistent early puller/troll for over 9 months which is amazing. This of course hasn't always been the case, and there will obviously likely be a time in the future when one shows up again. A number of other servers on our data center are in the same position even. The problem is that we don't have to deal with just people on our own server, instead, we have to deal with people on every server in the data center. And thanks to cross world, Discord, and 3rd party apps it's way too easy for someone from 1 of the 8 servers to screw over and troll the entire data center. And again thanks to those things it's incredibly hard to not let known trolls hear about the hunt.
This over time has caused the formation of several different groups who actively try to work against people who use 3rd party apps such as Xivhunt and also those who try to hog all the hunts across the data center for their own group. Every server has at least one of these groups who often focus on trying to get as many people in-game to the hunts as possible, especially the people who normally wouldn't be able to make it to the hunt. Aswang, Faloop, Coeurl (1 of the 2 main big Discords actually) - you might have heard the names of some of these groups before. They often go out and try to spawn S ranks to try and get as many people from the server to it as possible.
The Centurio Hunts Discord group, the other main big Discord group who get 95%+ of their relays from bots and 3rd party software, obviously don't like this. And as you can imagine there has been back and forth drama in various forms going on between these groups for multiple years now.
There are some people on both sides who purposely early pull whenever they notice certain groups or certain people (often notorious early pullers) are on the way to the S rank. There has even been a thing going around of a number of people purposely "pulling on ping" or also known as pulling the hunt the second a 3rd party app picks it up, especially in attempts to get fewer people to use them. You will often see people in shout chat even calling out people from both of these groups for some of the stuff they do. There is even stalking that commonly happens where people with the 3rd party app will purposely watch where known spawners are and will follow them around in attempts to let the Centurio Discord group get the hunt and learn about it the second it spawns. You will even see people often calling out these groups as to how controlling they try to be - with Centurio and their growing use and push of more automated 3rd party detection apps and how they often claim they are "the hunting community", and with the other groups who often let the spawner decide what should happen with the S rank since they were the one who put in the effort. If one group gets the hunt but the other group doesn't get it then people will often resort to calling people at the hunt snipers, early pullers, Aswang, etc. Entitlement issues are everywhere really.
Centurio Hunts often says that they believe hunts should be for everyone. However, I want to bring up why that is an obvious impossibility, and also how their actions often cause the opposite to happen where hunts often just end up being for themselves.
For starters, the obvious point - even with perfect wide-reaching relays you're going to run into the area congesting, and more realistically someone is going to pull and kill it before it gets near that point. Unless we are talking about near expansion/update time or prime time for a Shadowbringers S rank that is actually properly relayed. Not to mention hardware limitations, people without SSDs who have way longer load times, A ranks not loading in, etc. Hunts physically can't be for everyone - not even close.
Also, the Discord group has a culture of pulling within 1 min after the first few people make it to the S rank, regardless of how many people are still on the way unless it's during dead hours. (first few people often also being "aetheryte campers", more on that later) Whenever Xivhunt existed there was simply not enough time to do in-game relays. Assuming a 3rd party app instantly or near instantly picks up an S rank the second it spawns (which actually happens a lot and the Discord is trying to push this to happen more often even) then the moment in-game relays truly start to go out is the moment the S rank gets pulled, or, more often actually in-game relays don't really go out at all. Not to mention when an S rank gets pulled relays typically stop, and I'm sure a number of you have even heard at least someone complaining "why did you relay something that was pulled, I wasted my time, I dropped my queue, bluh bluh". This goes back to the point of the main people getting to these hunts are just these 3rd party app users and Discord people, even though "hunts should be for everyone".
In fact, there have been several cases of me afking online throughout a day, looking at the Discord, noticing 3-5 S ranks have spawned on Behemoth, and seeing that essentially none of them have been relayed to any LS's or the city I was in. More often than not the only relays I will see in-game are either from a Centurio Hunts moderator who happens to be in one of my LS's, or a late relay that happened within 1 min of it dying which is essentially useless. There has also been plenty that was just not relayed at all. Even trains often followed the same course. And for more context, I have 8 LS's and 8 CWLS's, 6 of the CWLS are Behemoth only people, and some of the LS's have the most active Behemoth hunters in them. These cases however have happened while Xivhunt was a thing.
Now that Xivhunt is dead we have been pushing for more and more in-game relays on Behemoth, especially since now we actually have time to do so. Here are the results of some of the tests that I did a while ago with comparison to other servers:
Important notes: The times are in EST, with primetime being 8:00-11:00PM, keep this in mind. Also, this is based on the amount of people in the area based on player search, a more realistic representation of how many people were at the hunt is if you subtract roughly 10 to 20 from these results. The player searches were executed the same second the S rank died. The non-Behemoth server S ranks were relays by the Discord community, while the Behemoth ones were with me trying to do a bunch of in-game relays.
Behe Forgiven Pedantry (ShB) 2020-06-25 3:33PM 160 people Note: 2 min late in-game relays Behe Nuny (ARR) 2020-06-25 9:48PM 137 people Levi Tarchia (ShB) 2020-06-26 2:03PM 102 people Behe Safat (ARR) 2020-06-26 2:11PM 85 people Behe Wulgaru (ARR) 2020-06-26 4:32PM 70 people Behe Orghana (SB) 2020-06-26 4:55PM 100 people Lamia Ixtab (ShB) 2020-06-26 5:10PM 93 people Famf Tarchia (ShB) 2020-06-26 5:50PM 124 people Behe Laideronnette (ARR) 2020-06-26 7:13PM 93 people Behe Garlok (ARR) 2020-06-26 8:08PM 96 people Ultros Forgiven Pedantry (ShB) 2020-06-26 9:23PM 128 people Behe Lampa (ARR) 2020-06-26 10:41PM 96 people Levi Theda (ARR) 2020-06-27 11:09PM 25 people Excal Brontes (ARR) 2020-06-27 11:38PM 54 people Lamia Gunitt (ShB) 2020-06-27 12:21AM 130 people Famf Lampa (ARR) 2020-06-27 12:27AM 54 people Excal Nuny (ARR) 2020-06-27 1:41AM 108 people Note: As an experiment here I did a bunch of in-game relays on another server Levi Gunitt (ShB) 2020-06-27 3:08AM 67 people
The next day on Behemoth we had a Mindflayer spawn during prime time in South Shroud where we had 177 people in the area for it. ( https://i.imgur.com/6Imy0BU.png ) This was all a while back ago too, and since then we have been pushing for in-game relays even more.
More recently on 2020-07-07 10:17PM we had roughly 325 people for the Il Mheg S rank, more than tripling the average turn out that the Discord community manages to pull off. I say roughly because player search only works for up to 200 players unless you do multiple filtered searches, also we knew we had 250+ players there, and the area congested. (which is known to happen at the 300 player mark) After the hunt died and people started porting out there was a sudden 10-15 people who couldn't get in all shouting for inv as the area congestion went away.
The Discord community average seems to be around just 20-50 for ARR/HW/SB S ranks and just 110 for SHB. Again keep in mind those are numbers from player search for the entire area, as in 10-35 for ARR/HW/SB and 90 for ShB is likely more accurate. I've even seen a number of ShB S ranks where there were a little over 100 people at it and only around 25 people from the server itself. This just goes back to show how little care for relaying people have, especially when a bot can just do it for them, even if said bot is way less effective than what they could do themselves at times. I've even observed a number of times on the Centurio Discord whenever their relay bot stops working that relays all together often stop on the Discord itself. Despite having so many people on there tons of hunts end up going un-relayed because people have become so conditioned to not bother relaying at all thanks to 3rd party apps. In such cases, the vast majority of relays on there are often just copy/pastes from the Coeurl Discord who don't rely on such things.
How is Behemoth getting so many more people to hunts? We try to actually do in-game relays, especially through the combo use of both LS's and shouts, that's how. Also, it's worth noting in those prior tests I was the only one going around shouting out in-game relays. A single person on a single world getting 2x to up to on special cases 10x more people to hunts and even FATEs than the Discord community could pull off. And no this isn't because of server population imbalance, as proven by my experiments with doing in-game relays on other servers and getting similar results to the Behemoth ones. Also how when we don't bother doing in-game relays the average amount of people who show up plummets all the way down to the Discord average. On a side note, it's kind of interesting how now people from the Discord community are starting to blame Behemoth as a whole for early pulling hunts on Behemoth because we get so many people to them that they die so fast. Also, this really makes you realize how small the Discord community is in comparison to how many hunters are out there. I'd argue 5% or less of people are actually apart of it (especially in terms of just people who are at least somewhat active; the vast majority of people on there have long since moved past hunting or FFXIV itself) which is probably a pretty realistic number honestly when you think about it.
Think if multiple people were doing this on Behemoth. (as we have been starting to do) Think if people were doing this on all 8 servers in the data center instead of 1. All of a sudden you would theoretically start congesting (300 player limit) ARR S rank zones, though realistically thanks to server transfer times and early pullers this wouldn't actually be the case. Or who knows how many people for ShB S ranks, possibly 500 to 1000 people theoretically.
It honestly might make you wonder why does cross-world hunting even exist with the overabundance of people we have? That even groups are forming that are developing and using 3rd party applications in attempts to control hunts for themselves. That this isn't even near update or expansion time too, where the numbers will easily go up way more. And that there has also been talk about possibly taking down the barrier between the different data centers. There are just too many people.
There is actually an absolute ton of people out there who don't want to have to use 3rd party apps like Discord to do something they should be able to do purely in-game. Especially with all the drama that seems to have a tendency of circling in such places, and also how inconvenient it is to use 3rd party apps. This is one of the reasons why in-game relays are so important.
I also want to take a moment to clear up what the Coeurl Discord group often does. A few people have gone around accusing Coeurl of early pulling, sniping, and controlling hunts for themselves. The fact is this really is in truth the opposite case from reality. The Coeurl group has a highly active spawn and relay team who often try to get as many people in-game (especially from the server itself) to the hunt as possible, especially the people who often don't make it to the hunts who often get sniped by controlling 3rd party app users, along with other spawners in the group who all try to work together as a team, before doing a public Discord release. This unfortunately sometimes means that the hunt will get pulled or killed before a lot of the Discord community can get to the hunt. You have to again keep in mind that there is an overabundance of hunters out there and hunts physically can't be for everyone, not even close, and as a result missing out on some is actually quite a natural thing. If you are not missing out on a fair amount of hunts then you are likely denying others from getting to the hunts in the process, and are to some degree in a sense being greedy and controlling.
To be honest, even though I don't believe it's one of the group's core focuses, unlike Centurio, the Coeurl Discord group actually make hunts available for everyone to a greater degree than Centurio Hunts does. They even often get more people to S ranks despite being a smaller group. They put in an immense amount of effort to spawn hunts, relay them, try to avoid letting the trolls hear about them too quickly, among other things. They even have had a SS minion protection team formed with how people were griefing the minions to prevent the SS rank from spawning. They even go around trying to educate people about the different aspects of hunts, what you can do to get more people to the hunts, and try to stick up for the hunt community in general. They are not trying to snipe hunts, instead, they are actively actually sharing them, preventing 3rd party app users from controlling them all for themselves, and often manage to get way more people to hunts as a result.
Speaking of too many people look at trains. Whenever people in-game are properly relayed that a train is happening the A rank hunt vanishes for 1/2 the people, the mechanics don't even hit everyone, people with slower machines especially without SSDs often arrive at the first A rank of each area when the A rank is at 25% health or already dead, and a number of people generally complain. A large number of people have stopped doing trains because of these things or enjoy them way less as a result. A ranks are clearly not designed around 100+ people flying in and killing it in 30-45 seconds before it can even do all its abilities. (Shadowbringers S ranks even now often don't have a chance to use all of their abilities) And people often just abuse trains as a brain dead easy way to cap on tomestones while watching Netflix or something while not even really caring about what they are doing.
There is also a ton of gatekeeping and hate in regards to killing A ranks outside of trains, especially from the Discord community which is known for trains. On Behemoth we often still kill some A ranks outside of trains. Every now and then though someone in shout chat, often wanderers, will start going crazy at everyone killing the A rank and will make it their mission to try to ruin everyone's fun. People will often come in and call you a bunch of criminals, snipers, etc. for doing so. Some even threaten to try and get you blacklisted and try to publically shame you on the Discord community. And a number of people have even also purposely waited for the A rank to get low, join in, and purposely reset the hunt on everyone after they have been at it for several minutes. It's honestly sad this happens as a lot of people enjoy going out with just a single group or 2 and killing an A rank for fun. A little while back even someone made the comment after killing Mudman with a single group that it was the most fun they had in this game yet. I've even personally done a fun solo challenge where I solod 5 out of the 12 ShB A ranks as a DRG, and I'm now working on the 6th - the other 6 being impossible. ( https://i.imgur.com/jHj5hB3.png ) ( https://i.imgur.com/tyQe6wX.png )
Slightly off-topic but if Square Enix really wants people to kill A ranks outside of trains more, then they should reduce their health by 33-50% really. Back around launch they were being killed left and right because there was often like 100 people in the zone, the hunts were also fresh and people wanted to check them out, and they died pretty quickly due to this. Now with there being way fewer people in each zone it takes way longer to kill these A ranks, even with everyone now being level 80 and geared out. Even if you get a full group of people it can often still take like 10 mins to kill it.
On top of that, A ranks should probably have a 2-6 hour respawn timer instead of 4-6 so there is more opportunity to kill them before a train starts. Especially as people often start scouting for a train around 30 mins before cap and that's often when the drama starts. I personally just kind of miss the time where you or someone else would see an A rank out in the world, call it out, and you'd work together to kill it for fun. It still happens from time to time on Behemoth, but not that much. Instead, it feels like hunts are way less about actual hunting, and the fun is actively getting optimized out of them on several different aspects. I figured I'd also mention that even trains now are partly being automatically scouted by 3rd party apps. Maybe even make A ranks respawn quicker so that they can be both for trains and for people who want to go out and kill a couple for fun so that we have the best of both worlds. Then maybe even more people without SSDs would be able to participate in hunts properly who currently can't.
Now let's switch over to the types of reoccurring drama and their influences. I have already gone over several things above in regard to this so I won't mention those again.
Let's start with achievements. If you want all of the achievements, especially the ones with mount rewards, you are essentially forced into doing cross world hunting and need to be pretty competitive. For reference, I've been hunting extremely actively for almost 2 years now, with minimal cross-world hunting outside of rushing to get the Shadowbringers mount achievement near launch when there were 3 instances for each area, and I'm just now at the 1/2 way mark for the final 10k A rank and 5k S rank achievement. That is honestly pretty insane, and I know I have a lot of hunt connections that the vast majority of people don't have.
You can also reference how each ShB S rank spawns roughly every 115 hours or around 1.46 times per week. That's 8.76 ShB S ranks per week for each server. If you are a very active hunter and are on for 40% of the time, (around 10 hours per day) then that is 3.5 ShB S ranks per week. Honestly, everyone misses out on S ranks every now and then even while online, especially late calls/snipes, so that is probably more realistically 2.5-3 ShB S ranks per week. Let's say you get 3 ShB S ranks per week. That's still 333.3 weeks to get enough ShB S ranks for the mount or almost 6 1/2 years of active hunting. Most people would probably get less than that per week, and also no doubt would take breaks from the game, and are therefore probably looking at around 10+ years of hunting to get it. That is completely insane and something I realized early on in ShB which made me start doing cross-world hunting to rush it before 3 instances per area went away.
These achievements have a number of people in total greed mode and have sparked a ton of drama especially in the forms of entitlement. If anyone remembers the first 1/2 a year of ShB it was honestly rather a warzone with how much drama there was going on based on greed, entitlement, and not to mention how many people there were. Even to this day a year later the same stuff happens.
There are also people known as "aetheryte campers" who have again caused a bunch of drama. Aetheryte campers often just sit at the world transfer aetheryte for hours on end, wait for an S rank to ping on their 3rd party app, and then immediately transfer worlds and rush over to it as fast as they can. These people are notorious for early pulling or joining in on early pulls, often act very entitled whenever they don't get to the hunt on time, and a number of people are known to cause drama with them over the fact that they pretty much never help spawn stuff, expect everything to be handed to them, and deny others from getting to the hunts especially the people who normally wouldn't be able to get to it. Pretty much every single consistent early puller/troll follows under this category. It's also surprising that a few people who got the final 5k S rank achievement ages ago continue to do the above regardless, including the most infamous early puller on Primal.
There is also so much drama in hunts that there are actually a surprising number of people who partly hunt for that drama and the entertainment and salt they can get out of people. A number of whom who again of course early pull on purpose to troll among doing other stuff.
Entitlement. "The hunt was relayed to me and therefore I deserve it and if you pull before I get there then you are all early pullers regardless of how many people are at the hunt". "Hunts belong to everyone". "___ group was just relayed, how is it already dead you snipers?" - even if again tons of people got it. "How dare you kill A ranks outside of a train". "How dare you early pull a hunt you spawned". People calling themselves "The Hunt <insert important title here>" like it's their job/occupation. You get the point, and again a number of people actually purposely troll others who are known to constantly act this way. And to be fair I'd argue pretty much everyone is guilty of at least a little bit of this, especially since the way hunts are currently designed can easily cause frustration. Some people more than others though, especially those who wish to try and control hunts.
Witch-hunting. People who go out of their way to try and get others to hate a person or certain group because they don't like their way of hunting. And yes, there are multiple ways of hunting, people hunt in different ways and enjoy different things, and that is okay really. People often try to stir up drama against others on Discord and try to get them blacklisted. Speaking of which, Discord is often being used as a means to harass others and make them feel shitty as you can't get banned from FFXIV for stuff you do on there. There is even a pinned message on the Centurio Discord pointing out a person that a number of the higher-ups in the Discord don't like. Often when you speak out against these groups while trying to express a different opinion you get harassed, censored, demoted, banned, and get called an "Aswang". If you don't follow one of the groups made up hunt politics and rules then you are likely to get targetted by them.
Honestly personally at times I just want to escape the whole Discord side of hunts due to all the drama on there, but it's pretty hard to when they are so controlling of hunts and how things should and shouldn't be done. This is where some people even spawn S ranks or scout a few A ranks, get a bunch of buddies there to kill it for fun, and kill them without certain groups knowing. The problem is if you get caught doing this especially on a regular basis the Discord community will be sure to witch hunt you because they think all hunts belong to them. Even if at the end of the day you're just trying to have fun, or blow off some steam, and not do anything malicious. Honestly, if you just want to hunt for fun and not have to deal with drama I'd highly recommend staying away from the Discord community.
Targetting and griefing servers you don't particularly like. Stuff in regards to this seems to happen on a fairly regular basis. People often make comments on how shitty X server is, how their own server is the superior server, and going out and purposely griefing hunts because of what server it is on. The Leviathan, Famfrit, and Ultros servers seem to often be involved in this. Sometimes this even includes purposely making a SS minion withdraw so a SS rank fails to spawn, which has actually been happening a ton.
Early pulling. As if this doesn't get mentioned enough. This is honestly mainly just an issue due to the crazy amount of people there are in hunts thanks to cross world hunting existing, and also because of the health totals of the hunts, especially level 50-70 ones. Even level 80 ones are often dying in 1 min or less once pulled. Compare world FATE bosses with hunts - world FATEs rarely ever have people complaining about early pulls unless it's one of the world FATEs where the level sync is out of wack that it dies extremely fast - hmmm sound familiar to hunts?
Wanderers. To this day people still complain about wanderers all the time. More so when they deny people from being able to do something whether it be S ranks or getting to hunts fast enough on trains, which happens fairly regularly. As if the Ishgard Firmament release wasn't super obvious enough of this being an ongoing issue. It's also worth noting that wanderers have a higher tendency to early pull because it's not their own server, and therefore they have way less accountability for their actions. When said people are on their own server you will often notice a strange higher degree of patience with them, and some even go out of their way to reset the hunt if it gets early pulled. (which I've been told numerous times you can get banned for doing if someone reports you for it)
Wanderers running trains. This was actually a huge drama fest a month ago which caused several people to take a break from hunting and form truces. Why does this cause drama? It usually comes down to a few different things. For one servers often have their own dedicated people to organizing and running trains. If a wanderer comes and runs a train while said people are trying to set up a train they naturally step on each other's toes and to some extent waste each other's time. Also, wanderers can't use normal LS's to relay their train and are notoriously known for their complete lack of relays to the actual server the train is being run on. There have been way too many instances where I have seen wanderers run trains on Behemoth where only 10-30% of the train were people from Behemoth. ( https://i.imgur.com/PLD9yZ4.png ) ( https://i.imgur.com/VOR4oOH.png ) And for comparison when one of the usual conductors from Behemoth runs a train it's often 60-80%. Tons of people often miss out when this happens, and people tend to get annoyed when they later find out that a train ran on their server without them knowing it.
Fun fact this is where the "Did the president of Behemoth authorize that?" meme was born a year ago because a certain wanderer kept running trains on Behemoth (and other servers) while purposely not relaying people on there. During one of their trains they shouted they didn't give a ____ if Behemoth knew about their trains or not, which obviously made a ton of people even more outraged than they already were at both them and the Centurio Discord (which they were one of the mods of) who defended them for saying that, especially while saying things like it's not the conductor's job to relay their train. Which always made me annoyed because how are people supposed to even know about the train then if the conductor doesn't even relay it? There is even often a 5 min wait period before the train starts while people are gathering that you could use to shout out every city on the server.
Discord wars. There are 2 different big hunt Discord groups on Primal with a lot of conflicting opinions on how hunts should and shouldn't be done. There is a ton of drama as a result, especially from certain higher-ups, and you will often see people trying to fire shots at the opposite group. If you ever do something that is perceived as "taking a side" then you will likely be targeted by the opposing side.
Lastly, I figured I'd randomly mention why I pretty much never cross-world hunt. It's because sometimes me being there would result in denying someone else from that world being there instead, and I'd rather not be greedy. This is especially true whenever a consistent early puller/troll shows up who often pull based on the number of people there, and try to pull as close to the "threshold of no return" as possible. In other words, when everyone else will just say screw it and join in on the early pull with them, go ham, and won't bother resetting the hunt. Smart early pullers who want a hunt killed as fast as possible actually wait for that point instead of outright instant pulling. Whenever I did cross-world hunting for my Shadowbringers mount I always tried to shout out a few different cities before heading to it, especially to help combat the ongoing sniping issues and to help offset me being there.
That should cover pretty much every issue that hunts currently have. Hopefully, the developers realize these things and address them accordingly so that hunts can become more enjoyable for everyone. And honestly to be fair now that Xivhunt is gone the drama has gone way down with it, not saying there are not still a dozen other issues though. However, people are worried that FFXIV Sonar is going to cause all of these issues all over again, assuming the program actually completes and people actually use it. Also sorry if I rambled on about the Centurio Discord a bit much there. I'm in no way saying that they are a bad group, there is plenty good they do too, but I will say they have a number of issues they really need to address, with some being caused by their group's growth and dependency on 3rd party software. Anyway sorry for the long post, I just wanted to be as thorough as possible so that people hopefully get the full picture. And for that reason no you're not getting a TLDR from me.
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There has been a lot of ongoing drama in the hunt scene over the past year. Yes, I know drama in hunts isn't a new thing, but it's more about the degree of it and the core issues that have been causing it to grow that probably should be addressed. There is the normal "early pulling" type drama that I'm sure everyone is aware of, but I wanted to more so go into different things that most people don't really realize or think about.
Let's start with Xivhunt. If you are not aware, Xivhunt is a 3rd party program that reads the client's memory, checks if there is a hunt up in the area, and if so figures out where exactly that hunt is and instantly relays it to other people using it and one of the hunting Discords (Centurio Hunts) on Primal. Whether it's good or bad has been debated both ways for a long time, but I'll give you my opinion on why I think it's pretty bad.
In essence, Xivhunt sounds good - it's built to try and get the word out about a hunt to a number of people at once. One of the biggest issues however is who it relays to - a completely unmoderated source unlike LS's and other forms of communication often is. In fact, if you observe where all the consistent early/instant pullers and trolls have been coming from over the past year or more you will quickly realize that 90% of them come from both it and the Discord groups, where again there is no moderation. What often ends up happening, as a result, is that the vast majority of people who make it to the hunt are mainly just the same people who use said 3rd party apps, whereas everyone else in-game often doesn't make it in time, or way more often than not gets sniped from. The people who use it often end up controlling all the S ranks for themselves and said people almost never bother relaying hunts in-game at all especially because they just expect that Xivhunt will do all the relaying for them, which in turn causes mass sniping. Even worse this tool has caused certain well known early pullers to quite often be either the very first person, or one of the first, to the S ranks. Not to mention this 3rd party app has created an insane amount of drama in the S rank hunt scene and has divided the community.
If you are not aware 90% of the S ranks require you to actively go out and do something to spawn them, and you will often be at it for multiple hours until something spawns. These S ranks also more often than not don't spawn directly on top of you and you have to go find them. Well, another big issue with it is how it can often pick up and relay the exact location of an S rank the same second it spawns. This has caused a number of spawners to miss out on the S rank that they have spawned, and also often results in the spawner not being able to get the people they wanted to get the hunt in time. As you can imagine this has caused a ton of frustration and drama over the years.
I've even personally missed out on 100+ S ranks that I have spawned because of this. This is partly because whenever I spawn something I like to take a couple of mins in /shouting it out to different cities & popular areas, as do some others on Behemoth to help reduce all the sniping that constantly happens all the time. And yes I understand the risk of leaving and shouting for even just a couple mins, I still do it anyway, and how fast something gets picked up by Xivhunt determines how much shouting I can do. I would have easily missed out on way more than that had I not realized Xivhunt was a thing and what it causes. There have been several reported cases even of people who spawned something who just couldn't find the spawn in time because they didn't know what Xivhunt was and that people were notified on it.
On top of all that there is all the normal ToS related stuff it breaks too, how it gives you an edge over all other players, how PS4 players can't use it, and that sort of thing.
The good news is that Xivhunt has actually been terminated for around a month now and is no more. This has been one of the reasons why we have been able to get so many more people to S ranks on Behemoth as of late, and why you probably haven't seen much of any drama related to it which used to happen multiple times per day. The bad news is the Centurio Hunts Discord group is working on their own version of Xivhunt called FFXIV Sonar, ( https://discord.gg/K7y24Rr ) which will likely cause the same issues all over again and cause history to repeat itself. The Discord group is also now currently using a certain piece of 3rd party botting software, which I will avoid mentioning the name of so it doesn't get exposure, for all it's bot relays. ( https://i.imgur.com/QTWvE4s.png ) ( https://i.imgur.com/nwAPqFL.png ) The software in question being something against the ToS on a whole new level which also allows you to bot crafting, gathering, FATEs, hunts, relics, and quests among other things, and also allows you to teleport hack by clicking on the map where you want to instantly teleport to. ( https://i.imgur.com/00FTMsg.png ) A number of people on the Discord have tried getting others to use it so that they keep up their automated relays, though thankfully it costs money.
Now let's switch to cross world hunting in general and the hunting Discords. Right off the bat, I'm going to say there are too many people with cross-world hunting, and the issues caused by such a thing really shows...
As of right now on Behemoth we haven't had a consistent early puller/troll for over 9 months which is amazing. This of course hasn't always been the case, and there will obviously likely be a time in the future when one shows up again. A number of other servers on our data center are in the same position even. The problem is that we don't have to deal with just people on our own server, instead, we have to deal with people on every server in the data center. And thanks to cross world, Discord, and 3rd party apps it's way too easy for someone from 1 of the 8 servers to screw over and troll the entire data center. And again thanks to those things it's incredibly hard to not let known trolls hear about the hunt.
This over time has caused the formation of several different groups who actively try to work against people who use 3rd party apps such as Xivhunt and also those who try to hog all the hunts across the data center for their own group. Every server has at least one of these groups who often focus on trying to get as many people in-game to the hunts as possible, especially the people who normally wouldn't be able to make it to the hunt. Aswang, Faloop, Coeurl (1 of the 2 main big Discords actually) - you might have heard the names of some of these groups before. They often go out and try to spawn S ranks to try and get as many people from the server to it as possible.
The Centurio Hunts Discord group, the other main big Discord group who get 95%+ of their relays from bots and 3rd party software, obviously don't like this. And as you can imagine there has been back and forth drama in various forms going on between these groups for multiple years now.
There are some people on both sides who purposely early pull whenever they notice certain groups or certain people (often notorious early pullers) are on the way to the S rank. There has even been a thing going around of a number of people purposely "pulling on ping" or also known as pulling the hunt the second a 3rd party app picks it up, especially in attempts to get fewer people to use them. You will often see people in shout chat even calling out people from both of these groups for some of the stuff they do. There is even stalking that commonly happens where people with the 3rd party app will purposely watch where known spawners are and will follow them around in attempts to let the Centurio Discord group get the hunt and learn about it the second it spawns. You will even see people often calling out these groups as to how controlling they try to be - with Centurio and their growing use and push of more automated 3rd party detection apps and how they often claim they are "the hunting community", and with the other groups who often let the spawner decide what should happen with the S rank since they were the one who put in the effort. If one group gets the hunt but the other group doesn't get it then people will often resort to calling people at the hunt snipers, early pullers, Aswang, etc. Entitlement issues are everywhere really.
Centurio Hunts often says that they believe hunts should be for everyone. However, I want to bring up why that is an obvious impossibility, and also how their actions often cause the opposite to happen where hunts often just end up being for themselves.
For starters, the obvious point - even with perfect wide-reaching relays you're going to run into the area congesting, and more realistically someone is going to pull and kill it before it gets near that point. Unless we are talking about near expansion/update time or prime time for a Shadowbringers S rank that is actually properly relayed. Not to mention hardware limitations, people without SSDs who have way longer load times, A ranks not loading in, etc. Hunts physically can't be for everyone - not even close.
Also, the Discord group has a culture of pulling within 1 min after the first few people make it to the S rank, regardless of how many people are still on the way unless it's during dead hours. (first few people often also being "aetheryte campers", more on that later) Whenever Xivhunt existed there was simply not enough time to do in-game relays. Assuming a 3rd party app instantly or near instantly picks up an S rank the second it spawns (which actually happens a lot and the Discord is trying to push this to happen more often even) then the moment in-game relays truly start to go out is the moment the S rank gets pulled, or, more often actually in-game relays don't really go out at all. Not to mention when an S rank gets pulled relays typically stop, and I'm sure a number of you have even heard at least someone complaining "why did you relay something that was pulled, I wasted my time, I dropped my queue, bluh bluh". This goes back to the point of the main people getting to these hunts are just these 3rd party app users and Discord people, even though "hunts should be for everyone".
In fact, there have been several cases of me afking online throughout a day, looking at the Discord, noticing 3-5 S ranks have spawned on Behemoth, and seeing that essentially none of them have been relayed to any LS's or the city I was in. More often than not the only relays I will see in-game are either from a Centurio Hunts moderator who happens to be in one of my LS's, or a late relay that happened within 1 min of it dying which is essentially useless. There has also been plenty that was just not relayed at all. Even trains often followed the same course. And for more context, I have 8 LS's and 8 CWLS's, 6 of the CWLS are Behemoth only people, and some of the LS's have the most active Behemoth hunters in them. These cases however have happened while Xivhunt was a thing.
Now that Xivhunt is dead we have been pushing for more and more in-game relays on Behemoth, especially since now we actually have time to do so. Here are the results of some of the tests that I did a while ago with comparison to other servers:
Important notes: The times are in EST, with primetime being 8:00-11:00PM, keep this in mind. Also, this is based on the amount of people in the area based on player search, a more realistic representation of how many people were at the hunt is if you subtract roughly 10 to 20 from these results. The player searches were executed the same second the S rank died. The non-Behemoth server S ranks were relays by the Discord community, while the Behemoth ones were with me trying to do a bunch of in-game relays.
Behe Forgiven Pedantry (ShB) 2020-06-25 3:33PM 160 people Note: 2 min late in-game relays Behe Nuny (ARR) 2020-06-25 9:48PM 137 people Levi Tarchia (ShB) 2020-06-26 2:03PM 102 people Behe Safat (ARR) 2020-06-26 2:11PM 85 people Behe Wulgaru (ARR) 2020-06-26 4:32PM 70 people Behe Orghana (SB) 2020-06-26 4:55PM 100 people Lamia Ixtab (ShB) 2020-06-26 5:10PM 93 people Famf Tarchia (ShB) 2020-06-26 5:50PM 124 people Behe Laideronnette (ARR) 2020-06-26 7:13PM 93 people Behe Garlok (ARR) 2020-06-26 8:08PM 96 people Ultros Forgiven Pedantry (ShB) 2020-06-26 9:23PM 128 people Behe Lampa (ARR) 2020-06-26 10:41PM 96 people Levi Theda (ARR) 2020-06-27 11:09PM 25 people Excal Brontes (ARR) 2020-06-27 11:38PM 54 people Lamia Gunitt (ShB) 2020-06-27 12:21AM 130 people Famf Lampa (ARR) 2020-06-27 12:27AM 54 people Excal Nuny (ARR) 2020-06-27 1:41AM 108 people Note: As an experiment here I did a bunch of in-game relays on another server Levi Gunitt (ShB) 2020-06-27 3:08AM 67 people
The next day on Behemoth we had a Mindflayer spawn during prime time in South Shroud where we had 177 people in the area for it. ( https://i.imgur.com/6Imy0BU.png ) This was all a while back ago too, and since then we have been pushing for in-game relays even more.
More recently on 2020-07-07 10:17PM we had roughly 325 people for the Il Mheg S rank, more than tripling the average turn out that the Discord community manages to pull off. I say roughly because player search only works for up to 200 players unless you do multiple filtered searches, also we knew we had 250+ players there, and the area congested. (which is known to happen at the 300 player mark) After the hunt died and people started porting out there was a sudden 10-15 people who couldn't get in all shouting for inv as the area congestion went away.
The Discord community average seems to be around just 20-50 for ARR/HW/SB S ranks and just 110 for SHB. Again keep in mind those are numbers from player search for the entire area, as in 10-35 for ARR/HW/SB and 90 for ShB is likely more accurate. I've even seen a number of ShB S ranks where there were a little over 100 people at it and only around 25 people from the server itself. This just goes back to show how little care for relaying people have, especially when a bot can just do it for them, even if said bot is way less effective than what they could do themselves at times. I've even observed a number of times on the Centurio Discord whenever their relay bot stops working that relays all together often stop on the Discord itself. Despite having so many people on there tons of hunts end up going un-relayed because people have become so conditioned to not bother relaying at all thanks to 3rd party apps. In such cases, the vast majority of relays on there are often just copy/pastes from the Coeurl Discord who don't rely on such things.
How is Behemoth getting so many more people to hunts? We try to actually do in-game relays, especially through the combo use of both LS's and shouts, that's how. Also, it's worth noting in those prior tests I was the only one going around shouting out in-game relays. A single person on a single world getting 2x to up to on special cases 10x more people to hunts and even FATEs than the Discord community could pull off. And no this isn't because of server population imbalance, as proven by my experiments with doing in-game relays on other servers and getting similar results to the Behemoth ones. Also how when we don't bother doing in-game relays the average amount of people who show up plummets all the way down to the Discord average. On a side note, it's kind of interesting how now people from the Discord community are starting to blame Behemoth as a whole for early pulling hunts on Behemoth because we get so many people to them that they die so fast. Also, this really makes you realize how small the Discord community is in comparison to how many hunters are out there. I'd argue 5% or less of people are actually apart of it (especially in terms of just people who are at least somewhat active; the vast majority of people on there have long since moved past hunting or FFXIV itself) which is probably a pretty realistic number honestly when you think about it.
Think if multiple people were doing this on Behemoth. (as we have been starting to do) Think if people were doing this on all 8 servers in the data center instead of 1. All of a sudden you would theoretically start congesting (300 player limit) ARR S rank zones, though realistically thanks to server transfer times and early pullers this wouldn't actually be the case. Or who knows how many people for ShB S ranks, possibly 500 to 1000 people theoretically.
It honestly might make you wonder why does cross-world hunting even exist with the overabundance of people we have? That even groups are forming that are developing and using 3rd party applications in attempts to control hunts for themselves. That this isn't even near update or expansion time too, where the numbers will easily go up way more. And that there has also been talk about possibly taking down the barrier between the different data centers. There are just too many people.
There is actually an absolute ton of people out there who don't want to have to use 3rd party apps like Discord to do something they should be able to do purely in-game. Especially with all the drama that seems to have a tendency of circling in such places, and also how inconvenient it is to use 3rd party apps. This is one of the reasons why in-game relays are so important.
I also want to take a moment to clear up what the Coeurl Discord group often does. A few people have gone around accusing Coeurl of early pulling, sniping, and controlling hunts for themselves. The fact is this really is in truth the opposite case from reality. The Coeurl group has a highly active spawn and relay team who often try to get as many people in-game (especially from the server itself) to the hunt as possible, especially the people who often don't make it to the hunts who often get sniped by controlling 3rd party app users, along with other spawners in the group who all try to work together as a team, before doing a public Discord release. This unfortunately sometimes means that the hunt will get pulled or killed before a lot of the Discord community can get to the hunt. You have to again keep in mind that there is an overabundance of hunters out there and hunts physically can't be for everyone, not even close, and as a result missing out on some is actually quite a natural thing. If you are not missing out on a fair amount of hunts then you are likely denying others from getting to the hunts in the process, and are to some degree in a sense being greedy and controlling.
To be honest, even though I don't believe it's one of the group's core focuses, unlike Centurio, the Coeurl Discord group actually make hunts available for everyone to a greater degree than Centurio Hunts does. They even often get more people to S ranks despite being a smaller group. They put in an immense amount of effort to spawn hunts, relay them, try to avoid letting the trolls hear about them too quickly, among other things. They even have had a SS minion protection team formed with how people were griefing the minions to prevent the SS rank from spawning. They even go around trying to educate people about the different aspects of hunts, what you can do to get more people to the hunts, and try to stick up for the hunt community in general. They are not trying to snipe hunts, instead, they are actively actually sharing them, preventing 3rd party app users from controlling them all for themselves, and often manage to get way more people to hunts as a result.
Speaking of too many people look at trains. Whenever people in-game are properly relayed that a train is happening the A rank hunt vanishes for 1/2 the people, the mechanics don't even hit everyone, people with slower machines especially without SSDs often arrive at the first A rank of each area when the A rank is at 25% health or already dead, and a number of people generally complain. A large number of people have stopped doing trains because of these things or enjoy them way less as a result. A ranks are clearly not designed around 100+ people flying in and killing it in 30-45 seconds before it can even do all its abilities. (Shadowbringers S ranks even now often don't have a chance to use all of their abilities) And people often just abuse trains as a brain dead easy way to cap on tomestones while watching Netflix or something while not even really caring about what they are doing.
There is also a ton of gatekeeping and hate in regards to killing A ranks outside of trains, especially from the Discord community which is known for trains. On Behemoth we often still kill some A ranks outside of trains. Every now and then though someone in shout chat, often wanderers, will start going crazy at everyone killing the A rank and will make it their mission to try to ruin everyone's fun. People will often come in and call you a bunch of criminals, snipers, etc. for doing so. Some even threaten to try and get you blacklisted and try to publically shame you on the Discord community. And a number of people have even also purposely waited for the A rank to get low, join in, and purposely reset the hunt on everyone after they have been at it for several minutes. It's honestly sad this happens as a lot of people enjoy going out with just a single group or 2 and killing an A rank for fun. A little while back even someone made the comment after killing Mudman with a single group that it was the most fun they had in this game yet. I've even personally done a fun solo challenge where I solod 5 out of the 12 ShB A ranks as a DRG, and I'm now working on the 6th - the other 6 being impossible. ( https://i.imgur.com/jHj5hB3.png ) ( https://i.imgur.com/tyQe6wX.png )
Slightly off-topic but if Square Enix really wants people to kill A ranks outside of trains more, then they should reduce their health by 33-50% really. Back around launch they were being killed left and right because there was often like 100 people in the zone, the hunts were also fresh and people wanted to check them out, and they died pretty quickly due to this. Now with there being way fewer people in each zone it takes way longer to kill these A ranks, even with everyone now being level 80 and geared out. Even if you get a full group of people it can often still take like 10 mins to kill it.
On top of that, A ranks should probably have a 2-6 hour respawn timer instead of 4-6 so there is more opportunity to kill them before a train starts. Especially as people often start scouting for a train around 30 mins before cap and that's often when the drama starts. I personally just kind of miss the time where you or someone else would see an A rank out in the world, call it out, and you'd work together to kill it for fun. It still happens from time to time on Behemoth, but not that much. Instead, it feels like hunts are way less about actual hunting, and the fun is actively getting optimized out of them on several different aspects. I figured I'd also mention that even trains now are partly being automatically scouted by 3rd party apps. Maybe even make A ranks respawn quicker so that they can be both for trains and for people who want to go out and kill a couple for fun so that we have the best of both worlds. Then maybe even more people without SSDs would be able to participate in hunts properly who currently can't.
Now let's switch over to the types of reoccurring drama and their influences. I have already gone over several things above in regard to this so I won't mention those again.
Let's start with achievements. If you want all of the achievements, especially the ones with mount rewards, you are essentially forced into doing cross world hunting and need to be pretty competitive. For reference, I've been hunting extremely actively for almost 2 years now, with minimal cross-world hunting outside of rushing to get the Shadowbringers mount achievement near launch when there were 3 instances for each area, and I'm just now at the 1/2 way mark for the final 10k A rank and 5k S rank achievement. That is honestly pretty insane, and I know I have a lot of hunt connections that the vast majority of people don't have.
You can also reference how each ShB S rank spawns roughly every 115 hours or around 1.46 times per week. That's 8.76 ShB S ranks per week for each server. If you are a very active hunter and are on for 40% of the time, (around 10 hours per day) then that is 3.5 ShB S ranks per week. Honestly, everyone misses out on S ranks every now and then even while online, especially late calls/snipes, so that is probably more realistically 2.5-3 ShB S ranks per week. Let's say you get 3 ShB S ranks per week. That's still 333.3 weeks to get enough ShB S ranks for the mount or almost 6 1/2 years of active hunting. Most people would probably get less than that per week, and also no doubt would take breaks from the game, and are therefore probably looking at around 10+ years of hunting to get it. That is completely insane and something I realized early on in ShB which made me start doing cross-world hunting to rush it before 3 instances per area went away.
These achievements have a number of people in total greed mode and have sparked a ton of drama especially in the forms of entitlement. If anyone remembers the first 1/2 a year of ShB it was honestly rather a warzone with how much drama there was going on based on greed, entitlement, and not to mention how many people there were. Even to this day a year later the same stuff happens.
There are also people known as "aetheryte campers" who have again caused a bunch of drama. Aetheryte campers often just sit at the world transfer aetheryte for hours on end, wait for an S rank to ping on their 3rd party app, and then immediately transfer worlds and rush over to it as fast as they can. These people are notorious for early pulling or joining in on early pulls, often act very entitled whenever they don't get to the hunt on time, and a number of people are known to cause drama with them over the fact that they pretty much never help spawn stuff, expect everything to be handed to them, and deny others from getting to the hunts especially the people who normally wouldn't be able to get to it. Pretty much every single consistent early puller/troll follows under this category. It's also surprising that a few people who got the final 5k S rank achievement ages ago continue to do the above regardless, including the most infamous early puller on Primal.
There is also so much drama in hunts that there are actually a surprising number of people who partly hunt for that drama and the entertainment and salt they can get out of people. A number of whom who again of course early pull on purpose to troll among doing other stuff.
Entitlement. "The hunt was relayed to me and therefore I deserve it and if you pull before I get there then you are all early pullers regardless of how many people are at the hunt". "Hunts belong to everyone". "___ group was just relayed, how is it already dead you snipers?" - even if again tons of people got it. "How dare you kill A ranks outside of a train". "How dare you early pull a hunt you spawned". People calling themselves "The Hunt <insert important title here>" like it's their job/occupation. You get the point, and again a number of people actually purposely troll others who are known to constantly act this way. And to be fair I'd argue pretty much everyone is guilty of at least a little bit of this, especially since the way hunts are currently designed can easily cause frustration. Some people more than others though, especially those who wish to try and control hunts.
Witch-hunting. People who go out of their way to try and get others to hate a person or certain group because they don't like their way of hunting. And yes, there are multiple ways of hunting, people hunt in different ways and enjoy different things, and that is okay really. People often try to stir up drama against others on Discord and try to get them blacklisted. Speaking of which, Discord is often being used as a means to harass others and make them feel shitty as you can't get banned from FFXIV for stuff you do on there. There is even a pinned message on the Centurio Discord pointing out a person that a number of the higher-ups in the Discord don't like. Often when you speak out against these groups while trying to express a different opinion you get harassed, censored, demoted, banned, and get called an "Aswang". If you don't follow one of the groups made up hunt politics and rules then you are likely to get targetted by them.
Honestly personally at times I just want to escape the whole Discord side of hunts due to all the drama on there, but it's pretty hard to when they are so controlling of hunts and how things should and shouldn't be done. This is where some people even spawn S ranks or scout a few A ranks, get a bunch of buddies there to kill it for fun, and kill them without certain groups knowing. The problem is if you get caught doing this especially on a regular basis the Discord community will be sure to witch hunt you because they think all hunts belong to them. Even if at the end of the day you're just trying to have fun, or blow off some steam, and not do anything malicious. Honestly, if you just want to hunt for fun and not have to deal with drama I'd highly recommend staying away from the Discord community.
Targetting and griefing servers you don't particularly like. Stuff in regards to this seems to happen on a fairly regular basis. People often make comments on how shitty X server is, how their own server is the superior server, and going out and purposely griefing hunts because of what server it is on. The Leviathan, Famfrit, and Ultros servers seem to often be involved in this. Sometimes this even includes purposely making a SS minion withdraw so a SS rank fails to spawn, which has actually been happening a ton.
Early pulling. As if this doesn't get mentioned enough. This is honestly mainly just an issue due to the crazy amount of people there are in hunts thanks to cross world hunting existing, and also because of the health totals of the hunts, especially level 50-70 ones. Even level 80 ones are often dying in 1 min or less once pulled. Compare world FATE bosses with hunts - world FATEs rarely ever have people complaining about early pulls unless it's one of the world FATEs where the level sync is out of wack that it dies extremely fast - hmmm sound familiar to hunts?
Wanderers. To this day people still complain about wanderers all the time. More so when they deny people from being able to do something whether it be S ranks or getting to hunts fast enough on trains, which happens fairly regularly. As if the Ishgard Firmament release wasn't super obvious enough of this being an ongoing issue. It's also worth noting that wanderers have a higher tendency to early pull because it's not their own server, and therefore they have way less accountability for their actions. When said people are on their own server you will often notice a strange higher degree of patience with them, and some even go out of their way to reset the hunt if it gets early pulled. (which I've been told numerous times you can get banned for doing if someone reports you for it)
Wanderers running trains. This was actually a huge drama fest a month ago which caused several people to take a break from hunting and form truces. Why does this cause drama? It usually comes down to a few different things. For one servers often have their own dedicated people to organizing and running trains. If a wanderer comes and runs a train while said people are trying to set up a train they naturally step on each other's toes and to some extent waste each other's time. Also, wanderers can't use normal LS's to relay their train and are notoriously known for their complete lack of relays to the actual server the train is being run on. There have been way too many instances where I have seen wanderers run trains on Behemoth where only 10-30% of the train were people from Behemoth. ( https://i.imgur.com/PLD9yZ4.png ) ( https://i.imgur.com/VOR4oOH.png ) And for comparison when one of the usual conductors from Behemoth runs a train it's often 60-80%. Tons of people often miss out when this happens, and people tend to get annoyed when they later find out that a train ran on their server without them knowing it.
Fun fact this is where the "Did the president of Behemoth authorize that?" meme was born a year ago because a certain wanderer kept running trains on Behemoth (and other servers) while purposely not relaying people on there. During one of their trains they shouted they didn't give a ____ if Behemoth knew about their trains or not, which obviously made a ton of people even more outraged than they already were at both them and the Centurio Discord (which they were one of the mods of) who defended them for saying that, especially while saying things like it's not the conductor's job to relay their train. Which always made me annoyed because how are people supposed to even know about the train then if the conductor doesn't even relay it? There is even often a 5 min wait period before the train starts while people are gathering that you could use to shout out every city on the server.
Discord wars. There are 2 different big hunt Discord groups on Primal with a lot of conflicting opinions on how hunts should and shouldn't be done. There is a ton of drama as a result, especially from certain higher-ups, and you will often see people trying to fire shots at the opposite group. If you ever do something that is perceived as "taking a side" then you will likely be targeted by the opposing side.
Lastly, I figured I'd randomly mention why I pretty much never cross-world hunt. It's because sometimes me being there would result in denying someone else from that world being there instead, and I'd rather not be greedy. This is especially true whenever a consistent early puller/troll shows up who often pull based on the number of people there, and try to pull as close to the "threshold of no return" as possible. In other words, when everyone else will just say screw it and join in on the early pull with them, go ham, and won't bother resetting the hunt. Smart early pullers who want a hunt killed as fast as possible actually wait for that point instead of outright instant pulling. Whenever I did cross-world hunting for my Shadowbringers mount I always tried to shout out a few different cities before heading to it, especially to help combat the ongoing sniping issues and to help offset me being there.
That should cover pretty much every issue that hunts currently have. Hopefully, the developers realize these things and address them accordingly so that hunts can become more enjoyable for everyone. And honestly to be fair now that Xivhunt is gone the drama has gone way down with it, not saying there are not still a dozen other issues though. However, people are worried that FFXIV Sonar is going to cause all of these issues all over again, assuming the program actually completes and people actually use it. Also sorry if I rambled on about the Centurio Discord a bit much there. I'm in no way saying that they are a bad group, there is plenty good they do too, but I will say they have a number of issues they really need to address, with some being caused by their group's growth and dependency on 3rd party software. Anyway sorry for the long post, I just wanted to be as thorough as possible so that people hopefully get the full picture. And for that reason no you're not getting a TLDR from me.
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