Many factors, primarily World Visit, has made it almost impossible to participate in the hunt unless you are playing on a PC with an SSD.
On the Primal data center, hunts are organized into hunt trains, where a group of scouts will locate the individual hunt marks, note their locations, and kill them with a large group of players one by one. That itself is not a problem: the problem comes with just how many people will visit another server for the sole purpose of joining one of these hunt trains.
So many people will go to each train that areas sometimes become congested and impossible to load into. If you are able to load into each area for the hunt, the hunt mark itself dies in a matter of seconds from the sheer number of players that are swarming it. If you're more than a few yards away from the hunt mark, it will despawn in favor of the hundreds of other players, many of which are from other servers, making it impossible to target. And this is all if you have a solid-state drive and are playing on PC.
If you DON'T have a solid state drive, the areas take so long to load into that by the time you manage to gain control of your character, the hunt marks in the area are already dead and the train is on its way to the next area.
You might say, why not kill the hunt marks outside of the trains if you don't have an SSD? The issue there comes with the culture of hunt linkshells. Because the hunt train is so efficient, it's unrealistic to get the number of players necessary to kill the hunt marks since players would rather wait for a train. In addition to this, there's a culture that if you "snipe" a hunt outside of the train, you're essentially shut out of the resources used on the data center like hunt linkshells.
I'm sure some people are going to claim that I'm only posting this because I'm upset that I can't access this feature of the game, or that I should get a better computer if I want to participate in the hunt, but the fact of the matter is I have a good computer with a fast SSD, and I participate in the hunt regularly with almost no issues. I do, however, know of numerous players who cannot participate in the hunt for the reasons I listed above. I got involved in the hunt community because I wanted to make it more accessible for more players, but the way world visit currently works has made it less accessible for many players because of overzealous hunters from other servers. And that's not even getting into how hunts from older areas are balanced.
So what would I suggest to make hunting more accessible for more players, short of an entire rebalancing of the hunt? Simple: turn off rewards for players from other servers. Cross-world rewards have already been turned off for Ishgardian restoration for similar reasons, and you can't access timed gathering nodes when visiting other worlds, so why not do the same for the hunt? It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than the situation we have now.
Continue reading...
On the Primal data center, hunts are organized into hunt trains, where a group of scouts will locate the individual hunt marks, note their locations, and kill them with a large group of players one by one. That itself is not a problem: the problem comes with just how many people will visit another server for the sole purpose of joining one of these hunt trains.
So many people will go to each train that areas sometimes become congested and impossible to load into. If you are able to load into each area for the hunt, the hunt mark itself dies in a matter of seconds from the sheer number of players that are swarming it. If you're more than a few yards away from the hunt mark, it will despawn in favor of the hundreds of other players, many of which are from other servers, making it impossible to target. And this is all if you have a solid-state drive and are playing on PC.
If you DON'T have a solid state drive, the areas take so long to load into that by the time you manage to gain control of your character, the hunt marks in the area are already dead and the train is on its way to the next area.
You might say, why not kill the hunt marks outside of the trains if you don't have an SSD? The issue there comes with the culture of hunt linkshells. Because the hunt train is so efficient, it's unrealistic to get the number of players necessary to kill the hunt marks since players would rather wait for a train. In addition to this, there's a culture that if you "snipe" a hunt outside of the train, you're essentially shut out of the resources used on the data center like hunt linkshells.
I'm sure some people are going to claim that I'm only posting this because I'm upset that I can't access this feature of the game, or that I should get a better computer if I want to participate in the hunt, but the fact of the matter is I have a good computer with a fast SSD, and I participate in the hunt regularly with almost no issues. I do, however, know of numerous players who cannot participate in the hunt for the reasons I listed above. I got involved in the hunt community because I wanted to make it more accessible for more players, but the way world visit currently works has made it less accessible for many players because of overzealous hunters from other servers. And that's not even getting into how hunts from older areas are balanced.
So what would I suggest to make hunting more accessible for more players, short of an entire rebalancing of the hunt? Simple: turn off rewards for players from other servers. Cross-world rewards have already been turned off for Ishgardian restoration for similar reasons, and you can't access timed gathering nodes when visiting other worlds, so why not do the same for the hunt? It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than the situation we have now.
Continue reading...