I've been working on my Hunt achievements on OC/Materia for 9-10months now. It's a long grind, and I'm quite happy with my progression. However there's an elephant in the room regarding hunts on Materia and the more I live in this grind the harder it is to ignore.
Voyager players traveling to Materia have a huge advantage over native Materia players and it is, at best, annoying and, at worst, a disruption of gameplay for locals.
Raw Numbers:
Materia locals cannot leave the data centre. This leaves us with only the 1 data centre with 5 servers.
North America and Japan both have 4 data centres, 8 worlds on each. This means a local NA/JP player has 32 servers to work with.
Europe has half that, 2 data centres and 8 worlds each, a total of 16 servers to travel to.
The total amount of S ranks per server is 47. 17 for ARR zones, 6 for each expansion.
This totals to:
NA/JP: 1504 S ranks
EU: 752 S ranks
OC: 235 S ranks
The caveat to these numbers is that NA, JP, and EU all have access to OC's marks, so their totals inflate. OC's does not, we do not have the luxury of traveling data centres. What we have is all that we get.
Peak Hours:
OC is a small place. Our population doesn't quite reach even the lowest populated server on Aether.
Our population is also spread across a quirky bunch of timezones, stretching from New Zealand, running head long through Australia's timezone madness, and ending on South East Asian times. Collectively our timezones come together for an active peak time of roughly 4-6 hours in the evening. This leaves us with 18-20 hours of "dead hours" where there aren't many, if any, locals playing the game.
This leaves us with far more hours that voyager players can spawn and kill elite marks without locals present. If an S isn't open to spawn during our small peak hours window the chance of it disappearing entirely overnight is almost guaranteed.
Player Behaviour:
There's a lot to be said for player behaviour regarding hunts in general, but that's a different post for a different time. To summarise my thoughts for this small note: Free For All content that has desirable or outright valuable rewards leads to player entitlement, paranoia, underhanded gameplay, and anti-social behaviours such as stalking and bullying.
For Materia and Voyagers specifically, there's a lot of entitlement surrounding who can and will spawn S ranks on our servers. While we do have a handful of very lovely voyagers who like to leave "gifts" (spawned S ranks left alone so that locals can discover them), lately they've had to stop doing this as the hunts are being eaten by voyagers in our dead hours. Most folks traveling to Materia for elite marks are either entirely ambivalent to our restricted access to hunts, or so entitled to all marks they have access to they don't care. The social cohesion is very strained at the best of times and is a factor in anti-voyager attitudes of local players.
It is plainly unfair to native Materia players that everyone has access to our very limited elite marks. When you account for other conditions, like active server hours and player attitudes, it becomes an issue of detrimental gameplay experience and, at the end of the day, is one of the contributing factors for players moving away from Materia.
Continue reading...
Voyager players traveling to Materia have a huge advantage over native Materia players and it is, at best, annoying and, at worst, a disruption of gameplay for locals.
Raw Numbers:
Materia locals cannot leave the data centre. This leaves us with only the 1 data centre with 5 servers.
North America and Japan both have 4 data centres, 8 worlds on each. This means a local NA/JP player has 32 servers to work with.
Europe has half that, 2 data centres and 8 worlds each, a total of 16 servers to travel to.
The total amount of S ranks per server is 47. 17 for ARR zones, 6 for each expansion.
This totals to:
NA/JP: 1504 S ranks
EU: 752 S ranks
OC: 235 S ranks
The caveat to these numbers is that NA, JP, and EU all have access to OC's marks, so their totals inflate. OC's does not, we do not have the luxury of traveling data centres. What we have is all that we get.
Peak Hours:
OC is a small place. Our population doesn't quite reach even the lowest populated server on Aether.
Our population is also spread across a quirky bunch of timezones, stretching from New Zealand, running head long through Australia's timezone madness, and ending on South East Asian times. Collectively our timezones come together for an active peak time of roughly 4-6 hours in the evening. This leaves us with 18-20 hours of "dead hours" where there aren't many, if any, locals playing the game.
This leaves us with far more hours that voyager players can spawn and kill elite marks without locals present. If an S isn't open to spawn during our small peak hours window the chance of it disappearing entirely overnight is almost guaranteed.
Player Behaviour:
There's a lot to be said for player behaviour regarding hunts in general, but that's a different post for a different time. To summarise my thoughts for this small note: Free For All content that has desirable or outright valuable rewards leads to player entitlement, paranoia, underhanded gameplay, and anti-social behaviours such as stalking and bullying.
For Materia and Voyagers specifically, there's a lot of entitlement surrounding who can and will spawn S ranks on our servers. While we do have a handful of very lovely voyagers who like to leave "gifts" (spawned S ranks left alone so that locals can discover them), lately they've had to stop doing this as the hunts are being eaten by voyagers in our dead hours. Most folks traveling to Materia for elite marks are either entirely ambivalent to our restricted access to hunts, or so entitled to all marks they have access to they don't care. The social cohesion is very strained at the best of times and is a factor in anti-voyager attitudes of local players.
It is plainly unfair to native Materia players that everyone has access to our very limited elite marks. When you account for other conditions, like active server hours and player attitudes, it becomes an issue of detrimental gameplay experience and, at the end of the day, is one of the contributing factors for players moving away from Materia.
Continue reading...