bounty hunt still sucks, what now?

[princelaharlsama]

after about 3 years of waiting, the bounty hunt rework is finally here... and after the event, the lobbies page for it is just as empty as before. so what happens now? do we get another rework or should the devs just cut their losses and work on other things?

[Erikune]

I feel like the change to Bounty Hunt was to make the mode more fun for people who enjoyed Bounty Hunt. It wasn't to make the mode massively popular. The issues with Bounty Hunt were, very simply, that a match takes much longer than in Normal mode. Nothing is every really going to change that.

As for the BH changes, I think they worked well. Giving stat buffs on norma and allowing players to buy and hold items have made a lot more characters viable in the mode, as opposed to just a handful and the mode entirely focused on gather quests. And the Assassin Badge makes fighting other players a viable (if risky) option to get fame now. As much as I enjoyed playing Islay and outperforming most other characters just from superior base stats, having much more variety to character options now does make the mode more interesting.

Bounty Hunt was never going to be popular. But at least now it's more fun.

[MarkVD100]

Originally posted by Erikune:

The issues with Bounty Hunt were, very simply, that a match takes much longer than in Normal mode.

Perhaps they could do the option to have a match last up to 14 fame instead of 20 like in Treasure Tails event.

[SomeGuy712x]

Originally posted by MarkVD100:

Originally posted by Erikune:

The issues with Bounty Hunt were, very simply, that a match takes much longer than in Normal mode.

Perhaps they could do the option to have a match last up to 14 fame instead of 20 like in Treasure Tails event.

I second this.

[princelaharlsama]

i still dont think reducing fame would help as the mode just isnt balanced for that. its already barely on the edge of a snowball-fest as it is, and reducing the time players have to catch up would worsen that.
what i think the developers dont want to hear, personally, is that the game mode just has too much bloat. 4 shops, 10 locales, 3 different invaders not including the shady merchant, 3 different types of summons, and 12 different monsters, not even getting into the items and home effects overlayed on top of ojs existing complexity! and very little of it is meaningful or adds to the enjoyment of the game despite how much fbf sincerely wants us to like these characters and accept them as part of the universe

but to cut any of that would be throwing out developer work and effort even if the game would be better off for it. not to mention how ive been campaigning for literal years to make the game mode less arbitrary by making dedicated bounty hunt maps balanced around the higher amount of mov.

to even begin to enjoy bounty hunt you need to know what field effects to ban and what few maps actually make the experience tolerable; a bad map+field event choice will skyrocket the session from 45 minutes minimum to almost an hour and a half. while this is an issue with normal mode oj, its significantly moreso an issue here both because of how exponentially longer bh games take from the onset as well as there being much fewer truly terrible normal mode maps. because they were designed for normal mode. not a mode where everyone has +2 mov and chapters take 6-10 minutes and the wincon is entirely different.

i dont know. im just really kind of upset they found this acceptable to release. its not even more fun for people who likex BH because theres barely been any changes to passives, cards, hypers, etc. whatsoever. much more care has been given to co op, and i hate to think thats indicative of "a time when fbf was more competent or cared more," because i dont want to, but it certainly feels that way

[Erikune]

I'll agree that some more bounty hunt-focused maps would be nice. Some maps, like Training Program, are absolutely awful when the one location you need to harvest from/deliver to/hunt a monster at is stuck in the middle.

But I don't think the mode needs to be radically changed just to fit within a 15 minute game session. Cutting out half of the mode's content is just going to make it even less popular, because the people just looking for a quick game are still not going to play, and the people who like BH wouldn't be interested in a much simplified version. The fact is that BH is just more complex than the basic multiplayer. That's going to be true, regardless of how much it's changed. And if somebody is just looking to grab a quick game, they're won't want to deal with the extra complexity most of the time.

Outside some map changes (or removal) I think it would be good to indicate when you have the quest item for a quest, some place to look at what items you might get in a particular shop, and some idea of what creature might be where. There's still a lot of obscure content in the mode and after watching someone grab Herbal Tea three times in a match before fighting a Fame 4 bounty, it's pretty clear that people who know more about the mode than me are going to do better at it. I realize there's some randomness but "Which house is the inn?" is kind of an important question when looking at the map and bounties.