Whitetail spawn system

[Shady]

I don't know if the dev's read this, but I'm going to post here because they don't have a forum.

I remember the moment last year when I finally realized whitetail were drinking 150 meters from the shore line, behind bushes on Layton. I've always noticed people complaining about whitetail spawns, and zones. It was always my impression that whitetail were being treated differently, to make them feel more "special". Only offering them on one reserve (until Rancho), and giving them odd behavior that made them much more difficult to hunt etc. However, now that I've hunted them for probably 50+ hours on Rancho, I've had it.

Here's my typical whitetail grind.

1. Spend several hours hunting my drink and feed zones that wrap around almost every body of water on the reserve. I can hunt 300-500 whitetail in this period of time, and I will find a fair amount of max weight bucks. However, they're always trolls. 240-249 range.

2. Out of nowhere all of my zones will start filling up with small bucks and does.

3. Spend another 2 hours running around to discrete portions of the reserve , looking for where my respawns are disappearing to.

4. Hunt the discrete locations bucks (and does), all max weight are trolls.

5. Return to normal zones, and repeat.

^^^ This is not how any of the other species behave in this game. I have hunted well over 1000 whitetail on Rancho alone, and I haven't seen a single diamond yet. Any other species I would have found several by now. Heck, I accidentally found a 2 Diamond Mule deer just in the process of grinding whitetail.

I understand why the developers would treat whitetail differently, if they are. Obviously it wouldn't be fun if they were on half of the reserves, and diamonds were easy to come across. However, this system is awful. It's so bad it actually makes me not want to hunt the species. That's the opposite of fun. I'm tired of hunting 50 max weight bucks that are all between 240-249 every time I grind, only to find the respawns disappearing to discrete areas on the reserve. The amount of time I've spent trying to find a single diamond, has resulted in finding several diamond of other species (that I wasn't even looking for). That just goes to show there's something off about the whitetail spawn system/behavior.

If you want people to have fun hunting this species, you have balance it out. It feels like whitetail systems are optimized for COTW streamers or something. If you play the game for 4 hours a day, every day of the week, I'm sure you're going to find diamonds, and the occasional great one. However, the other 99.9% of us do not have the time for that.

[jal273]

You know why it's like this,, Because it' EW and they don't know what the F--f they are doing

[bairms15]

I kind of agree although I'm not fed up with it just yet. I found them very difficult to hunt on Layton. Their zones were always hard to get to and find, and not conducive to tripod hunting. Then I tried Rancho and at first was having good success on some of the big lakes, but its annoying because you can shoot a couple bucks 150 m away, but then you have to travel nearly a km around the irregular shape of the lake to get to them. I used to get a lot of golds and was feeling like I was getting close to a diamond, but my last 5 or so runs all I see is tiny silver bucks. Haven't even shot a gold in I dont know how long and the only respawns I get are little guys.

[Shady]

Your respawns are taking off to discrete portions of the reserve. You have to go find where they are, set up new zones, or hunt those. You'll be playing this game for a long time with whitetail. I don't have this experience with any other species. On Rancho , you can find drink zones for white tail that wrap around the entire body of water. You can usually just pick a side, and hunt all the way around the lake. It's obviously easier if you lay down tents. But yes, the money and time invested into whitetails are not worth the reward in my opinion. I get a diamond and I don't even care about it because the grind was so annoying. It's like finally, and now I don't care. When I hunt other species I have a lot more fun.

[chazg6]

I am grinding whitetails at New England; I have 6 diamond whitetails stacked right now I am also having problems with small level 1 bucks in my zones. I am just wondering where all my bucks are spawning to I guess I am going to have to run the entire water system again to find them....which is time consuming and not that fun.

[Shady]

Originally posted by chazg6:

I am grinding whitetails at New England; I have 6 diamond whitetails stacked right now I am also having problems with small level 1 bucks in my zones. I am just wondering where all my bucks are spawning to I guess I am going to have to run the entire water system again to find them....which is time consuming and not that fun.

FYI, they changed the way whitetail work since I posted this. It seems like I was either in a bad/unfortunate respawn situation, combined with the fact that Layton is just not the best place to hunt whitetail, unless you want to put the work in to max out blinds/tents/tripods, since it's such a big reserve with so many whitetail zones.

New England, Rancho are definitely better to hunt whitetail on (in my opinion).

What it seems like is happening to you, is that you need to hunt your diamonds now. I'm not entirely sure how the "stacking" system works, but I have an idea based on how I already presume the game works.

If your zones are being flooded with level 1's , it's because your average is already too high for level 2's to spawn because you have 6+ diamonds on the map. Keep in mind the whitetails only have 3 levels + fabled, so you should run into this problem much more quickly "stacking" diamond whitetail than you would stacking diamond Red Deer (or any species with a larger delta between easiest to hardest difficulty/more levels).

That's my guess, but it's as good as any.