I've spent a lot of time lately reading about solo hunting.

There was a time in the game when almost everyone hunted with off-the-shelf weapons and there were no society powers. Beyond a statue, buffs were hard to get and there were no scripts yet. Solo hunting was risky at any level, and solo hunters died often. They died from 8 round stuns to the eye, missing limbs, knockdowns, clouds (often someone else's), ewave, poison, etc. There were few foggers, and droppage and the demonic were still factors. There were definitely no chrisms. It was much harder to drag people out of certain areas because more rooms needed to be climbed out of. Dying was a more serious issue than it is now.

All of these factors encouraged people to hunt in groups. If you had a couple friends in the game who also happened to be like level, you could join them and go hunt as we do now. If not, the MO was to go to a hunting area and, if possible, find and join a group that was already there. Many of the oldest hunting areas were just a few rooms in size so you'd join a bigger group and the leader would wander a bit - or just camp. There were fewer risks because more people means more targets, and more help if someone got squished. One of the reasons the old gen rates were higher and critters swarmed so much was because of this (or, possibly, it was the other way around). There were a few rooms that were well-known camping spots for different critters. Seeing a solo hunting wander by without stopping was unusual; a group would almost always ask the person if he wanted to join. Some professions were a great fit in these groups - a cleric could help by blessing weapons while they hunted undead, an empath could help by transferring wounds, bards could sing, others could cast spells.

I'm not advocating for camping, exactly, but looking back at a system that encouraged social hunting. With the probable exception of sorcerers, no profession had the ability to "safely" solo hunt at this time - not clerics, empaths, or wizards, and certainly no semi or square of the time (who were generally much weaker than pures). It made for a more social game. While you "hunted" and gained experience you learned about and gossiped and joked around with players you didn't know, and sometimes even roleplayed a bit. When you were fried, you headed to a node to rest. It was a novel system but it did have its own issues. As the population increased, camping was increasingly seen as a bad thing. Groups got too big. It created havoc for the people who wanted to hunt solo or in a small group. Not everyone wanted to join the big group. Loot often went to the person who swung last. Sometimes people didn't get along. Sometimes people had to stance down. In some ways, when critters weren't swarming, it was too easy, and players got bored. GMs spent a lot of time creating expansion areas for the old hunting grounds so that people had the option to wander and hunt. Over time, social hunting stopped completely. Lately, there are small groups who go into warcamps or hunt bandits of like level, but it typically involves active recruiting done in town, not a chance meet-up in the field.

In my experience, the ability to safely solo hunt, in any game, turns players into islands (or, at best, cliques). The safety of a group is no longer needed, and the loot is better when hunting alone. Is there anything else to be gained? There are many things that have been added to this game over time that discourage social interaction. Hunting solo, and especially with a script, discourages interaction in the field, and reduces the social part of the game to just in-town or on-node events. Resting is often a time when people are usually NOT interacting - with a few notable exceptions. Even the new systems that encourage group hunting, such as the Adventurer's Guild, require you to go back into town to add someone to a bounty. In a different reality, bounties might have been tasks that were so hard that no one could do them alone.

I liked the old way, frankly. It helped more than it hurt. It's possible I'm the only remaining advocate of this kind of hunting, but I'd rather see more of this kind of thing than everyone off solo hunting.

More than any other single factor I think player population, number of hunting grounds, and level spread are the main contributions to spreading people out these days. I do miss when more people rested or hung out outside town, out of everything I think. Like the Gash in Danjirland wasn't even a node nor a Sanctuary but healers and others used to hang out there.

>the loot is better when hunting alone

That's strictly false, all other things like level being equal. There's actually a bonus: https://gswiki.play.net/mediawiki/index.php/Treasure_system_(saved_posts)#2008_Posts

>How quickly we forget Repel clerics!

I dunno, Repel was changed out quite a long time ago. :)

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The deathbot will come back eventually.

>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p