Part of the reason behind Monster Hunter Wilds' massive success is how it improves upon the franchise's best features, which were made even more prevalent in Wilds' most recent title update. While many of the best offerings in the title update were features partially expected from its initial launch, they were nonetheless exciting additions to the game. Although the newly expanded gathering hub, challenging monsters, and near gear to unlock from Wilds' arena or event quests are great, one way of acquiring them might already be impossible.

With the sheer number of features and new content unveiled in Wilds' title update showcase, many of the more unique offerings were somewhat overshadowed on release. Aside from Monster Hunter Wilds' event quest schedule adding more replayability between significant updates, the newly added arena quests are a great way to push your skills to the limit while being rewarded for your effort. Even though not everyone enjoys the limiting nature of arena quests that lock you into using specific armor and weapons, Capcom finally offers more incentive to beat your best arena quest times.

Arena Quests Have Unique Rewards In Monster Hunter Wilds

Encouraging Players To Push Their Limits With Friendly Competition

Arena quests have offered interesting challenges in the past without being a necessary part of the experience, most commonly offering unique armor sets or even unlockable skills in Monster Hunter Rise. While some of these options provided incredibly valuable rewards, most didn't have enough incentives to keep players engaging with them aside from their initial armor materials or completion bonus. In a surprising announcement revamping the system, Capcom confirmed that the first title update would introduce limited-time arena quests that offer exclusive rewards based on the time it took you to beat them.

The very first of these limited-time challenge quests came in the form of an Alpha Doshaguma, offering three different pendants for simply participating in the arena quests, getting at least a B rank, and having one of the top 10,000 fastest times. Given that there wasn't much reason to interact with the global leaderboard in previous Monster Hunter entries, aside from seeing how absurdly fast some players are, I was excited to see even more ways to interact with the community through some friendly competition.

In theory, limited rewards are a nice way to acknowledge and reward higher-skilled players or community .

Given that pendants are purely cosmetic and hard-to-notice additions, they felt like a great way to add to Wilds' newly incentivized fashion grind without feeling like a necessary chore. While some players were still upset that the reward couldn't be obtained through hard work, I think that, in theory, limited rewards are a nice way to acknowledge and reward higher-skilled players or community .

Cheaters Have Already Ruined Monster Hunter Wilds' Ranking System

A Leaderboard Filled With Questionable Ranking Times

Despite claims that Wilds' developers were planning to crack down on players who use cheats or mods to inflate their arena quest times, according to posts on the official Monster Hunter X , the scoreboard is still filled with modified records. While some players are better at hiding it than others by choosing somewhat believable times, even loading into the game now will showcase countless pages of impossible times. With some players beating the quest in under four seconds, it's clear that Monster Hunter Wilds will need to take more aggressive steps to address its cheating problem.

Even if cheating is nothing new to the series, as the same problem has plagued every entry, this is the first time Monster Hunter has offered significant rewards based on global completion times, rather than individual satisfaction.

Even before arena quests, players were caught modifying the game files to create quests with game-breaking rewards or unlocking cosmetic DLC, which Capcom seemed much quicker to ban those players outright.

While limited arena rewards were an interesting idea, seeing pages of players cheating on their scores is incredibly discouraging for anyone who initially felt up for the challenge.

Modding Has Always Been A Grey Area For The Monster Hunter Franchise

An Unavoidable Aspect Of The Monster Hunter Community

While Capcom doesn't officially modding for Monster Hunter, they only seem to take action against players utilizing mods to take advantage of the game through cheating, bying paid content, or affecting other players' gameplay experiences. Given that arena quests are now being tied to limited in-game cosmetics, there is a chance that Capcom may decide to take a stronger stance against modding as a whole, which would significantly harm the overall Monster Hunter community.

Even if you don't utilize mods yourself, they've been a core part of the hunting experience for years, ranging from massive gameplay improvements like adding in missing quality-of-life features to MH Wilds, bug fixes, and performance improvements, alongside an endless stream of harmless cosmetic content. While the topic of some gameplay mods like health bars or anything that seems to eliminate the challenge of the game is heavily frowned upon by the community, so long as it doesn't affect other players, most of these mods are harmless on their own.

Hopefully, Monster Hunter Wilds can find a middle ground to deal with cheaters without affecting innocent mod s.

Thankfully, Capcom's decision to distribute rewards after the limited arena quest period rather than during it means they can manually remove any clearly modified scores. However, the more realistic ones may still be a challenge to tell apart from the legitimate ones. Hopefully, Monster Hunter Wilds can find a middle ground to deal with cheaters without affecting innocent mod s. Still, as it stands, the largest change to arena quests might be a waste of time until the problem is addressed.

Source: Monster Hunter/X