So in World, for instance, when monsters came to the same area, they slugged it out for a while. They did damage to each other, and could mess you up if you got in the middle of it, but also gave you a good opportunity to go for tail cuts and stuff since the monsters would keep each other's attention for the most part. Then you usually got to see a turf war if you let it play out, and then the monster fucked off for a while. It was a risk/reward thing.
Glad I asked. This is the kind of elaboration I want (but can't expect everytime obviously, lol). I didn't play World that much so my impression of TW was that it was always free damage on at least one monster and I'd be an opportunist to get some parts from either one.
For the older games, it was pretty much full detriment to have 2 monsters together in a zone since they didn't really care about each other.
Yea they never did, though having an aggromon like Tigrex was always fun, just put the other monster in between at all times and let Tigrex charge away haha. I did that quite a bit in one arena quest in MHXX featuring Tigrex and Garuga.
In Rise, not only will they instantly put one of them into a rideable state, but then when they end up in the same zone again later in the hunt, one of them will always run off again. There's no opportunity for 2 rides for the same set of monsters.
From what I'm gathering in the rest of your post, it might be that your team of hunters is performing efficiently.
I play solo and I'm not a minmaxer, let me tell you that you can ride the same monster more than once per hunt, but there's a hidden cooldown (which I never bothered to time) and I've had many hunts where the initial monster that ran away after WR would meet up after enough time and get put into a rideable state again. You don't get the same number of monster mats this time from bashing them since I believe that's based on breaking parts.
I think Turf Wars happen based on predetermined pairs of monsters, usually meant to be a cinematic fight played out in realtime, in engine.
So stuff like Zinogre vs Mizutsune (fated match up since the MHX trailer) or Goss Harag vs Tetranadon (part time slugger vs sumo wrestler), Magnamalo vs Teostra (catfight) or in one particularly traumatic case, Magnamalo vs Aknosom (purely to bully Akno lol).
Not saying it's all bad, but it's like whenever you see a 2nd monster enter an area that you're fighting, your mind instantly just goes, "oh cool, let me back up until one of them gets stunned and then ride it". There's no dynamic way for the situation to play out, it's always the same.
Yea the main drawback of this IMO is that whenever a monster is rideable, the A button gets overridden in a large radius, so if you wanna pick up items you gotta at least ride the monster and crash it first.
That said, you do have options when riding. The monster that gets downed and punished will remain in the zone, the ridden one will leave and of course ramming another monster puts it into a rideable state immediately, provided it wasn't already ridden recently.
I've done things like riding my target monster, running around to find another monster, ram them then ride them to inflict blights and damage to my target monster and continue the fight. Or like the one time I rode Jyuratodus onto dry land so it couldn't hide in the water and then it got ganked by Narga and Zin who happened to be there lol.
I'm not sure how much of these can play out in MP, but my experience with it in solo has been great for the most part.