Ambuscade Vol.1 April 2019

Anyone who requires someone else to use add-one or plugins to participate in content is an idiot. This game can be done fine with equipment sets and/or skill.

That being said, is this month simply a repeat of an older version; or has the layout changed?

Na gluing your eyeballs to chat and whacking away at your 1-6 Macro palette for barspells is the only way to play the game. If you mess it up once you are back in line for the 30 page wait. Also You need to manually put on your fast cast gear in between barspells or else you won't cast fast enough.

not a requirement to use it, but doing your job right is a requirement, and whether you do it manually or use the addon idc, as long as the job is done.

It's not required. But. An event with a line means you need to hurry the hell up. Whatever it takes.

Last month never got below 10 pages for more than a few minutes. That's unacceptable. Your wiping and requeing is unacceptable.

In fact I'm thinking about doing a 100m give away to the person that screenshots the highest queue and starts a complaint thread on the OF.

It's not like SE doesn't realize it's an issue, they have limited options. Redesigning their instance behavior is likely not trivial and they've already reappropriated servers half a dozen or more times this year to try to deal with Asura's population issues.

Again, Asura problem. Not a FFXI problem. Even first or last day of the month, wait is near nonexistant on Leviathan.

it did get below 10 pages, as early as Monday during Gain EXP (it was 9 pages, then gradually shrunk to 4 and was 0 wait at one point). 4 minute kills and repeat for a friend who recently returned to the game. On other occasions, specifically during the daytime, the wait was very low (i literally check page wait every hour), but in general 10 was a good average. Still only a 10-15min wait, which is probably 20-25min per run cycle. With seals, that's amazing gil/hr.

Anyways, the whole "React" discussion thing is kind of interesting. While I certainly would want my WHM to be as good as possible, I don't care if he's using it or not. If he can get the job done without it cool. If he needs it, sure. I have a crappy laptop I sometimes play on, and there's no chance I could ever land barspells in time on reaction. On my home PC, it's not an issue. Every person's circumstances are different.

I have seen macros fire off saying "BIO/SLOW/CHARMED/ETC ALERT". It can be helpful especially when trying to minimize mistakes. There is also just good reflexes that do the trick. It's kind of amusing to hear people bragging about surviving near-instant tp moves, and then berate others for their lack of skill in "not switching to a hybrid set". I have personally had a party leader during master trials complain that I didn't have anchor and ja0wait/tako activated because i was bound and out of range after a knockback effect, because it "just added one more thing the whm had to worry about during an already tough fight". It's comical. A lot of players truly cannot play the game without programs, period. They don't have the reflexes/reaction/appropriate sets properly laid out on their macro palette. I think it's fine as long as these programs just don't become the standard, because THAT'S when it's kind of pathetic.

I wish there was an event that imposed the same restrictions as old school salvage/encumbrance gear swaps or Ballista/Brenner penalties for gear changes, just to see people complain about not being able to use their favorite program and cheese their way to a win.

Sorry just to confirm, since no one has mentioned it here...

What happens if you DONT barspell the moves?

30 page wait? Sorry, I had to LOL at this. As "great" as Asura supposedly is, the long wait to get into Ambuscade makes the lower population servers seem like paradise.

Currently a 4 page wait on Shiva

tl:dr you miss you die

Doing Ambuscade during Gain-Money is fail

Plenty of solutions. Impose 3 person minimum. Open a second zone that mimics legion. Force a "once a day maximum". Remove sellable items from hallmarks. All are exceptable answers. The ONLY unacceptable answer, is what they're doing. Nothing.

You don't die, not right away. You have two chances to react basically. One is the barspell, which will nullify the status effects of the elemental aoe the meeble uses (i.e slow para virus etc). If miss that opportunity, you still have the option to Misery + Esuna quickly and remove all debuffs from your group in one go, followed by (usually) a curaga or something. Might require the tank/party to go into full DT mode momentarily. Basically if everyone gets hit with virus HP down and then an aoe move, they can die.

It gets pretty ugly (but manageable) if you miss a barspell, which is why it is preferred to have your brd or geo focus on those (you can split the elements if you wish), and have your whm focus on healing. It just takes teamwork, not really that impossible to pull off naturally. React just makes it 100%

Yeah, I don't mind lending the opportunity to help a friend during money time. It comes regularly enough anyways.

ur solution to ambuscade overcrowding is make it so people have no reason to do ambuscade? lol

Absolutely. I would 100% prefer that VW had improved drop rates and ambuscade did not sell rift cinder/dross/plates

I would also enjoy a room in salvage after the boss where there are gears that repop non-stop.(this would create congestion there too... but it's better than ambuscade congestion)

i think that might a little heavy handed to remove money items but i agree they could make a mirrored version of ambuscade npcs with different instances in selbina and kazham to relieve the congestion. Maybe make it so one of the zones handles money items and the other one handles rare/ex items for capes and weapons.

We dont have that issue with over crowding being on a lower population server unless its Saturday, but i remember how frustrating things were back in the day.

Ambu has actual gear and way too important capes, putting that kind of limit on it is stupid and would instantly scare away new/returning players. Maybe if they removed the sellable items, sure, but those sellable items help keep it relevant for people to help out those who don't have the equipment.

We should be considered lucky that it's not old school dynamis or Limbus where it's one group for an entire lockout before someone else can enter.

Is this Eiryl's daily HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE post? Can we get a twitter for that?

That's Anti-Asura discrimination, smaller Servers won't reach nearly as high of a page # as Asura.

I agree that congestion could be relieved by adding two more entry points, but instead of breaking up the rewards have different entry requirements:
- Selbina: 3 party minimum, Vol1 D and VD only
- Mhaura: No party minimum, All Vol1 difficulties
- Kazham: No party minimum, All Vol2 difficulties

That way groups doing the hardest version can have open access to a short line of people only doing the hardest possible. Or at least in theory.

There's better ways to handle this, they just don't think reasonably. Keep in mind this is an ASURA ONLY problem, which means it's not really a problem, just an inconvenience for its citizens.

That could work but i was mainly thinking of how they would keep track of who has bought how many of each items between zones on the npcs. The suggestion i posted would be the simplest i could think of by only having each npc hold different items. However i dont know what limitations would affect them being able to do it most. It might be the instances? but im not sure.

Youre playing ffxi... your time isnt that valuable. If you cant enjoy wipes, you cant honestly say you enjoy ffxi.

It's not an "only a problem on Asura problem"

It's a "Asura IS the ONLY server problem"

Oh don't even try, just because Asura is biggest server currently does not mean it's the only and that everything should be catered to it.

It houses a majority of the players, in a way there should be catering towards it. Asura should definitely have more server instances allocated to it. But who knows what their load out is like.

These zones could easily be repurposed:

https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Diorama_Abdhaljs-Ghelsba
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Abdhaljs_Isle-Purgonorgo

No reason Legion needs to share the same zone as Ambuscade when Abdhaljs owns all three zones. Literally nobody uses either of the above, and it would certainly help control congestion if Ambuscade frequently cycled between 3 zones, and randomly allowed you to fight in either one, whenever lines are long.

Wanting to adjust instance loads in favor of Asura is understandable, but saying that it's specifically a problem that has to be fixed using "Asura is the only server" as a reason is silly. No matter how you look at it Buukki is right, it's an inconvenience rather than a problem.

Congestion is a factor of how many instances the hardware can support. The hardware doesn't care if it's sending packets that will have the client render legion or diorama or wherever the hell.

Adding more zones changes nothing, and would not alleviate any congestion.

Yes, but are you refering to congestion as server loading time or the time players wait to enter ambuscade? Are you stating that if they split Ambuscade up and had different zones/instances for Vol2, etc (like I said above) there would still be the same amount of waiting as now?

The waiting is because the server is limiting the amount of instances that can be created, not because it takes too long to create an instance.

It doesn't matter how you split it up, if you increase the amount of supported instances you will need to increase the hardware powering them.

So no, there isn't a magical quick fix. Optimizing the code to support more instances or buying additional machines are likely both over budget, and they've already been trying to add machines most likely (see: all the exchanging server equipment maintenances).