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What's this nonsense about ambuscade being clogged up? I get entered so fast that the mobs are dead before my item screen loads up for me to use food/seals in mhaura or the battle.

You're on a lower population server.

I get that... but I wasn't talking soloist as they always have gotten none. It's pretty bad right now even at the 3 mark which most would consider reasonable cut off. And this has gone from incentivize to harshly punish real quick

SE wants to specifically encourage groups of 6, not just groups of >1.

It doesn't screw anyone. It's not that hard to find people capable of matching trusts, and it slims the amount of other groups that will be competing. If you're entering with less than 6 without at least trying a shout, you deserve to get a ***return.

Once again I totally get and approve of that. I'm just saying the degree to which it's been done over the last month has gone far from mere encouragement. And the people who were already willing to do a ton of runs are likely still going to do less than 6 and likely do even more runs though seriously doubtful they will go to the full 10k. But hey whatever <6 deserve it right? Screw those guys

Three or more would work to alleviate congestion, but would undermine the point of Ambuscade being an event for everybody. It's been great at serving as the entry point into other content for returnees and people without much flist/ls support.

Gallantry was a good start to get people to group up, but they could take it further. Maybe shift some of the better rewards from HM to Gallantry, and stop giving Gallantry to soloists, while upping Gallantry/round for larger groups.

For the past 3 months we just wait until the end of the month and finish it over a 7-8 hour spam session. No ques.

Again, nobody is forcing you to go <6. If you shout, you WILL find someone as capable as your trusts who would like to tag along and get their clears/gear. Any miniscule difference in cleartimes caused by their slowness is almost certain to make itself up due to having less people trying to queue up.

Then I guess you can't complain about congestion that you and many other people are willingly bringing upon themselves when they CHOSE to go to an overly congested server.

That's exactly how gallantry already works...

Why not just allow alliances in? Treat it exactly like Omen. Omen content can be cleared easily and regularly with 6 but there's no punishment in bringing more now...

I think this would encourage more group ups and would allow for more people to tag along that you normally wouldn't or couldn't bring in with you.

allowing alliances would encourage peoplermt to roll a dozen burn-to-99 mules and leech them to get hundreds of mils of mats per cycle

never mind that it defeats the point of having difficulty tiers, 12+ idiots could faceroll almost any VD just by sheer damage

Yeah, no. Saying "You can sacrifice X to cure yourself of Y, so you can't complain" doesn't follow if sacrificing X is a bigger negative than Y.

Your little bait tactic only to retort with a ridiculously condescending comment is totally transparent.

Doesn't make it any less accurate. Every time some idiot cries for 'merge servers', the competent people who have groups say the same thing: PLEASE DON'T. It's for a reason, congestion sucks.

That's not the logic here. The logic here is that you CHOSE to sacrifice your ability to enter ambuscade/salvage/etc by going to an overly congested server so now you're complaining about an entirely forseeable problem you deemed acceptable which you could easily not be having and is not actually a problem for the majority of servers. I'm not even saying you have to stick with your bad decision.
You: I'm gonna go to a place with congestion and overpopulation.
Later: Why is there congestion and overpopulation when i chose the three out of 17(?) servers that actually have this problem?

This is assuming you're actually willing to server transfer in the first place and simply weren't originally there.

The issue with congestion isn't that it exists... it's that it is MUCH worse this month than previously.

Which is because they've raised the demand of Ambuscade by leaps and bounds this month.
If you still could get everything you needed from 14.5k~20k hallmarks, the congestion would have followed the same as all previous months: the first and last week of the month are congested, but the middle chunk is virtually 0~2 page waits.

This time they've raised the demand on the total hallmarks and gallantry a person needs to have to get the same amount of gear (capes) as previous months. By ~2.5x.

Had the gallantry cost for metals been 100 and not 1000 per metal... just that alone would have dropped congestion as there'd be little to no difference from previous months.
Maybe a day or two longer of having to wait a few minutes to enter.... But still that middle 2wks would be fine.

I'm saying 0 gallantry for solo players, right now they still get a bit. Then, say, for a party of 6 doing VD vol 1, increase the gallantry from 500/round to 1200/round.

If the rewards in gallantry are good enough, I think you'd see a lot more people grouping up and shorter queues. And the people who have no choice but to solo can still get their armor/vouchers so they can have baseline gear to join groups in the future.

That's exactly how gallantry already works...

We're not going to be able to split soloists and groups because let's face it, sometimes one way works better. It doesn't help that monthly one volume is always significantly more beneficial to do but is inevitably linked to the weaker volume's congestion. Personally, I think if SE wanted to free up some congestion, they could oh...incorporate additional zones.

You could go with more entry points- why use Mhauara and not Selbina? Could stick Vol 1 in one and Vol 2 in the other?

I also get that the bc area is the legion arena, but why not come up with the concept idea of Abhjalderp coming up with different battlegrounds to continue challenging players in new places and *gasp* you can expand.

You could use say legion's map grid, and make theme copies of that battleground, like alzaddaal undersea, sky, sea, riverne, castle z, promy areas. etc. It not only visually spices up the appearance of the arena, or if you did change the area you could try to incorporate it into the fight strategy.

BUT all of these would require a more than 2 people working on ffxi and a budget. Disappointment. Please look forward to it.

I didn't choose the Ambuscade life....!

pretty sure their instance code is just garbage and they're being bottlenecked by server capability not something they could just solve by implementing additional zones.. it has to come from somewhere

you can see the bottleneck in action by observing the amount of dropped packets in ambuscade and the amount of double/triple sent packets(which happens when server doesn't process your incoming in time)

a full rewrite could probably accomplish it as there shouldn't be anything in there that's a significant enough resource hog on modern hardware.. but that's definitely not in the budget and would be bound to throw bugs everywhere for months even if they were crazy enough to tackle it

There is no instancing in FFXI, the server side zones are static and their index is downloaded to your client when you do an update. Instead what they do is build multiple copies of a battle field in the same zone and then rotate groups between them. Originally they only had a few battlefields in that zone and ***was super HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE so they added more battlefields, which made things better usually but at the expense of the server being more bogged down.

That's not true. There's only one battlefield per zone in instanced areas. You can tell because you can find every monster listed in the .dats and monsters with identical IDs can only be up at one place in a zone, so there's no possibility of a second group in the same zone. In contrast, looking at the zone of things like BCNMs reveals triplicated monsters and you only face one set.

I don't even have groups and I understand that merging servers would bring more negatives than positives.

I don't solo Ambu, so I'm just going by what BG lists on their tables.

The tables list 5 values for gallantry, for 2,3,4,5,and 6 player groups.

Legion / Ambuscade is a single zone, it's just doing weird ***server side to create the effect of instancing. FFXI's server design just isn't designed to do dynamic zone creation / destruction. Legion isn't a BC, the contents are generated dynamically. If you do a search of the zone you can see not only everyone doing ambuscade but also everyone doing Legion. They actually share the same zone but have different entry queues.

Same coordinates, same monster IDs, same map, different copies. If multiple groups are in the same party while inside the zone, they each have their own loot pool. Seems instanced to me. Maybe they have 10 copies of the zone, maybe it's dynamically allocated, it doesn't really matter.

The bottom line is that they have a bottleneck in the way it's coded that makes it perform extremely poorly even at the limit they have in place. They can't pull resources out of nowhere, and rewriting the code is almost certainly not feasible from a manpower perspective. If it's a single bug causing the load, they don't seem concerned with finding it.