Greetings,
First, I would like to apologize for not sharing this information sooner. When we first made the announcement on the Japanese forums, we saw a large amount of feedback regarding it. Therefore, before moving forward with posting the exact same information, we wanted extra time to confirm that the suggestions made to alleviate the queue times for Ambuscade were just suggestions and not finalized.
That being said, the development team is currently examining every possible measure to alleviate the congestion issue; however, we are not able to make any further adjustments to the system itself.
We presented two possible solutions which may make an impact; however, we felt that these options would be poorly received by players. The first option was to place a time based restriction on challenging Ambuscade, similar to what we currently have for Omen. The second option was to remove the equipment and their upgrade materials from the list of rewards altogether.
Why only these two options?
There were many suggestions from our players, operations team, and the dev. team; however, when considering the options, we needed to make sure it is something that we can accomplish, and something that will make a clear impact to alleviate the situation. As a result of considering various options, the two suggestions we made above met these conditions.
We felt both of these options aren't viable for players, and as we can see here on this thread, there are far more comments against such changes. Therefore, we will not move forward with these measures. We will continue to look for other possible solutions; however, please note that the final decision we make may not be the outcome everyone can agree on.
Again, I apologize again for not bringing up this matter sooner, but we wanted to confirm these points before posting. We ask everyone to continue leaving feedback and possible suggestions, so we can relay them to the dev. team investigate.
Also, to give you all a better understanding to the situation, here are some common questions we've seen thus far.
- If you were to place a time based restriction on entry, do you have plans to ease the materials used for other content obtained from Ambuscade?
We have no plans to make adjustments to other corresponding battle content. For example, we have already made adjustments to the effect of cells for Voidwatch, adjusted the price of the Phase Displacer, removed the restriction on how many can be purchased, and adjusted how many can be purchased at one time. For this reason, we believe the difficulty has been eased. With this adjustment, the difficulty to create Empyrean weapons have also been lower than what we originally assumed. Therefore, we do not have any plans to consider any further adjustments to ease these, as they may lose their purpose entirely.
- Would increasing the number of NPCs used to enter resolve this issue?
This adjustment would be only be a visual one, and would not change the number of players that can enter the content on the system end. Instead, by having more NPCs available, we worry that more players will talk to these other NPCs at the same time, causing the queue times to be longer than it is now. At the very least, this would not change the current situation.
In addition to this, we are not able to increase the amount of players that can enter at once on the system end. This goes without saying that we do require additional resources and staff to do this, but furthermore, the major factor for this content relies on the base foundation of the system. Please note that any type of system-side adjustments to reduce queue times is near impossible.
- Isn't it possible to lower the amount points needed to obtain items?
The attributes set on these items were set based on the difficulty and effort required to obtain them. For this reason, we have no plans to adjust this; however, we are able to take another approach, such as adding other ways to obtain items like Abdhaljs Seals. While it does not directly affect the point requirement, it does have the same effect as lowering the points. It is a very subtle change, but we believe we can expand a bit more into making these type of changes.