Replace Ambuscade with a cash shop.

just do what the people that spam VD have been doing.... git gud! stop whining that you dont have what is required to make a good party, take your attention away from ambuscade for a while then and focus getting better at your job and gear better, then you'll be doing ambuscade on VD much more

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Originally Posted by Clou777

just do what the people that spam VD have been doing.... git gud! stop whining that you dont have what is required to make a good party, take your attention away from ambuscade for a while then and focus getting better at your job and gear better, then you'll be doing ambuscade on VD much more

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So this is sarcastic, but it's the truth.

Why are you even playing if you aren't going to improve.

Life is about optimization. Really, git gud. Spend 2 hours a MONTH doing ambuscade instead of 10, and get on to more important things. It really, honestly, doesn't take much effort. If you're willing to waste hundreds of hours being bad, imagine what you could channel that energy into instead.

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Originally Posted by detlef

Thing is, gallantry and hallmarks aren't mutually exclusive. Teaming up is the only way to get gallantry yes, but it also allows you to get hallmarks more efficiently as well. There's no reason not to team up and that is the point I've espoused here and elsewhere. That's the only way to reduce congestion that players have control over. Requesting major changes from SE will yield bandaid results at best; it's far more important to change the mentality of the playerbase.

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You keep saying "There is no reason not to team up" when there can be plenty of reasons not to want to team up sometimes.

- My linkshell isn't on. They're on the west coast and I'm on the east coast so we're not on at the same often. And I don't feel like partnering up with strangers today.
- Today, I don't feel like going other peoples' pace. I feel like going at my own pace.
- I'm only going in once each for both Regular and Intense. I'm not going to waste time finding a party when I only intend to be on for less than an hour anyway. I want to log on and log off.
- Maybe I'm a person who doesn't care for gallantry drops; I just want to work on capes today. Otherwise, we already have all the gear we desire already and it's just a matter of upgrading it. There are 5 very low cost metals from just hallmarks and if someone is satisfied to just update one piece every two months, so what?

You may condescend others, talking as if they haven't experienced this game enough to have an opinion. But if I might say, you sound as though you can only speak to the perspective of somebody who still plays this game for hours at a time. That is out of touch with a portion of the playerbase that has aged and is content to be casual at this game.

It shows in the attitudes of people who have a problem with soloers in this thread that you assume many of the players soloing aren't "gud". Plenty of them are are "gud", probably even by your standards. Sometimes people just feel like soloing and owe you no explanation for why they want to.

So before anybody comes up with a solution that would mandate partying, I get you Asura people think you still have the purest experience of this game and all, but think about how that will impact people on other servers.

I think you've misinterpreted some things and confused a few other things.

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Originally Posted by Ketaru

You may condescend others, talking as if they haven't experienced this game enough to have an opinion. But if I might say, you sound as though you can only speak to the perspective of somebody who still plays this game for hours at a time. That is out of touch with a portion of the playerbase that has aged and is content to be casual at this game.

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First, the whole reason I even bring up new/returning players. Ambuscade's been around for what, a year? A little more than that? I've been around for all of that. You need 14.5k hallmarks per month to get the +1 body from total hallmarks, and I've done that. My response to Folken was that I didn't think he'd experienced Ambuscade on a monthly basis because I disagreed with his assertion that there is no congestion in Ambuscade. I came to this conclusion because he's trying to farm hallmarks for vouchers and I assume he was trying to obtain gear he had missed due to being unsubscribed or something so he wouldn't have a good idea of what it could be like when people were competing for instances. If he's been doing it all this time then I was wrong. But casuals should as concerned about congestion as anybody, because often times they don't have a choice when they can log on and can only run during peak NA or JP times.

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Originally Posted by Ketaru

- My linkshell isn't on. They're on the west coast and I'm on the east coast so we're not on at the same often. And I don't feel like partnering up with strangers today.
- Today, I don't feel like going other peoples' pace. I feel like going at my own pace.
- I'm only going in once each for both Regular and Intense. I'm not going to waste time finding a party when I only intend to be on for less than an hour anyway. I want to log on and log off.
- Maybe I'm a person who doesn't care for gallantry drops; I just want to work on capes today. Otherwise, we already have all the gear we desire already and it's just a matter of upgrading it. There are 5 very low cost metals from just hallmarks and if someone is satisfied to just update one piece every two months, so what?

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All legitimate reasons of course. I keep to myself a lot of the time for many of the same reasons you do. I guess I should have been clearer. There is no reason not to team up from a rewards standpoint. You could solo Intense VE for 200 hallmarks, or you could team up with a stranger and clear VE faster for the same 200 hallmarks plus a small bonus of 20 gallantry. Or attempt a higher difficulty. I will grant you that 20 gallantry is a piddly amount and you'd be in the right to be critical of that.

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Originally Posted by Ketaru

It shows in the attitudes of people who have a problem with soloers in this thread that you assume many of the players soloing aren't "gud". Plenty of them are are "gud", probably even by your standards. Sometimes people just feel like soloing and owe you no explanation for why they want to.

So before anybody comes up with a solution that would mandate partying, I get you Asura people think you still have the purest experience of this game and all, but think about how that will impact people on other servers.

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Hey maybe I have the wrong idea then. A lot of the soloers I see on Valefor (I'm on Valefor by the way) are plenty capable. But at the same time, a lot of the most vocal players on this forum are much less than that. I just wish they'd partner up. A player like you doing a couple Ambuscade runs in a night isn't even noticeable. What I see are people spamming runs back to back to back for a couple hours who would stand to benefit from partying up.

So yeah, I'm not on Asura. I just recognize an issue that negatively impacts a lot of players.

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Originally Posted by Ketaru

It shows in the attitudes of people who have a problem with soloers in this thread that you assume many of the players soloing aren't "gud". Plenty of them are are "gud", probably even by your standards. Sometimes people just feel like soloing and owe you no explanation for why they want to.

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You're right, and it often takes more skill to "solo with trusts" on the lower difficulty levels, than it takes to just hammer Very Difficult with a team of real players.

My Trusts spam WS that heal the NM when it is in Absorb Skillchain mode, and my healer trusts always make sure they are standing in the path of frontal AOE. Also my healer trusts sometimes prioritise casting Erase on my Gravity effect, instead of curing me. This despite the fact that Gravity does not bother me at all, I have no plans to go jogging, I'm standing still and my health is in the red, but they are removing my Gravity effect. This is especially bad when the NM is using Aura Gravity, so it is a permanent effect.

By contrast, a full party of players, we will all agree beforehand that Gravity is not an issue, and that the priority is to spam cures. And that certain Skillchains will be absorbed, and should be avoided. Etc. Players also have a lot of -DT gear and such, even the healers. This is not the case with Trusts.

There has always been a certain resentment towards solo players in FFXI, dating back to Beastmaster in 2004~ when people would literally stalk BSTs across a map and kill the charm pets. People would wait until the BST was about to switch pets, and the people would suddenly voke the new charm pet, and the BST would be killed by the VT mob s/he was soloing. I also got a lot of resentment when I solo'd on my PUP, although it was never as bad as on BST. I hold the view that people hated solo BST because people were simply ***jealous*** of the mad winly skills that solo BSTs had, and the huge amount of loot BSTs could farm alone.

Re; Ambuscade specifically, I think it is unfair to blame solo players for Ambuscade problems. I would argue that there are too many treasures in Ambuscade, there are the capes and the huge number of cape upgrade materials, there are the armour sets and the metals for +2 armours, and then ontop of that there are all of the valuable RME items and Afterglow rocks which can be purchased.

It is a lot of treasure to offer from one entrance point. I think we should be asking why all of this stuff wasn't spread around 5 different events / entrance points, instead of just blaming people who happen to play solo, either because they simply enjoy playing solo, or because they can't get a decent party on their server / time of day.
:)

Brace yourselves for a post that will not convince anyone of anything:

Ambuscade queues are only a problem on Asura, and I strongly oppose any change, like a 3-person minimum, that narrows the QoL choices for all players based on the experiences of one server people could leave if they wanted to.

But. But. Ambuscade's structure since its implementation has leaned so heavily towards doing Intense (bigger rewards, harder Regulars, fewer kills for the KI) that I wonder if there's any reason to do Regular at all. This isn't just an efficiency thing: V1VE is as rewarding as - and usually much easier than - V2D, and the KI quest is quicker, too. Shout out to my solo homies, I find soloing Ambuscade while listening to podcasts fun, too, but just shout for three other DDs, get a tank/healer if you can and Trust those slots otherwise, and YOLO V1VE until y'all get bored. It's 119.

A better restriction would be time limit (or maybe bonuses/penalties based on completion time). Even if you going full pt if you taking that full 30 min you are just as bad as the guy soloing in 5. And that guy taking 15 minutes to solo is really bogging things down. If you taking more than 10 minutes to do this you should be doing an easier difficulty