AA Fight instances

[larrymc]

Greetings,

Below are two comments from Akihiko Matsui about the wait times for Ark Angel battlefields.

In Summary - Wait until the content is no longer in high demand .. that will solve the congestion problem. I don't like the answer, but at least we got an answer.

I do have another question since revamped Skirmish was mentioned - not sure if I should start a new thread for this or not ... Will the upgrade path to Skirmish 119 gear "erase" the augments on our existing skirmish gear?

[Alhanelem]

In Summary - Wait until the content is no longer in high demand .. that will solve the congestion problem. I don't like the answer, but at least we got an answer.

I do have another question since revamped Skirmish was mentioned - not sure if I should start a new thread for this or not ... Will the upgrade path to Skirmish 119 gear "erase" the augments on our existing skirmish gear?

I think a better way to look at it is: "It's too difficult to modify the area to support more groups, so we will add more battlefields that have the things people want most from the AA fights, so that people can still get these items if that area is full."

Either way means we have to wait some time for it to be addressed- there isn't going to be an immediate solution.

[bungiefanNA]

More like "we want to add more battles to spread out the congestion, while we work out how to add more instances to the currently congested battlefields" which is a faster fix for now. Having something new to do, and with some unique and some of the same rewards, will spread out the groups doing these battles.

[Sephiran]

This game obviously merits some server-side love. SE, can we please get new higher-end servers for this game? That way you wouldn't have to worry about adding new spells. It would also help the congestion issues immensely.

[Trumpy]

I hope there is more than 3 fight instances for the next two new battles.

Maybe i am just dumb or something but it seems like to me they could just add a "duplicate" zone or something maybe with more fight instances if it was needed and just change the entrance to send you there when the first three are full? Maybe i just dont understand how these things work or why its soo difficult. I kinda figured they would have worked on the making it instanced better before they released this stuff.

[Dragoy]

I would like to think that things could be worse.

They could have put a three-day block on re-entry for example. =]

Not that I'm bothered by it in any way personally; I lack access to Adōulin and the equipment it provides, and thus I don't feel like I should like to be gallivanting too close to the high-level angels.

I do hope the new battlefields will clear things up a bit for those who are being 'hit' by this. I also hope that it will reduce the prices on certain materials (5 million gilzors for a log, really?).


Trumpy,

As far as I understand, it will be the limit that always has been for those areas, just like it is for the existing ones. It will be like that until/if they manage to re-structure the system.

Or at least that's how it seems to me.

[MDenham]

Part of the problem (okay, really, most of the problem) is how instances are implemented in FFXI: every instance of a given battlefield is in the same zone, rather than a more straightforward "we create an actual new copy of the zone for each group in the battlefield". While this means that they therefore have a more predictable server load (in that they don't have to worry about abnormal "spikes" in usage of one of the zone servers), it also means that things are quite a bit less flexible.

This is partly due to virtualization being a somewhat unproven technology in 2002 - a full rewrite of the server code to take advantage of virtualization and allow more efficient usage of the existing servers would be nice and would probably allow them to implement true instancing of zones, but it's a lot of work for, at this point, not very much payoff.

It's one of those unfortunate side effects of playing a game that's over a decade old, but maybe they'll end up fixing it. (I'm not holding my breath because implementing this is a sign that the devs have run out of other things to do. :-D)

[MarkovChain]

So basically, we need to stack SKC and then BAM! Free plutons boxes (without even farming) into VD SKC10/20 ? Now I need to build my points again.


Suggestion for the dev : limit the entry to the bcnms to 3 persons minimum. Some jobs can solo up to normal...

[Demonjustin]

I disagree with the idea of having minimum player requirements added to the battlefields, I do not think they are ever a proper solution to congestion issues.

[Hvinire]

Greetings,

I’d like to give a follow-up on the congestion of La'Loff Ampitheater.

As previously mentioned, we will be continuing to release other attractive content in addition to these new battlefields, which will aid in the reduction of congestion. To give you an example, we will be adding new skirmishes and also making adjustments to Delve to make it easier to access with fewer members.

The development team is currently in the midst of looking into other improvement measures as there is still congestion as well as items that can only be obtained from the ark angel battles.

We’ve been receiving a lot of requests and feedback mentioning that the best way to deal with this congestion is to just add more instances. However, to actually do this it would be roughly the same amount of work and testing as adding a whole new type of content or could even require more time. Likewise, the same goes for having ark angels spawn in other battlefields. The reason being that if something is added to existing battlefields there is a possibility that bugs will arise in the existing elements, and it would take time to test for this.

Based on the above, we would like to see the conditions after the February version update and then make a decision about adding instances. I apologize that we are not able to fix this issue right away, and we appreciate your understanding.