recommendation to solve instance abuse

I'm not suggesting that it LANDS you at a zoneline. I'm saying /pickzone only WORKS at zonelines.

Or another option could be "common LFG areas" with a message when you're in one (like Arenas do for temp PVP)

I beg to disagree.

Example:
I was camping in MM graveyard the other day, cycling the avenging caitliff placeholder. It spawned, but before I could pull it, somebody magically appeared right in that hallway and killed it. He either warped in or he was cycling through all the Mistmoores, waiting for sombody to have cycled the caitliff. Aside from his blatent disrespect for my efforts in keeping the placeholder cycled, and assuming he didn't warp, this is a classic case of manipulating instances to get more loot than you otherwise would.

Something like that could work too. I just figured, programatically, it would be easy for the coder to detect if there's a zoneline within N feet of a person when they attempt to do a /pickzone command. The devs wouldn't have to insert these "lfg" areas, then.

I agree. 15 minutes would be good enough to prevent a lot of instance scamming. In the event you do get split up from your group and don't want to wait 15 mins, it would take less than 15 minutes (probably less than 5 minutes) for everyone in the group to just zone out of the instance in question then all zone back in at the same time to get in the same one.

Depends Z-axis detection is weird in EQ - I could see a simple X distance from zone being problematic in Velk's Lab for example.

Just don/t see how this is that big an issue. Sure if you work at it late night/early morning you can probably keep some instances active swapping back and forth but PH's still must be killed and you can still only be in one place at a time. If you are losing a camp to others then you would lose it regardless of instancing. In fact having multiple instances helps deter KS'ing as you can only be in 1 at a time.

I think the succor point fix would be just like Nolrog said -- a way to manipulate zone travel.

But I still think a fix to increasing the picktime to 10 minutes would help, but also making it trigger on having any agro at all. That lets you move about a bit between instances, but once you do something that angers a mob in any way the timer kicks in.

Even having it a 5 minute timer if no agro is fine I think, and then a much longer timer for having agro in the zone (10+ minutes).

Make /pickzone 18 min timer or even 36.

Another option might be to force all of the people in a guild into the same zone. Then they would be forced to play nice, at least with each other. Sure, they can de-guild, exploit instances, and join the guild again, but that can be a chore as well.

But then they would all instantly go to one instance, and the only other instance they could pick would be the base one (where they would bind, since binding in the instances is bugged).

Don't you just hate it when select people abuse something good, so it has to now get tweaked, changed, and nerfed for everybody else. I hate people that abuse good things for their own gains, and ruin it for everybody else.

I think when thinking lesser of two evils, I'd rather people abuse succor point solution for traveling, than to see people hop instances to gank named and steal mobs from those camping them. Traveling is overrated, I don't really care if someone who's out of combat wants to travel across the karanas or get to the dungeon's zone line. If that solves the problems with instance hopping for named ganking, I'm all for it.

I'll also go for longer /pickzone timers, as long as they make sure you zone into the same instance as your group, even after death when you respawn and such.