How many instances of your dungeon did you see primetime?

I was in unrest and I think there were 5 dungeons up with an average of 30 players in each.

I ran through roughly 6 or 7 dungeons and that seemed to be the average per instance, around 30 with the only exception being perma which only had one instance at 42.

The problem is that instances don't collapse / go away until they are empty. Right now there are 4 instances of South Ro, one with 42 players, and 3 with 1 to 2 players each. I think there should be a mechanism that merges low population instances periodically.

Not entirely sure the best mechanism for this, as of course that might result in people losing their camp if someone else was camping it in the instance they merged into, but something has to be done or we'll always have 4 or 5 'ghost town' instances with just a few players who basically get the whole zone to themselves and one 'normal' instance with the bulk of the population.

Sure, the selfish part of me thinks this is awesome, as I can simply /pickzone to an instance with 1 player and have a hay day farming whatever I want, but I recognize that this is not healthy for the community or the server, long term.

In fact, I am hopeful that DBG is monitoring the server population and will REMOVE the /pickzone feature over time, as the population spreads out and expansions open up. Its a nice way to relieve overcrowding during the classic era when there is little content to support thousands of players, but we all know that even if people don't unsubscribe, the longer the server is up, the more spread out the "active" population at any given point in time will be (people will go back to work, start logging in only a couple of times a week, levels will be spread out more, alts will be created, etc). Clearly, at this moment it is off-peak, but as I run around and check the zones, I have yet to find a single zone that actually *should* be instanced, yet all of them are! (85 players in Commonlands prime, 5 instances, with 5 - 10 players each in the splinters. Great if you want an orc or Dervish camp, but crappy for the community).

It is not crappy for the community. DBG just needs to merge the chat channels into one for each zone... The problem is when you get a zone limit of 400 in chat.

The problem I see with the instancing is that large guilds are going to populate say Lower Guk with enough people to spawn a a new zone. Leave a couple people in first one to lock down camps and move to Zone # 2 to spawn another new zone. They can keep doing this until they have a multitude of zones just for the guild to lock down multiples of the same camp.

I would be highly shocked if you don't start seeing TL and other large guilds abusing this soon if they havn't already.

Why does this matter if they or anyone else does this?

You think TL would bother mustering 300 people to farm an item that is inferior to raid gear?
You understand that they basically have no competition and will be dripping in raid loot on mains, alts and alts alts in a month or three right?

If a RMT wants to pay $450 to use 30 boxes to spawn a new instance so he can farm a fbss and sell it for $20... more power to him. DB is making money!
I cant see anyone that dumb but included that example preemptively

Can't collapse an instance until everyone leaves. Imagine the poor guy getting the named he has been camping solo down to 1% only to get "your instance has closed, loading please wait"

oh and was not a Dungeon but in Lavastorm last night there were 3 instances with roughly 25 people in each.

All of this, 10/10.

Yep. Collapsing instances that have just a couple people is a must-do.

We've been told over and over it's not a 'private dungeon' feature, but with zombie instances with 2-3 people, that's exactly what it is.

Simple enough to provide a 10 minute warning or whatever and move people into a larger instance.

I too am hopeful the feature will be removed from zones as it becomes unnecessary. It's an emergency fix that should NOT become the standard way to play on a progression server. I'm sure it's simple enough to turn off as it becomes unneeded, and that's what should happen.

Agreed!

If those in the 1-5 ppl zones wish to move to another more populated zone, they can /pick. Leave it up to them to decide how and where they want to play?

That is not the intention for pickkzone as far as I can see. It is to allow overcrowded zones to still have content that can be accessed, not to allow your own personal zone. Part of that is appropriately collapsing the instances to keep zone prime populated as necessary.

Thats not what Eradikater was saying. if people end up in an small pop instance they can choose to leave it. Instances are not started with /pick but you can delete one with it if you are the last player in the zone. if a player gets put in a low pop instance and they are soloing and don't care to move, how does that change how everyone else plays. as long as you can't create your own instance it should be fine, because you can't control who and when someone comes into the instance you are in.

So people are worried that items will be over farmed and that said items will lose value?

Why are we worried about this?

The only people worried are the people that have intentions on making a lot of plat, maybe for their own use or to sell. The reality is that there needs to be more items due to increased population, having just a limited supply would artificially inflate the value of the items, more people should = more supply not the same supply.

Because people want to stroke their egos .. and sell gear for lots of plat...

Arguments all over the forum about balance and economy are being made and the reason it is all holding together is that there are, for example 4 times as many players so there are 4 times as many zone instances. If that ratio gets off a little it won't be the end of the world. If there is 4 zones and only enough players to properly populate 1, an imbalance is going to happen. That is how it effects everyone.

Well then you can't trade the gear for like 10 Krono each

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Uh-huh, o-0.