I have a character whose job is to care for a good bit of my trade materials, some quest materials and other things. Her station is in a standard Guild Hall. Given a choice she stays in there except to be introduced to a friend or when a server reset places her in Guild Lobby. Until now, that is . . . Yesterday and today I am noticing that each time she camps out she is relocated to the Lobby.
That may mean no one was in your GH for a period of time. Its an instanced zone I believe so it probably spun down. But thats just a guess.
This a new change...I have a standard guild hall for my alts and each time they log out they log in at the guild lobby. I used to be able to log back into my guild hall even being offline for a day or two. It seems DP has taken ANY instance zone and shrunk the amount of time it is vacant before it poofs to save server load (speculation). Kind of annoying wish they would put an exception to guildhalls.
If the GH instance is not available, a new GH should be spun up when the character logs back in rather than putting them in the lobby. Even if it was a reset of the GH, that would be fine. Just make it essentially the same as if the character went through the GH door. That's what the person will do anyway when they get tossed into the lobby. Save them the hassle of walking over the GH door and just put them in a new GH to begin with.
So fun fact: before the last update, guild halls weren't closing properly. At all. It's why there were issues where new zone instances wouldn't spin up, those hosts were overloaded. What was happening before (your guild hall instance staying up for days even with no one in it) was a bug. Now they're properly closing after being empty for 15 minutes. When you log in and your character was in a guild hall that's no longer up, the game doesn't know if it was your guild hall, your brother's guild hall, or a random stranger's guild hall, all it knows is the instance number it's looking for. Because it can't find an instance running with that number, it punts you back to a safe spot.
While i get this important for stability and performance, any chance it could remember the last port, i was doing some anniversary quests and had to buy the same stone every 15-20min. Not a priority for sure but a nice to have
Make a free account. Make a level 1 character on that account. Invite level 1 toon to the guild. Log the character on and park it in the guild hall while you go do other things on your main account(s). Boom...guild hall stays open for as long as you want.
Odd that guild halls have been around for YEARS but now we learn if they exist more than 15 minutes while empty it's a bug. This sounds more like a change in policy designed to free up server load because no one has heard of this "bug" since GHs have been around which has been how many years?
Guild Halls have always been supposed to close after 15 minutes of being empty as they are instanced zones.
This is why guilds would leave one person logged into guild hall at all times - so the port would not close. Personally I thought it was 10 minutes. I even made a little alt whose only job is to sit in the guild hall when I don't want the port to expire.
Wouldn't it be better for the overall server-health if guilds stopped doing that? Maybe the server lag is partially our own fault...
Except, if they don't do that... casting GH anchor TL has disastrous consequences. Really, any Anchor TL/port can run into this issue.
I have to wonder if this has also been responsible for some of the guild hall issues we've seen over the years, both personally and anecdotally from others!
Yes, I suspect you are right. There's lots of weird stuff with regards to anchors, guild guests, camping, etc. I think we all can understand the need to save server computing resources if a GH is not in use, but it seems like this isn't an impossible problem to solve. Save the GH state when deleting the instance and restore it as necessary so it's seamless to the user. This doesn't have to be done with all instances in EQ, as many instances are understood to be temporary (like missions). But a GH is something which should have the feeling of permanence. I'm sure the current behavior has caused much confusion and hassles to the users. It'd be great if they could spin up the GH as necessary with the correct state so that users aren't kicked to the GL just because there doesn't happen to be a GH instance at that moment. Or if nothing else, have the GH have a much longer timeout than random instances. I feel that having the GH empty for 15 minutes is way too short to decide to delete it. It should be something more like 6 or 12 hours. Guilds who are raiding or whatever may be out of the GH for hours. It would be nice if they could return to it easily after raiding for hours.
Here's a really stupid idea I suppose but could guildhalls and player housing be hosted on the PLAYER computer and the datapackets synced to the EQ servers? That way the CPU time is offloaded to the playerbase and no bazillion instances will need to be created. Downsides to this idea are, of course, EQ has never done this and the potential for some forms of cheating I suppose although this can be possibly overcome through checksums or something else?
