Time 'instancing' fubar.

[Qhue]

Well it didnt take long for the new "Instancing" code that accompanied the Plane of Time patch to become undone. Right now Time is NOT instanced on Tunare through some bizarre bug that is apparently starting to manifest itself on other servers.

On monday my guild (Talisman) zoned into TimeB for the first time in over 7 days as we share the plane with a week-long rotation with the other North American timezone guild. Given that it had clearly been >> respawn time since we were last there we expected to find that our instance was fully spawned....instead what we found was that phases 2 and 3 were down and 2 of the phase 4 gods were dead! A little investigation showed that this was the exact configuration that was left on the Asian timezone's guild from earlier in the day. The first person to click over into TimeB had not gotten the friendly red warning about creating a new instance if they continued...the instancing was simply not working or at least had given us a copy of a different guild's "save point".

Having received no GM support on the matter at allwe proceeded to clear phase 4 and part of phase 5 before heading to bed and hoping that we'd start again today with a fresh instance. We found out when the asian guild started their raiding Tuesday morning that they got the same instance we had been in the night before. Where they had left half of phase 4 up they now found themselves facing the half of phase 5 we left up. They made no progress on phase 5 and left it in the same state they found it in. We log in tonight and are once again at Phase 5, we clear it and progress onto Quarm where we fail and have camped for the night.

So right now the asian guild will wake up tomorrow and, despite not having killed Vallon Zek yet, will port straight up to Quarm. Again this evening we made VERY certain that the first person to click in had ZERO connection to our raid on monday as the secondary in question hadnt been logged in for days. Once again no red "instance" warning message and we got happily ported into the shared instance.

I'm not sure without having the other North American guild zone into Time and try and start a raid if we have a situation where two guilds are sharing ONE instance and the 3rd guild is in an instance by themselves, or if instancing is just plain broken entirely and we are all back to sharing one verison of Time. Regardless its clearly pretty FUBAR right now.

I heard from others tonight that found themselves suddenly in an instance that was different than the one they left the previous night so perhaps this is not an isolated fluke on Tunare but is actually spreading to other servers as well...

[Zith]

Same thing has happened on Cazic Thule.

We cleared phases 1-3 at the end of our week in the rotation (we rotate with an alliance of 2 guilds), and when they went in they beat the trials and went straight to phase 4.

This was their first trip to the zone, so it is probably just as frustrating for them as it is for us.

Pretty shitty that it is broken like this, hopefully it can get fixed ASAP.


edit - typos suck

[Furor Planedefiler]

The instancing can support a max of Two Guilds. If you're not one of the two guilds to start the instancing, you'll end up in one of the other instances.

Solution? More instances.

[Tilien]

From what I have heard RN is screwed too, but I will not know for certain until tommorrow when we zone in. Other guild ran into our instance today. They cleared Time, so I'm curious to see if we will find anything up at all.

edit: I wonder if the fact that we are in a 2 guild alliance might be a cause for breaking the instance.

Are only 2 total different guilds allowed in Time?

[Kain of BotS]

more instances means SOE has to mess with it more, which means more work, and why would they do that!?

[Metranon]

bottom line is they need to fully LDonize it, to support more than 1 raid at once and much more than 2 guilds, anything less is unacceptable

[KiL4H]

i am not 100% sure, but PoTime doesnt have instances exactly. Intances means you could have 2 seperate raids at the same time in the same zone killing their owns mobs, which is not the case. In PoTime you have "save points", and as furor said seems that there is only 2 safepoints avalaible.

[Nakilos]

It isn't by guild, its an individual player who starts it. We discovered this when one evening we had someone who just got back from a week vacation being the first one to zone in to the tier 1 events, causing a new instance to be started, and resulting in delaying the raid 1 hour while we waited for that instance to stop. It also seems to temporarily flag all people who were in said instance for the following days raid days likely when you proceed to the next tier (this would explain why no one else was able to zone in when the just off vacation player zoned in first). I assume it was done this way to prevent cheese farming time - you could effectively just clear time in 1-2 days, start a new instance with another member and clear another set of spawns while the first instance respawns.

Regardless, that is a pretty ass problem especially for servers who are rediculously overcrowded. I can't wait til full instancing actually works and this pseudo instancing goes away. I would expect within the next 2-4 months most servers will have 3-6+ guilds in Time and without a working system, its just a big clog at the high end.

Oh wanted to add Furor is likely right about there only being 2 saved instances at a time, because we have yet to experience this problem with 1 other guild in Time, and they haven't ended up with assorted tiers up/down and vice versa. I would assume the "save" happens every time a part of a tier is completed (meaning if you kill 1 god, 3 will be up the next day, or kill 1 tier 2 boss, a shadow would be up if you left after killing just 1) rather than at just 1-2 specific points.

[Qhue]

Okay I did some digging and came up with the following:

The instancing was working perfectly fine a week ago. As of the last time we handed off to another guild in the North American rotation they got a fresh instance that was neither ours nor the Asian guilds so it WAS possible to have more than two instances a week ago.

In the interim apparently some guilds, by accidently spawning new instances when the wrong person clicked over first, found out how to reliably spawn new instances whenever they wanted and were clearing Time (or at least as many of the gods as they could) nearly everday despite the longer respawn timer.


My guess is that they partially disabled the instancing to prevent this from happening and figured that TWO was enough simultaneous instances to keep around since that would allow a NA guild and a Euro/Asian guild to both use it...only they didnt account for a) Tunare having THREE guilds and b) the determination of which instance anyone gets to be messed up... so now we have all kinds of problems !

Its really very frustrating

[Lenardo]

Qhue

Gallenite(scott hartsman) has read this thread.


expect it to be fixed soon.....

[Aellis Freewind]

more instances means SOE has to mess with it more, which means more work, and why would they do that!?

Because its their job?

[Sampo]

may as well break it too, hey, why not right

[Southern]

thanks a lot for the fix (well I assume its working right now!).

fairly timely, within a week...not bad.

[Pasteton]

so is that why the zones were taken down yesterday? seems they regayed the drop rate in phase 3 at the same time, any one else notice this?

[CeNo65]

you just got the ass end of the RNG Pasteton, drops seemed fine yesterday

lemme guess, you got 2 loots, and they were both arms ?