Instance Reset Timer

Hello,

I see there have been a few threads on this already, but none recently.

I would really love to see the option to increase the amount of time it takes for an instance to reset. Frankly, even if this comes as a cash shop only option (to account for the server drain of running old instances), I'd still be happy to see it.

15 minutes is a long time for most people, but it is incredibly frustrating for people on unreliable internet connections. While consistently unreliable access is rare, everyone suffers from occasional difficulties.

The following situation happened to me last night and it was *far* more frustrating than it had to be:

I was levelling a new character with fairly standard gear. I made it to the prison, great!

I cleared the lower prison looking for stairs, found the upper prison. Started to clear the upper prison for a bit, looking for the Warden's chambers. Got disconnected and could not reconnect for several minutes.

Reconnect, go back to lower prison...whoops, it's already reset. Repeat above process. Predictably, the upper prison had reset by the time I found the stairs. Start working in upper prison, get disconnected again, repeat entire process.

In the end, I had to run through (and mostly clear) the lower prison 4 times before I finally had a shot at killing Brutus. Believe me, having to kill Chatters 4 times in a row as melee with untwinked gear/gems is not a fun experience.

This isn't really a one-time thing, as my connection has been flaky for a week and it just keeps happening.

Like I said, I'd consider paying a reasonable amount of money to bump my instance timer up to a few hours or something. That'd also take care of long trips to town, or having to town portal+afk due to an unexpected emergency (or unexpected visitors), etc. Of course, if this is a non-paid option that would be nice also!

As an aside: having to re-invite partymembers every time you lose link for 1-2 minutes is also kinda annoying :)

First of all I am not sure if the timer really is 15 minutes.
Last night I got a phonecall while playing and put up a town portal to answer the phone. While I was still on the phone I could see the portal poofing in town. A minute or so later when I hung up the phone I saw that the call had lasted 11 minutes, hence if town portals are linked to zone reset, then the timer is more like 10 minutes.

Either way 10 minutes is way too short time for a town portal. It should either be extended to half an hour or indefinately (since zones can be reset manually).

I too question the validity of 15 minutes as a flat rate. I really do.

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Fubbik wrote:

First of all I am not sure if the timer really is 15 minutes.

It isn't, necessarily - it depends on the area. Some go as low as eight minutes (this is a relatively recent change), if they're not expecting a player to need to revisit it.

Personally, I think the timer should stay, but be prevented from closing the instance if there's a portal open in it. Since any given player can only have one portal open, this shouldn't affect server load too much.

For me, the timer is a big turn off... I have a baby and while playing I occasionally need to leave the game for short time (AFK in town for 5-20min) to change diapers, bathing the baby, etc.

When I come back to the game the timer has run-out and I need to redo the instance... Rinse and repeat.

:/

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Saela wrote:

Like I said, I'd consider paying a reasonable amount of money to bump my instance timer up to a few hours or something.

This is not unreasonable at all. Paying customers are the 10%, therefore allocating them more server resources scales well.

Purely from a feeling standpoint I have no issue with this. Whether that's going to sell well is another question.

I would definitely buy an "upgrade" that would allow me to bypass the 15 min logout or reset of the last instance visited, without going crazy, perhaps increasing the limit to one hour?

My suggestion is to have an option to reset instance that the player can choose.

Like in WoW you can right click your portrait and reset instance.

But since they want to put a time limit on maps so players can't farm one particular map,
They can make the reset instance button only available after 15 minutes.
It is frustrating if you can't afk, go eat dinner or something happens your instance gets closed.

I like it as it is, but I'm pretty sure that this will be addressed after the server upgrade.

I did a full clear of church dungeon. Grabbed some loot and went to town to sell.
I teleported back to church dungeon and promptlty got disconnected. I log back in and teleported to church dungeon again. Instance was reset.

This happened in the space of two minutes. That is a big downer. I had loot still to grab but the worst part aside from the loot is the fact that I now have to clear the instance again to advance the quest. This is not an issue currently but later on this will be a huge issue.


Now that more people are testing is there perhaps a built in load distribution cap that has been forgotten about?

I would also like to see an instance idle-time limit increased as well. As I understand it, currently if an area has only 2 exits it will expire in 8 minutes of inactivity and if an instance has more than 2 exits it will expire in 15 minutes of inactivity.

I agree with a few of the solutions mentioned in this post, I'd also be willing a pay a little in the shop to have my instance time limit increased.

I'm a father of a toddler as well and I have to sometimes portal to town to take care of some business.

I'd like to make a suggestion of having a trigger than you can control to increase the instance expiration time. For example, I'd like to see an option where I can type in a status, such as /afk that will set my character to an away mode which also will temporarily lengthen my current instances' timers. Any movements or actions to my character after setting /afk will automatically clear the away status and return the instance timers back to their pre-afk time, or even reset to the default 8/15 minute interval.

Another suggestion is to not have an instance timer run on any instances that have a town portal open; this seems like a simple solution.