Grinding?

We haven't finalised some of the exact details of instance management. It's one of the areas we're examining at the moment based on feedback from alpha testers.

We want to keep it as simple as possible, but to avoid situations where instances close that you wanted to keep open (or the more annoying case, where you have to wait for an instance to time out before you play in that area again).

We'll post more information once some hard decisions have been made.

Here are the basic rules we currently have for instances.

If you are not in a party and you haven't been to an area before, when you walk out into the wilderness, an instance will be created.

If you leave the instance, if no one else is in there, a timer starts (currently 3 minutes because we don't have instance management, but probably more like 20-30 minutes when the game is released.) If you come back within that timer the instance will still be just as you left it.

If you join a party then when you move into an area, you will end up in the instance that has the most party members in it.

Most of the time this just works naturally and you don't even need to think about it.

The reason we need instance management is because there is no real good timer value. If you need a break to go to the toilet or something you want to go back to town so that you don't die if you are just standing there and a monster happens to wander near you. 20-30 minutes seems a reasonable timer to have before the instance closes for this reason.

However, if you want to do boss runs or some other such thing then a 20-30 minute timer is a pain in the ass. You would have to sit there for ages waiting for your old instance to die before you can run it again.

My current thinking on this is something like being able to Control Click on an area transition or town portal in order to bring up the instance management screen.

This would just be a list of all the instances you have access to with times until they time out and an X next to each one to close it.

The trouble is that there are a lot of tricky rules to come up with to make sure this isn't abusable.

If you just use the rule that you can close any empty instance you have access to then you would be able to grief your party by closing an instance if you all went back to town. Should only the party leader be able to close instances? That might be annoying if you are playing in a party, but in different instances.

These issues still need to have solutions thought of for them and that is why we don't have the instance management in the game at the moment.