Instance lockout timers

[Euan]

Also what exact purpose do these serve? I was never a fan of these and never saw the reasoning behind them.

Gated progression. It stops hardcore players from getting too far ahead of casual players. Not to say that I am a fan of them either

It is true that this is an effect of lockouts, but I believe the true intention is to maximize the longevity of the content in question. If you can only run Gunbad one every three days, and every time you kill 'Ard to Eat he drops 2 chestpieces for a random class in your faction... it could take 6 runs or more for you to get your gear. That means you could be running Gunbad for your own gear, or to help others get theirs, for a month.

To say nothing of ToVL, which had a lockout timer of 4+ days (I don't remember exactly), and where each boss dropped some absurd combination of gear, ensuring that you needed to run it a dozen times with 3 different group compositions just to get 6 players their full set.

We haven't talked about lockouts, because we don't have a functioning instance system at the moment. One is in the works, but T4 is kind of more important right now. Trust me though, when it's ready, there will be discussions about lockouts.

As an aside, it also prevents a few higher-leveled and geared players from farming an instance to kit out their friends in a few hours, trivializing the content and indirectly harming those who have to do things the hard way.

Last time we got a dev letter they said instances are more important. Have things changed?

[RyanMakara]

Gated progression. It stops hardcore players from getting too far ahead of casual players. Not to say that I am a fan of them either

It is true that this is an effect of lockouts, but I believe the true intention is to maximize the longevity of the content in question. If you can only run Gunbad one every three days, and every time you kill 'Ard to Eat he drops 2 chestpieces for a random class in your faction... it could take 6 runs or more for you to get your gear. That means you could be running Gunbad for your own gear, or to help others get theirs, for a month.

To say nothing of ToVL, which had a lockout timer of 4+ days (I don't remember exactly), and where each boss dropped some absurd combination of gear, ensuring that you needed to run it a dozen times with 3 different group compositions just to get 6 players their full set.

We haven't talked about lockouts, because we don't have a functioning instance system at the moment. One is in the works, but T4 is kind of more important right now. Trust me though, when it's ready, there will be discussions about lockouts.

As an aside, it also prevents a few higher-leveled and geared players from farming an instance to kit out their friends in a few hours, trivializing the content and indirectly harming those who have to do things the hard way.

Last time we got a dev letter they said instances are more important. Have things changed?

Development on the dungeon building tool is a bit slow, it's much easier to focus on T4 aspects for the time being. We can't get started on dungeons as long as the tools aren't there yet, while we can already do preparation work for T4.

[Euan]

Cool, thanks again.