This is not the kind of topic I normally enjoy making on gaming forums, but I honestly feel like it needs to be addressed, at least on Klaipeda. I don’t know the situation on other servers, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to create mission instances in order to:

Enter a dungeon or mission with a pre-made, or alone. A pre-made 5-man party offers roughly 20% less total individual EXP than auto-queue, and so some people do prefer to pre-made or go with less. Or dungeon boss rushes. Enter Earth Tower, one of two endgame PvE contents with limited tries and cannot be reset by dungeon re-entry vouchers. Awaken items. Enter the guild hideout, to keep a guinea pig baby alive (inability to feed it results in it’s permanent death). Enter the Saalus Convent, the other limited entry PvE content, that cannot be reset either. This will be a larger issue when Transcendence is introduced into the game.

I know other players have mentioned their qualms with this problem, but I’d like to gather unified support. The likelihood of IMC responding may be small, but being vocal is probably better than being silent about it.

The five points sans the first one that I raised earlier cannot be worked around by using a queue system. You must enter them using manual entry, to which many of you have shared the same experiences of:

My team runs Earth Tower every day around 4-5 PM EST. It’s the only convenient time for us, because most of us are busy earlier, and some are in EU timezones so too much later and it’s too late. We currently farm 15/F, which a run of takes an hour to do. After two hours standing outside the entrance spamming space bar yesterday, we gave up on trying to enter Earth Tower. I re-organized my team 12 hours later at 4-5 AM EST and lo and behold we’re still unable to enter the instance (update: after an hour and a half, we managed to get into the instance right before the reset, so we at least got one run from yesterday in before the count reset. Three and a half hours total to enter Earth Tower once).

For those unaware, the game runs (ran?) on at least two types of servers (I’m going to use terminology freely here, even if it’s incorrect terms). A main server and a dungeon server. People auto-queue into the latter. It is seldom full, which is why you can auto-match into dungeons and missions with returning an error. When you do one of the five points listed above, it creates an instance within the former, main servers. This is why resource consumption for things like Poison Pot via Wugushi did not occur through auto-match, but does occur in pre-made.

I’m thoroughly convinced that as the week goes on from the start of maintenance, various nodes that the game creates instances on crash and fail to recover, making it more difficult to create additional instances. In terms of an analogy, it’s like right after maintenance, you are trying to fit 300 people through an airplane hangar door. Near the end of the week, the airplane hangar door narrows to a one-man doorway, and you still must fit the same 300 people through it. With this analogy in mind, there is a strong likelihood that I imagine this problem will persist today, tomorrow, and Monday as well, until the weekly maintenance fixes it for the beginning of the week.

Months ago, IMC would have performed an emergency maintenance for this kind of issue and many others (such as party cutscene). Why they are not communicating with the playerbase at this point is beyond me, and a flagrant offense to the people still playing the game.

I earnestly greatly enjoy this game. There’s a reason I still play it daily. But even when I stream it, I have a difficult time recommending it to new players due to all the issues that currently plague it.

I ask that IMC properly communicates with the players on these issues instead of addressing asinine questions in their Q&A that not nearly as many people are concerned about. And also to properly compensate the people who have been restricted by this event, in some way or another (extend King of the Tower event, for starters).

I apologize to the community in advance for the lengthy post. I hope some of you guys share the same sentiments as I do.