Instance Limit

Short and sweet, but…

What is the purpose behind the 10 instances per hour per server limit? I’m sure with Warbands becoming a thing soon, a lot of people are going to hit that if they’re farming an old instance over and over to target collecting the appearances for their characters. It’s also an issue now, and during most in-game holidays with dungeon events, because having more than 10 characters per server is not unusual for people who multi-alt.

Can this not-so-helpful feature be removed in future patches? Or even upped to 20-30 instance per hour lock?

14 Likes

One reason is it’s used to combat over farming by RMT/bots who will sell off every piece of loot they get for gold however it does not stop or combat them from making gold easily which comes to my next point:

The 10 Instances an hour is punishing players more than it is RMT. Each RMT company has hundreds if not thousands of people/bots all constantly making gold. The people who are controlling the bots just switch to a different set of bots once they make their ten instance runs and wait for the previous set to be finished. I’m not saying that’s what happens but it’s what I personally do with my 2 accounts when I’ve hit my instance limit on one.

Again 10 instance limit an hour is an archaic practice and punishes the average player more than it limits the RMT from collecting their payday. If they’re adamant about keeping a limit then it needs an increase especially as some older instances are finished in less than 5 minutes.

10 Likes

Right, there’s plenty of non-instanced content and boosting that is done outdoors, and bots/people who do RMT are going to find a way to do what they do outside of that 10 instance limit. But for short queued content like Crown Chemical Co, Horseman, Coren Direbrew runs etc or old xmog runs when warbands comes out is punishing the casual player and not the bot/RMTer.

5 Likes

I experienced this today, and by far it is ruining the experience. Log into a character I havn’t played today, just to be told by the system that this character “Has been in too many instances lately”. Okay, so when does that timer end? If they’re going to keep up with this stupidity of “Anti-BOT” crap then their needs to be a visual reminder to the player upon login “Oh hey, yeah because of our failure of BOT control you now have to wait XX minutes before we’ll allow you, a non-BOT player, the availability to do instanced content.”

They need to come up with better systems to combat BOTs. Most of their systems in one way or another detract from the common players ability to experience the game. Like with these types of events where it’s an instanced event, where players are more incentivized to run multiple alts thru everyday to garner the mount or toy which have a stupid drop rate. Either increase the drop rate beyond .000000000000000000001%, or remove this stupidity during at least holiday events.

3 Likes

Outside of the, my remaining holiday event farm am not hitting instance cap normally. It would be nice if ChemCo would/could be excluded in the future given the low drop rate and repeat nature of the farm (moreso than any other holiday mount in terms of years). I assume it is to combat bot farming though, have reported in the past there were hotspot dungeons the bots liked. Only other time I would instance cap, would be LFR farm for the monthly activities if I went that route or was farming transmog, quite easy to hit if you don’t plan to not hit the limit with running wings in a certain order/being optimal. If I went LFR Argus am sure I could hit cap shortly. ChemCo it’s the 5-7 hours it takes mostly due to run gating. I can push runs in about half an hour to cap, but then I wouldn’t be able to continue that pace. ChemCo I get hit pretty hard running the 60 daily still this year. I agree the bots will be optimal, same as certain leveling boost metas they will use outdoors time also and have it strategized. The only way around that 10/hr was another account which really isn’t a solution. I feel holiday time is the main time it’s inconvenient to the player doing mount runs for time limited fomo. I wouldn’t want the 10/hr to be completely lifted though I think an average player should be able to farm dungeons/raids comfortably. The holiday queues are separate short encounter dungeons, most of the chemco time is spent waiting on queues to pop (even the tank/heals ones) especially my dps queues. My joke has been this year that instance cap is a raid boss when it comes to my love rocket farming. With the rocket being so low (and the manuscript) it stings more. Timer ends when the first alt phases into the dungeon, say pushing 10 for the hour, until each expires with time. I’ve been using an addon (currently savedinstances) to track my instance capping for the event which can also cause some lag reading. I wonder if the system can accombinate for more runs (specifically chemco atm), if everyone ran unlimitedly the event that could also cause issues. Perhaps there could be a holiday instance cap. I don’t think anyone is running chemco for the gold, mount/dragon customization manuscript at this point etc.

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Yeah, from what I recall, the main reason Blizzard put this limit in BC (if I remember right) was to combat all the bots farming the instances.

Funnily enough, it also made me remember that hilarious bug happening at roughly the same time; an realm-wide announcement for that Midsummer boss, regardless of faction.

We all got so sick of being constantly spammed with “The Ice Stone has melted!” This went on for days.

When my guild learned about the instance limit, we immediately credited the bug for it.

And ever since, every time I see people talking about the instance limit, this pops into my head:

“The Ice Stone has melted!”
“The Ice Stone has melted!”
“The Ice Stone has melted!”

(In all seriousness, that’s a very good point about Warbands. Is Blizzard going to make the limit account-wise?? I hope not! Because that’s quite rather harsh on the players…)

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Right! It’s going to make things INCREDIBLY frustrating for a smaller sect of players. I don’t see the majority running into the issue, but they shouldn’t instance cap regardless. Bots have evolved since BC and don’t spam dungeons for gold anymore lol.

2 Likes

There are a lot of dungeons that can be run in the same amount of time as holiday dungeons these days. Using that as a basis - 10 Dungeons can be run in a 30 minute time frame (this is how long it took me to hit limit cap for Love is in the Air). If we could get the instance cap raised to 25 dungeons an hour I think this would help tremendously.

As both a player of WoW and FFXIV, in FFXIV - Raids, Trials, and Dungeons all have separated instance lock outs and instead of an hourly lock out there is a daily lockout per character. The lockout though is something between 100-200 dungeons/trials/raids a day.

Again FFXIV does theirs per character. It would be very nice if we could have something similar. If they want to keep the 10 dungeon runs an hour, at least make it per character instead of an account wide thing.

6 Likes