Instancing should trigger based on population - not as an on/off setting.

Hi team,

This is not a bug, and I'm not sure where I should really put this, but I have a problem with how Instancing is currently operating in FFXIV.

I'm on a smaller server. Stormblood zones are currently instanced. Instancing appears to be a setting you can toggle at the server level to help reduce congestion. This is leading to unfortunate results that complicate elements of the game.

On my server there are 12 people in The Peaks. They are evenly split among 3 instanced zones.

http://i.imgur.com/S9IuZKz.png

Having 4 people per instance complicates getting parties in-zone together for activities and makes Rank-A or Rank-S hunts difficult to organize. This feature is not very useful on lower-population servers.

Is there a way for instancing to engage when a zone's population reaches a certain value? That would be a much better experience for the players.

What you're asking for makes total sense but the engineering cost is fairly steep. A system which auto-scales based on population introduces extra game, server and infrastructure code. There are a lot of moving parts in order to design, implement and support such a system.

They have already said in another thread that there isn't any leeway with how they programmed instances. This is life for us now until everyone gets their Ixion mount.