Why in god's green Earth do dungeons have a timer?

[Karnyboy]

People complain about not being able to learn encounters, but my one gripe with this game is the timers on dungeons...why??

I don't get it.

[Rikkustrife]

because there is limited space on the duty servers and it needs to be shared by everyone

[Karnyboy]

So you're saying it's a server design flaw?
Never had this problem in other games. FF is the only game that has timers on dungeons

[NintenPyjak64]

So you're saying it's a server design flaw?
Never had this problem in other games. FF is the only game that has timers on dungeons

Let's put it like this. During the game's early days Amdapor Keep was the top dungeon for farming tomes. Everybody wanted to cap their tomes ASAP and would flood instance servers causing wait times that were very terrible. If there was no timer you would have had people just sitting around in the instances doing nothing but trolling other people meaning NOBODY would be getting their tomes in a timely fashion.

Plus It's not hard at all to learn and wipe several times within the dungeon timer if you actually put the effort to learn it. The timers were much much shorter during Beta days. It took the entire hour for people to learn the instance, or about 30 minutes for people who're experienced.

[chocomaid]

So you're saying it's a server design flaw?
Never had this problem in other games. FF is the only game that has timers on dungeons

It's a reasonable design with a realistic view. I'll give you an analogy if there were no timers in dungeons:

People go to restaurants and eat or drink, whichever. But there was no time limit on the stay and all of the current customers don't want to leave the premises and keep doing what they are doing. Eventually, the restaurant won't be able to cater to new customers and eventually become scaringly crowded.

Same goes with game servers, there is a limit, there has to be an in-and-out queue.

EDIT: Also some of my greatest/fun/memorable moments are when the timer is creeping to end, the feeling of rush, urgency and exhilaration is what timers should give you. I can't picture a supposedly "dangerous" and "notorious" dungeon to be taken nonchalantly with tea breaks.

[Lithera]

It's not a flaw...it's intentional. They did it to maximize the efficiency of their hardware. If they didn't put the timers in they'd have to account for a LOT more simultaneous server traffic which would mean more hardware to configure and maintain that most of the time wouldn't be utilized. Even without the timers most dungeon runs would take the same amount of time so with the exception perhaps of prime time, they'd be dealing with the same traffic they currently cap out at now but because there's no timers they'd see a HUGE spike during prime time so there'd be potentially 1 or more server shards that only get used during this time period and probably not even every day. That's a stupid and inefficient use of their hardware, memory, and network bandwith. The timer controls this.

[Fynlar]

It's like this so that people can't just camp out in an instance (whether to troll on purpose, or whether they just suck too badly to complete it) and prevent others from having their turn.

To be frank, the dungeon timers are so lenient that your group pretty much has to be majorly screwing the pooch if you find yourself running the entire clock on any of them.

[Tupsi]

90 - 120 minutes is more than enough time to do a dungeon. Don't even pay attention to the timer. It's not like dungeons are so well designed you have hours worth of exploring to do, 99% of the time they're a "long hallway" design that people seem to have hated in FFXIII but won't complain about in XIV

[Arkghyom]

Theme park MMOs FTW!

[Naunet]

No matter how people want to justify it, the fact of the matter is this shouldn't be necessary. This is simply not an issue any other MMO I've ever played has had, except WoW once or twice after big patches (I recall getting the "instance servers are full" message when trying to get into ToC when it finally dropped in Wrath - this was at the peak of WoW's subscriber numbers and when a heck of a lot of raiders were chomping at the bit for new content, critical mass). SE did something terribly wrong when working out how to organize their instance servers.

Someone told me once that SE has one server (or one section of a server) for each dungeon, while other MMOs tend to spread them out so that load is more evenly distributed. The latter seems more reasonable to me. What we have now just seems like poor planning.

It's like this so that people can't just camp out in an instance (whether to troll on purpose, or whether they just suck too badly to complete it) and prevent others from having their turn.

This really is not a thing that happens in other MMOs without a timer. SE needs to stop finding solutions to false problems.