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

[Lithera]

It doesn't imply crappy servers. It implies that SE is trying to be efficient. The wait times for things like AK and CT and Coil to an extent aren't because the servers are out of capacity but because they limit each dungeon to a set amount of simultaneous instances. The DF Servers can likely comfortably handle the peak traffic for simultaneous instances. Adding capacity past that maximum is just a waste of resources and money. The trick is certain dungeons are heavily popular at certain times of the week and even times of the day.

Say peak total traffic sits somewhere around 200 simultaneous instances. Servers can handle it fine, but without capping individual dungeons you could wind up with 150/200 instances being CT runs on a Monday night. No reservation waits for CT groups perhaps, but with CT dominating the instance servers, pretty near everything else might end up with wait times as they all try to share the remaining 50 instance slots. Cap CT at say 100/200 and you give the rest of the dungeons, trials etc. a bit more breathing room.

The alternative would be to increase capacity enough to support say 400 instances simultaneously. This is costly and a rather large waste as for upwards of 90% of the time half the server's capacity would go unused.

Removing the timer would potentially exacerbate the issues early in the week (still a LOT of groups timing out trying to clear Turns 4 and 5) and they'd potentially wind up HAVING to lean towards the extra capacity alternative.