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.

[Axlle10]

why in gods green earth is this a problem?

joking aside, seriously how is a timer a problem? especially a 90 minute one at that. its more their for your health and sanity XD god knows i wouldnt want to be stuck in the same party for 90 minutes if they suck that bad.

[Naunet]

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.

And why isn't this a problem with other MMOs, both in ones with similar player numbers and ones with significantly more?

[Ronyx]

Timer is definitely intent to be like that, but also there are a lot of many other games that do not have timers on dungeons and they dont blow up. They probably should have a lot more and better equipment to handle all those instance but clearly SE dont currently have.

[Fynlar]

Well, they are harming certain people's enjoyment of the game and are a symptom of poor planning. Yes, they are real problems.

People occupying instances potentially forever and lagging things up would be more harmful to many more people's enjoyment than this is.

If you actually run the entire clock on any dungeon in this game, you pretty much did not deserve the win. All there really is to it. None of the dungeon timers are even remotely strict, unlike things like invisible "DPS check" timers.

[Naunet]

People occupying instances potentially forever and lagging things up would be more harmful to many more people's enjoyment than this is.

Again: This is not an issue in other MMOs (I can count the number of times I've gotten "instance servers are full" in WoW on one hand, and both times were on the first day of highly anticipated raid releases), so why should we accept it as necessary in XIV? I'm not saying that it isn't "necessary" as the servers stand now, but I do think it's a symptom of cutting corners on SE's part in related areas, and as consumers, we really shouldn't support our service provider cutting corners like that.

Don't think about it too much because it's there for your own good.

Yea... I don't need SE mothering me, thanks.

[Seif]

Honestly the times when this is an issue are so few and far between that the upside of having plenty of free instances for raids outweighs the negatives.

The term "timers" here honestly sounds a lot more negative than what it is in reality as you never feel like you're "on the clock".
If the time runs out in 100% of the cases you're in a group that doesn't have skill to complete it anyway.

Don't think about it too much because it's there for your own good.

[Tupsi]

This is still such a non issue. If you get enjoyment out of an empty dungeon with zero exploration (still waiting for that list of alternate clear paths and numerous additional routes you could take) more power to you...but they're designed obviously for exp and loot vomit.

[SummonerSenah]

Dungeons with timers are like a drive-thru. You sit in the queue and wait for the person in front of you to be done at the window so that you can drive up for your turn. Wanting no timer so that you can roleplay is like some customer discovering that the dude at the window is an old friend and sitting there chatting and holding everyone else up. The obvious solution for the drive thru scenario would be for the customer to say "I can see you're busy, let's meet up later somewhere else," or the dude at the window to say "Hey I'm busy, let's meet up later somewhere else." They still get to sit and chat, but they don't hold up the drive-thru line for everyone else.

tl ; dr There's a time and place for everything and while it would be nice to roleplay in dungeons, the fact remains that you can roleplay outside of a dungeon.

[Anienai]

Yea... I don't need SE mothering me, thanks.

I will mother you.