Last night I ran my first instance: The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak. I am a US player, and I was with an EU, a JP, and a US player who could speak a little Japanese. I was very happy with how the instance turned out, having multiple bosses and lots of paths.
It was bittersweet, however. We finished the secret boss, and the chests from it dropped:
- Heart of House d'Somethingorother
- A bow
- An axe
- One other rare item
And rather than evenly distributing the items, it gave every single one of them to the JP player! So all of us have to scroll up in our chat logs to figure out what the items are, open up a browser window to look up the item to figure out its stats (and even what job it's for), and by the time the EU player said he needed the bow, used my US friend to translate from English to Japanese to the JP player since it took too long to figure out the auto-translate for it, we were kicked out of the dungeon.
I'm not 100% sure what the JP player said, but it was either that her inventory was full so she lost all the items when we were kicked out, or it was that no one had accepted the items so they all got thrown away.
I felt robbed. There was no indication that we would be kicked out after 90 seconds. In fact, all of us thought that the opposite was true because the NPC at the start told us, "There's a machine at the end that you can use to warp out of the dungeon." We figured that it was voluntary when you would leave the dungeon by using the device, or it would kick you out once the 60 minutes were up.
Now, I figure the reason we only have 90 seconds is to get us out so another party could enter during high-volume times. I see two solutions to this problem:
1. Create a Need/Greed system for dungeon drops. Rather than leaving it up to the players to decide who gets the items (which could allow for ninjaing items) it's still up to chance. This need/greed system would have only 60 seconds before it's automatically set to Greed, so there would be no issue of being kicked out of the dungeon and losing items thanks to the time limit.
2. Increase the amount of time we have to distribute items after finishing a dungeon, and give an indicator of how much time is left.
I am just glad that this didn't happen in the R50 dungeon, though I really could have used that CON weapon. Such a cool name too.
Anyway, thanks for reading.
(P.S. The mobile site for the forum works great! Typed this up on my Android tablet and I think I prefer this to the regular layout lol)