Why does East Shroud have 3 instances?

[SerLuke]

As far as I can tell no other ARR area outside of Mor Dhona(for Shadowbringers msq) is doing this, any idea why East Shroud is?

[Keizerwilson]

Probably because of GNB.

[Kirika-]

Gunbreaker job beginning quest and the HW-2-SB quest transition area.

[Fynlar]

Not sure why this zone got instanced but Limsa Lowerdecks didn't as far as I remember, though.

[Hasrat]

GNB doesn't start in East Shroud, it starts in Gridania. Haven't bought expansion to pick up the quest, but presumably some part of it leads to East Shroud, and they decided to instance to ease the load. Towns can take more to begin with, not having mobs and FATEs and such to track.

[alimdia]

Yeah the 3 main cities have lower data load since it's just people and NPCs, no combat, fates or mobs, so their limit is much higher.

[EveK]

The very early gunbreaker quests specifically involve fighting field enemies. Such situations in the past involved multiple people simultaneously fighting their versions of the enemies and others having to wait to even be able to spawn their own.

[YojimboM]

I'd assume it has something to do with Eternal Bonding ceremonies and assumed increased traffic in that area that might interfere with them in some way. They were probably playing "better safe than sorry" and didn't want to potentially have anyone's wedding crashed when lots of people were in the area.

[Iscah]

I'd assume it has something to do with Eternal Bonding ceremonies and assumed increased traffic in that area that might interfere with them in some way. They were probably playing "better safe than sorry" and didn't want to potentially have anyone's wedding crashed when lots of people were in the area.

Actually while it might have helped on that front, it's having some other unfortunate side effects on EB ceremonies - having attended two (both times as a guest) during the period where the zone has been instanced, it firstly complicates the initial "gathering outside the church" phase, but more importantly we don't all leave into the same instance at the end of the ceremony! Presumably because we're not all in a party so the game just sees it as disconnected players entering a zone, and it might be hard to code it specially just for that, but still a bit of a letdown to find yourself in a different instance to the newlyweds.

I can understand why they needed to split it up during the peak time when the expansion had just launched, but I think we can probably go back down now.

[Bearded]

You have probably just been lucky but I have seen instance notifications for nearly all open world zones including the original ARR ones. I guess it depends upon the time you access the game and also the client load at the time. Sadly as I am on a new/preferred world loads are high often thanks to the bots - so bad at one time a week or so ago that nobody could enter Western La Noesca as all instances were full

It was a pain for me as I had to delay attending to a hunt mark but I imagine it was more of an impact to every new player who wanted to progress their MSQ and could not.