Quote Originally Posted by Deveryn View Post
b) Deep Dungeons are just a matter of planning ahead with people. POTD takes up to 8 hours, so you split that in two. If your schedule doesn't allow it, don't even try it. Get to 50 and move on to HoH / Eureka.
Part of the problem is still the ISP situation though, I expect it's another thing like MCH that will never really be fixed because the developers live in a country well known for top flight ISP service, though (much like all those Korean games that depend on ping to the point that it's reasonable for South Koreans with their internet but in the USA fights are won and lost by where people live - except Western devs actually learned to work with that reality a long time ago especially after disasters like Quake II).

A single connection blip from any player and your 8 hours, even if everyone's there, is easily just plain toast due to the resultant desync within the group. And that was before the recovery time from a DC massively increased due to the anti-queue-jumper feature that tags anyone who tries to leap back in right away as a queue-dodger and hits them with the "Please wait and try logging in later" wait time (and this seems to be WAI, for that matter).

Then you realize the real trouble is you can't plan around any of this, because ISPs don't give you sufficient notice in the USA, usually the first time you even get to learn about maintenance is when it goes out and you check your phone and it helpfully tells you "oh yeah, there was maintenance scheduled for tonight!" (which is about as hard to find any advance warning of as the Vogon bulldozer plans). Try playing during the day to avoid that? Just as likely that it'll cut out on you mid afternoon with "oh yeah, we detected performance issues in the area so we're doin maintenance, we'll be back in just a couple hours, cheerio!"

How is anyone supposed to seriously do deep dungeons around that? It seems like too much of a crapshoot to go beyond 50, maybe 100 or so anymore ...