This system really needs a rework. I’m not going to focus topic into the bigger changes a rework should have in regards of farming legacy content and such because that is a huge discussion.
However, what I want to talk about it the smaller things that would improve the system we already have.
Like why doesn’t we already have a visible count-down on number of available instances?
And why can we queue using Dungeon Finder when we already have reached the limit and wouldn’t be able to enter the queued instance anyway?
Common Blizzard, this is minor things solving major issues and should strictly be hotfixed.
In my situation I just exhausted my instances farming a rare in Stratholme. Then 10 minutes later I queued up with the same char for the event dugneon without knowing wheter I could enter or not, and I was able to enter without problem.
Then ten minutes later my next char - a healer queued up for the same instance and that char hit that limit and was unable to enter the instance.
The point is I never know when I get available instances, and I should not be able to queue up for LFD when the game knows I can’t enter the instance anyway.
Yes, this. Enter Stratholme, run macro “/tar Stonespine”, exit instance and reset. Stonespine in this example is a rare mob that can be targeted from the entrance.
If you are farming for the Love Rocket or whatever silly name it has now, the lock is per realm. I used to do a load of characters on Draenor first, then swap to Silvermoon when the the instance lock hit me, then swap back to Draenor when hit the instance lock on Silvermoon. Rinse repeat.
I wholeheartedly agree it would be nice to see some kind of counter or countdown timer or something.
I would certainly reset 100+ instance IDs in my search for an ID with the rare spawn, but I would not kill a single mob or get anything from the 99% of the instance IDs because they doesn’t have the spawn - so there would not be any exploits.
Surely, I would happily let the game use my computer’s resources to generate instances instead of the server, but this again requires a bigger rework of the game.
You may not kill anything but the instance server keeps that instance alive for specified amount of time.
The limit is far older than 2019. I remember back in Wrath there was a time when the whole region was hit by the instance limit because groups of players would go in many, many instances per hour. I don’t recall exactly why it was. (Probably avoiding Oculus!)
Number one rule of MMO club: don’t trust clients with anything. Something Korean ports to ‘the West’ have found out. It’;s frustrating for you sure, but it’s such a fringe case it’s not worth dealing with. Even cloud computing has it’s server limit.
Indeed it would be nice if blizzard would stop ignoring their bad game design and fix everything they can but instead they’ve let all these small things pile up over the years causing a lot of loose ends and they keep creating them so there’s that.
Let’s just take another example, the achievement “You Used to Scrawl Me In Your Fel Tome” requires 6 pages. 1 random spawns per instance. Since it’s legacy content, naturally you keep looking for specifics, and then due to the bad design you’re likely to run into instance limits and be hindered from progressing.
The OP’s and your issue is not bad game design, you are doing old content. That content is located in an instance and instances with one player still have technical overheads. Log in do your instances and then either log out or do something else. It’s a multiplayer game not a single player game, you have no right to make demands that would affect the game for other players.
The more instances you do then the fewer that are available for other players. A small number of players could effectively affect the whole region like it has in the past.
Blizzard do stuff for a reason.
As I said before, computing resources are not infinite, even in a cloud environment, not that WoW is in a public cloud.