Zone chat not working reliably / possibly instancing problem

Sylow

Environment the test was done on:
PC, European Megaserver, Zone Deshaan

Background for the test: the last weeks i have problems recruiting new members for the guild. Feedback is slow. Yesterday some recruit told me that he saw my advertisement, while his brother, in the same zone, did not.

In turn we did a very short test today:
- First a bit over a dozen of your guild members independently traveled to Deshaan.
- I posted my advertisement. A total of three people reported to see it, the rest saw nothing.
- They also did a bit of messaging, it seems like it were four different groups of people, who saw each others messages, while the rest did not get them.
- We all traveled to one guild member. Then we all saw each others zone messages.

It seems like instancing is a big factor in this problem. Based on the intial trigger information, where two people played together but only one of them saw my advertisement, instancing seems to be not the only factor in play here. But while we were able to reproduce the effect of not seeing each others zone messages when not in the same instance, we were not able to reproduce the report of the two triggering it.

This bug makes recruiting for a guild extremely random, you can travel through all zones several times in a row and still not reach all instances. I consider a reliable chat to be an absolute core issue in such a social game like this and hope that this issue is handled accordingly.

Dragonslayerdovakiin

this needs more attention

LashanW

Afaik zone chat has been instance-based for quite some time. It is why people asked for some sort of lobby chat for trial group forming. People know that they should go to craglorn to find trial groups, but it's not efficient as there are several craglorn instances and their zone chats are isolated from each other.

But I do not know if ZoS has increased the number of instances per zone than in the past.

pihlaja

I’ve always thought it’s a normal state of the things that zone chat is instance based? I think it has been that way the whole time I’ve actively been in any guilds (about 1,5 years now)? If we are gathering pug trial with couple of friends, we sometimes intentionally try to jump to different instances so if some instance doesn’t give results, the group leader can port to other instance (and it’s knowingly different instance if the existing group member has been observing the zone chat and hasn’t seen the earlier group gathering messages). And in my opinion instancing is a good thing since it keeps zone chats not too busy.

Edit. And when it comes to new guild member and their brother, it might be that they had accidentally ended up to different instances, for example when exiting delve or public dungeon? Or where they definitely in the same instance; for example in the same place and were able to see each other?