Why can't I camp (log out/in) in my Stronghold?

tribbulater

Seems kinda strange to be building a hold-away-from-home, pouring resources, gold, manpower, treasure into it... yet any time I try to spend a few hours there they boot me out the door!

I run my characters through my stronghold every day, pick up some quests, do the quests, come back, cash in the quests. I can pray in the stronghold, do banking, email. Pretty much everything I need, in one place. Except whenever I log out there, expecting to come back later, I find myself on the far side of the door.

Except, not always. I can log all my characters out in the stronghold, come back the next day, 3/4 of them are still in the Stronghold, couple of them aren't. So I ride them all back in, pray, pick up some quests. Log out, come back an hour later, all but 1 of them are booted out the door. Do the quests, ride them all back to the stronghold, log out, come back that evening, half of them are in, half are out.

It's a regular map, it's obvious that characters CAN log out in it and stay in... so why the random bootouts?

beckylunatic

It's not random. It depends on whether or not someone else already has an instance of your stronghold open at the moment you log in, or within a short enough time period that it hasn't closed yet. If you move a character to your stronghold and then start logging in others that you left there, then you have opened up your stronghold again and will continue to log characters in there. It will also load faster if the instance is already active.

The game cleans up empty instances to conserve resources. So, sorry, everyone's stronghold can't be a persistent instance. If there is no active instance of your stronghold (usually one per guild unless you have more than 40 people in there at once), you will be logged into your last known location.

tribbulater

Thank you for the answer, and it may have some bearing. However it cannot be quite correct. While there are a decent number of characters in my guild, I happen to be all of them. (Yes, I contain multitudes) So if I log in the next day and ANY of my characters are in the Stronghold, it wasn't because someone had an instance loaded. And if I log in multiple chars with only seconds between them, and some are in and some are out, that's not a consistent result either.

Further, while I can see that strongholds can't be persistent (if no one is in them), if I log my character out in my stronghold, and then log back in later... why wouldn't it spawn an instance and put me in it? Loading me into Protector's Enclave first when I am going to turn right around and go back into my Stronghold doesn't save time/resources for me OR the server. In fact it wastes both.

I suspect the answer is 'because no one bothered to code it that way'. However if they are going to continue to promote Strongholds as a significant feature (and the latest devblogs show they are), then they might as well make it so you can log out and in to them as well. Why am I building a central location for my adventuring activities if the game is randomly tossing my characters back to whatever zone they entered through?

kreatyve

Except that she is correct. The amount of time it takes for the instance to close is not consistent, so sometimes you will be able to get to your next character without the map closing, but sometimes you won't. When you first log on, the game will attempt to put you on the last open instance that you were on. WIth the Strongholds, you can only be on 1 instance - your guilds - so if that map is not open, it will put you on the last open map that you were on, which is Protector's Enclave for many people.

plasticbat

tribbulater said:

Thank you for the answer, and it may have some bearing. However it cannot be quite correct. While there are a decent number of characters in my guild, I happen to be all of them. (Yes, I contain multitudes) So if I log in the next day and ANY of my characters are in the Stronghold, it wasn't because someone had an instance loaded. And if I log in multiple chars with only seconds between them, and some are in and some are out, that's not a consistent result either.

Further, while I can see that strongholds can't be persistent (if no one is in them), if I log my character out in my stronghold, and then log back in later... why wouldn't it spawn an instance and put me in it? Loading me into Protector's Enclave first when I am going to turn right around and go back into my Stronghold doesn't save time/resources for me OR the server. In fact it wastes both.

I suspect the answer is 'because no one bothered to code it that way'. However if they are going to continue to promote Strongholds as a significant feature (and the latest devblogs show they are), then they might as well make it so you can log out and in to them as well. Why am I building a central location for my adventuring activities if the game is randomly tossing my characters back to whatever zone they entered through?

Actually, they coded it this way intentionally. They had to do something special to make it behaves this way. I personally prefer it this way after I noticed what could happen if they didn't. I would hate the probable tradeoff. It takes forever to create a fresh SH instance with my guild's specified layout from scratch as the yellow progress bar stays on less than 10cm forever.... and what I want to do is just to have invocation for my toon. Even when the SH instance is not created from scratch, it took longer than other common instance to load up.

pitshade

Strangely enough, someone reported logging into their GF this weekend, for the first time since Winter Festival and being in Twilight Tor. She may have been trolling but didn't seem to be.

beckylunatic

pitshade said:

Strangely enough, someone reported logging into their GF this weekend, for the first time since Winter Festival and being in Twilight Tor. She may have been trolling but didn't seem to be.

Someone on my FL recently logged in an alt he must normally only break out for seasonal events, and was shown as being on the winter map for the entire time he stayed on that character. Only about five minutes, but long enough it was clear he wasn't being booted to PE.

Possibly the process to kick you from a disabled event location stops working after a long enough time has elapsed, if you don't trigger it.

beckylunatic

kreatyve said:

Except that she is correct. The amount of time it takes for the instance to close is not consistent, so sometimes you will be able to get to your next character without the map closing, but sometimes you won't.

This is true. I find the event that is most likely to cause me to load into a location other than the SH if I was expecting to load in the SH is that somebody else just exited the SH. That seems to make the map generation hiccup.

As for being loaded into your SH automatically when you're the only person for whom the map can even exist, I can think of a couple of things. If you're in an alliance, other members might prefer to use your SH for farming heroics, as the orc mobs in low-level strongholds are weaker than enemy types that later replace them. If it is just you, it may still be related to instancing, if the game is freeing up resources at the same time as you are calling on them, it might decide you belong in SH instance #37 which just became empty, so it loads you differently than if it needs to create SH instance #245.

tripsofthrymr

tribbulater said:

if I log my character out in my stronghold, and then log back in later... why wouldn't it spawn an instance and put me in it? Loading me into Protector's Enclave first when I am going to turn right around and go back into my Stronghold doesn't save time/resources for me OR the server. In fact it wastes both.

It costs a fair amount of compute resources to fire up an instance of your stronghold. You can see that by the load time if you're the first one that enters the stronghold for the day.

You might want to continue your adventures in the stronghold, but then, you might not.

It's a trade-off between using server processing capacity on the chance that you want to do something in your stronghold next time you log in vs. not wasting those same resources if you were just going to go somewhere else anyhow. Without being privy to actual metrics on that behavior, the way it's implemented seems like a reasonable design choice (and when they made that design choice, there weren't any metrics since strongholds was a brand-new feature).

therealprotex

beckylunatic said:

It's not random. It depends on whether or not someone else already has an instance of your stronghold open at the moment you log in, or within a short enough time period that it hasn't closed yet. If you move a character to your stronghold and then start logging in others that you left there, then you have opened up your stronghold again and will continue to log characters in there. It will also load faster if the instance is already active.

The game cleans up empty instances to conserve resources. So, sorry, everyone's stronghold can't be a persistent instance. If there is no active instance of your stronghold (usually one per guild unless you have more than 40 people in there at once), you will be logged into your last known location.

That's not the whole truth. It happens pretty often (yet not always) to me that I do not "wake up" again in the stronghold map, despite the fact that several guild members are on the map in that moment when I log in.

And one thing is reproducable (at least for me) to 100%: while you are on the stronghold map, queue for a skirmish or dungeon. When that run is finished, you NEVER return to the stronghold map, but ALWAYS to the location you have been before you went to the stronghold map. No matter if there are guild members on the stronghold map or not.

plasticbat

therealprotex said:

beckylunatic said:

It's not random. It depends on whether or not someone else already has an instance of your stronghold open at the moment you log in, or within a short enough time period that it hasn't closed yet. If you move a character to your stronghold and then start logging in others that you left there, then you have opened up your stronghold again and will continue to log characters in there. It will also load faster if the instance is already active.

The game cleans up empty instances to conserve resources. So, sorry, everyone's stronghold can't be a persistent instance. If there is no active instance of your stronghold (usually one per guild unless you have more than 40 people in there at once), you will be logged into your last known location.

That's not the whole truth. It happens pretty often (yet not always) to me that I do not "wake up" again in the stronghold map, despite the fact that several guild members are on the map in that moment when I log in.

And one thing is reproducable (at least for me) to 100%: while you are on the stronghold map, queue for a skirmish or dungeon. When that run is finished, you NEVER return to the stronghold map, but ALWAYS to the location you have been before you went to the stronghold map. No matter if there are guild members on the stronghold map or not.

In order to wake up in the SH again, the SH instance you were in needs to stay alive after you got out. i.e. the same SH instance number. If your SH stays 24x7 (some guild does with members from all over the world), you can get back in. Or, if the "new" SH instance number happens to be the same number as before.

The above only applies for logout/login situation. Playing dungeon does not involve logout/login.

therealprotex

plasticbat said:

In order to wake up in the SH again, the SH instance you were in needs to stay alive after you got out. i.e. the same SH instance number. If your SH stays 24x7 (some guild does with members from all over the world), you can get back in. Or, if the "new" SH instance number happens to be the same number as before.

The above only applies for logout/login situation. Playing dungeon does not involve logout/login.

That's.... silly. Not what you said, but how it was programmed if that's what you say is true. I mean, I do not care what actual internal instance number the map has and it is not relevant for server load if it is not the same instance number again. If the map is up, the system should place me there again after login. There is no sane reason to consider the actual instance number. After all if I go there from another place, the system knows what new instance number "my" SH map has as well.

And the issue with not returning to SH map after a dungeon/skimish run is even more silly imho - if it was wai. If it's a bug, it's time to get fixed.