(bug?) First portal in Ipande despawns

[Niles]

Org had a raid today, and we has some small challenges along the way, but at last we reached the beast lair and was killing beast. He had some tricks up his sleve, and doc/ enf and a few others died, but still 2 lived and stayed in the lair.

Everyone that died ress up and go to zone... they enter pande, but the FIRST portal that spawn just after north zod is simply gone. 2 ppl are STILL sitting in lair as I write this (adds have oddly enough depsawned) and it does not matter who enters the raid, no one can see the energy vortex portal.

Those that died and could not get past, killed Libra. (We had already killed north zod and TNH).

A few notices:
1) we had a sol in our team that ld 2 times during killing of beast
2) when sol ld, since we where 7 in raid, we put the person nr 7 in main team (as we where only 6 ppl left). When sol came back, he got the spot in main team, and person nr 7 went in team 2 again.
3) we did not disband whole raid and tried to find portalt, but after 1½ hour of waiting for petition, and most of our org logged off, prob we will try this just to test it out.
4) AFTER we tried with the original raid force to enter and find the energy vortex, we had some invites without raid locks to enter, and that did also not help

So, after ca 2 hours of waiting for petition, Ill just give up on getting help, but would still like any feedback from players or FC regarding this.

1) Is it intentional that the portals can despawn?
2) if so, why does it happen, and what should one as raidforce think about when entering

[Niles]

OK; message from GM:

GM: Well I have been told that the portal is supposed to disappear after a given period of time.
ME: but you dont know the timer on portal?
GM: I'm afraid not. I likely wouldn't be allowed to say even if I did.

That solves it then. I had no idea, and I cant say I like it, but OK, that is how it works i presume.

[filijokkus]

If you did non-instanced Pande, the portals disappear after 5 minutes. The Portal Zodiac/Bosses usually respawn within a timeframe of 20-25-30 minutes. (Been a while since I did non-instanced).

However - if portals, and that any of them; disappeared during instanced Pande, then you've encountered a serious bug. The next you'lll want to do is provide bug information in this format;

/bug [issue title] [quick summary] [shift+F9 output (copypasted)] [additional helpful information]

By doing that you make sure you provide the right people with the right information, and the likelyhood that you'll ever enounter this situation again will be less likely.

Happy future ventures.

[Niles]

Well, it was Ipande, not regular one. I sent the info as bug also.

It just troubles me that this might be supposed to happen.

I mean, delete the portal after 7 hours or whatever, if you dont want ppl to redo beast in same instance. After some time, make it require some check of the spesific instance number or whatever. I mean, at least those that where killing beast should be able to get back.

There should be a smarter way of locking down people selling clear instances. The way it looks now, if this is no bug, it just seemes like FC took a bit too quick solution.

[BugsCoT]

But it "Just works!"tm

[AhndraCorvid]

Originally Posted by Niles There should be a smarter way of locking down people selling clear instances.

There is. Do "/raid locks" and you'll see a number that corresponds to the instance you're personally locked to. Call it an ID if you will, I don't know what the true technical term for it is. If FC could somehow make it so that anyone trying to get into iPande who does *not* have that same ID gets dropped into their own new instance instead of following you into yours, they will never be able to get through an empty pre-cleared instance. Kinda like a while back when teams stopped automatically being dropped into the same instance in ToTW. I'm not sure if that makes sense. And I can't take credit for the suggestion because a friend came up with it, not me. But I think it would be a better idea than just making the portals in iPande despawn.

Like the OP, I petitioned after we finally (after about 3 hours working our way in a small group of friends through iPande) killed the Beast but found we couldn't bring back one of our number who had died during the fight, because the portals had despawned. He was there for the whole 3 hours and we couldn't even bring him back to loot. The GM told me it was an intended change, so I asked him whether I could know the reasons why, because I could see little logic in putting people into situations where they choose perhaps to challenge the instanced content with a small group of friends (as had been part of the intention behind instancing content in the first place, or such was the impression we'd gotten especially from the way FC talked about instances in LoX) and yet couldn't even reap the rewards from our work. The GM told me he didn't have any info but could pass my thoughts on. I said "yes please", but didn't really expect to get any feedback on it so wasn't surprised when I didn't.

[Tmonekeep]

Well, just put a raid together and like the previous posters we had some casualties during beast kill. These people won rolls for beast items and to our surprise we could not get them back to beast to loot their hard earned loot. So after 30 minutes of trying to figure out wtf(we tried everything), beast rotted and alot of the loot we spent hours trying to aquire went to waste. This is rediculous. I have no problem with trying to fix the holding of clear pf's. I do however have a problem with fc changing the way content works without informing the playerbase. Seriously a better fix needs to be thought of, if in fact, the reason for despawning portals is to prevent holding clear pf's. You cannot expect someone to raid for 2 hours if there is the possibility that if they die they will not be able to get back to loot.

**EDIT**
This Obviously is a bug as well. This bug needs to be addressed. I have seen the holding of clear pf's as recently as Nov. 13th personally, which is well after the OP. So this definately is not happening to everyone.