Low population and instancing means that it was crowded at one point and people just logged off or left. The game cannot, to my understanding, force people to load into one instance so that it can close the other. My observation of its behavior has been that when population is low, it begins assigning newcomers to the first instance. It doesn't close the additional instances, but it does not assign new players unless the first is becoming crowded. Eventually everyone is gone and it is closed. It would be a big pain to be forced to load into another instance. I don't even see how it could be practical. You are forced to a load screen and put into an area where suddenly all the mobs could be respawned, or your quest progress could break, or any number of problems. Plus it doesn't really matter that much. The zone chat is shared and you can switch instances every 30 minutes. Not being able to find players to do something with is not really a problem.

We tried it both ways, no dice.

My raid group ran into the very same issues. Got stuck in the pit in Karagga's and no boss spawn in Eternity Vault. I hope Bioware gets their crap together soon. One can only play Huttball so many times.

We defeated the turrets and the boss never appeared.

I've got almost all of the datacrons now and I don't see a problem with the system conceptually, but there are some problems nonetheless. Firstly, if I didn't have Force Push there would be like 8 datacrons I wouldn't have. Avoiding spoilers for those who don't want to know specific locations: On one planet there is a datacron that requires you to ride a moving object for over 30 minutes to reach it. This object despawned for no reason about 1 minute from the datacron and left me and my buddy quite angry. I used my Juggernaut Force Push to get my buddy up on the object and then leaped up to him to get it myself. On one planet there is a datacron that requires you to walk across a nearly invisible bridge. This bridge is not solid and you simply fall right through it. The datacron is inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have a Juggernaut or Guardian to Force Push them across the gap. On one planet there is a datacron that needs to be recharged at a charging station. The charging station is floating in the air up against a wall, along with a bunch of other bugged props like light posts and harvesting nodes. Inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have a Juggernaut or Guardian to Force Push them up to it. On one planet there is a datacron that requires you to collect objects and put them in a machine to unlock the datacron. After 4 hours of scouring the planet in question, the objects were nowhere to be found with no indication of whether they've been moved, or are simply bugged. There are probably more that I can't remember at the moment. But you get the idea. Requiring some tricky stuff is fine, but at least make sure it works. 10% + of the datacrons being bugged, or completely inaccessible, is just not acceptable.

Did it in under 70 hours /played here, but I leveled two 50s in testing so I knew what I was doing, and spacebar'd my way through story I already experienced twice. It could easily hit the "200 Hours" mark they mentioned a long time ago if you weren't rushing. The average person is going to take a lot longer than I did. Not just in actual time, but /played time as well. The pace of leveling needs to be reasonable for them. People who are significantly slower or faster than the average player shouldn't dictate the pace of leveling.

Coolness! I hit 50 about 2 hours after you. (Ascendant on Belgoth's Beacon) Grats on your hard work. You can now get some sleep!

Not 50 yet, but getting close.