I bonded my violin a week or so ago. While it's worked pretty much as I assumed (increased damage, reduced EQ time), the decay time's still ticking. Not sure if that's a bug or not so I thought I'd check here.

The decay time should still tick. However, playing the instrument should increase the total time, although it takes a pretty considerable amount of playing to do so.

I play my instrument quite a bit and haven't seen it turn back time yet, like it says in the AB file. It should be substantially easier to reverse decay time on instruments considering that it takes 100 ingame hours to be able to bond the instrument.

It's not that hard to reverse time it works like how the bonding works where it only increases a percentage if you play it once an IG day. At the end of the month it is possible for the instrument to still decay but sometimes it will just stay the same. Also, the decay time will only reach up to 100 months at least for the lute I use. The way I got it up that high was just to log in once an hour just to play a song like Perfectfourth and then log off. You have to play it at least once a day for a few days every month if you want it to steadily increase. You can tell by probing your instrument right after using it and you will sometimes see the month go up. It usually takes two or three consecutive days to raise it a month.

Yup. Playing it once an hour gives the same improvement as playing it constantly the whole hour, and doesn't always give the boost. Its not that hard to keep the time over 90. My mandolin stays between 90-100 even though I use my champ lute.

So in other words, it is easy to keep up...unless you are one of those "normal" people who can not log in every hour to play it. I would never make it as a bard - I can log in 2-3 hours in one sitting and that's it. For people who are working/sleeping/whatever else, logging in once an hour to play an instrument seems like too much. It would be more logical if it were based on how much time you spent playing it total in a given month, or something similar.

#alarm {*:00:00} {#con;play a song;#alarm +10 {#dis}}

Turn it on when you're not actively playing and you're good.

I don't have the opportunity to log in as much anymore because of school and I still maintain my lyre at 100 days. The only people I've ever seen it be a problem for are the ones who only log in once every two weeks.

Except that it's illegal and shrub-able if you get caught.

Consider: each IG day that you play has the chance to set it back by a whole IG month. So, evein if you can only log in during two hours a day, the chances are your decay time will stay relatively constant.