People do do lots of work and leave all the time. I see it in groups and when we were 1st looking for the Cave portal, I cleared 1/2 of VL, then had to leave. Later I cleared all of it, killed a couple shadow prisoners and had to leave. I think if you can't join Caves games or invite in, the Caves will mostly be empty.

How many people popped the portal and did the entire Caves series top to bottom in one session? I managed to do it once, but not since. And I got lucky on the portal. First game after I logged in and the group was excellent. That's not going to happen often.

I love that you have to clear VL (finally!). It'd be nice to see portal appear more often. I don't know whether drop rate needs to be better than Ao3 drops. I think Ao3 VL drop rates were pretty good already. At least in my experience, you don't have to run too long before a good drop. The caves are longer though... I'm guessing this is something to observe as people play it.