I don't really see the point of everyone gathering 20k+ maps to unlock the cove for this event.

For the Mabar event you needs a lot of people at once to complete it so forcing everyone to go in at the same time made some sense.
This event is unlocking a maximum 6 person instance so all making everone do it at once is going to do is make more lag, I hate to think what will happen on the live servers once several thousand kobalds try and figure out dynamically generated pathing at the same time let alone when people try and place more torches to adjust the pathing.

Just because the tech is there to allow you to do the unlock for the cove the same way the mabar event worked doesn't mean you have to use it.

My suggestion's

Make the Cove accessable all the time while the event is on, or at least only require it to be unlocked once per running of the event.
Remove drops of the compass (Leave it in the store)
Make the compass purchasable with 10ish maps.
Make the maps expire on leaving instance (to stop people instance hopping - this must make more lag...)
Make the maps tradeable.

This means you should be able to find a group, farm for a short while and get enough maps for everyone to get a compass and go and run the instance.

Make sure everything goes into an appropriate bag (not 100% sure they don't already my collectable bags may have been full)

Kambuk