In general most things should be open-world not instanced. So that in a game that focuses on social activities we actually see and interact with other players. This, of course, is the opinion that VR has repeatedly expressed and is clearly the prevailing view expressed on these forums. With the exception of the words "in general". VR's position has generally been "no instances, period".
I disagree to this extent. Instances are good for storytelling and I hope there will be some stories in the game even if it isn't a game focused on some overarching story such as LOTRO or SWTOR. Stories such as the history of the races and the world. AS FFXIV has shown (despite all the things I dislike about that title) cutscenes and instances can be quite effective in fleshing out backstories.
Instances can be good for protecting important content - content needed to progress into other areas for example, from being blocked by other players or guilds - especially guilds trying to keep competitor guilds from progressing, There are other ways, of course, such as making a dungeon boss fight private to the group that pulled the boss, and I am not saying we will need instances. But I would not rule them out entirely as a matter of principle.
Some may not call it instancing but having multiple copies of a zone when things are crowded may be beneficial. Sharing the same chat so they are not entirely isolated. This may be critical at release if many people try the game out as we all hope, Having 50 servers to handle the crowds shrink in three months to 5 servers for the "steady state" population would cause numerous problems. Not least the impression that the game was imploding and was about to fail.
When I first switched from playing UO to WoW back in 2004, I thought instancing was great. No real griefing to speak of, no macroing camps for hours on end. For the time, it was a great solution to toxic gameplay.
Now, many of the problems with WoW Classic stem from instancing. Mage level boosting/farming, gold sellers, would not be possible, at least not at the level they are currently in Classic, without instancing. Instancing has allowed them to exploit the game in a way that those of us that played back in 2004-2006 hadn't even considered.
Retail WoW is a different beast, where almost every aspect of the game is instanced in some way. It makes for a very cold dead world, where one never sees other players. When they first introduced "phasing" in Wrath of the Lich King, I wasn't able to do certain quests with my friend because we were at different stages of the quest progression, and couldn't see each other even though were standing right next to one another. That's not an MMO anymore, that's just a single player game you can play with friends.
I'm always hesitant to say something could work "if done right," because "if done right" typically means a whole host of different problems are created.I know Joppa said in the last Dev Roundtable that you guys were considering using instancing in some places of the game, but I think this is one where it's best to accept that the problems created by instancing outweigh the benefits, and no MMO designer will be able strike the perfect balance. Leave it out of Pantheon.
I'm OK with instancing for player housing, but that's it. Once the spots are gone, they are gone. Finite resources are not a good idea in MMO's. Open world player housing simply doesn't work unless you want to keep adding empty, new zones for players to put their houses in.
Contested content (Raids/dungeons) has proven to work just fine without instancing and can actually create tenseful, exciting, and fulfilling experiences. Just making a copy so everyone gets their turn only sounds great when we’re also handing out participation trophies to everyone, but it doesn’t make a better game. If anything, instancing just helps people just max out quicker and leave the game like most other MMO's.
So it's up to Pantheon developers tod decide what they want to be - like everyone else or a unique experience.
Ever since Everquest Omens of War I've liked the instancing thing. But on a very limited table. In my opinion the instancing in that expansion was done right.
Only the end game of that expansion was instanced (Mata Muram). But there was a lock out timer. So you could only do it on a limited basis.
Doing it that way made guilds happy in that they could keep thier schedules to a point. But the lock out timers made it where it didn't become all people did.
Just my opinion. If it's done right, it's fine. If it's done wrong, then everyone will become a number as they are on WoW.
Kilsin said:What are your thoughts? Can it work? Do you like it better? Or are you a full open-world kind of gamer who despises any kind of instancing in games like Pantheon? Let us know why down below! #MMORPG #CommunityMatters
I hate instancing for actual content. The game is an MMO, not a series of private "play groups". I don't mind it for player dwellings, where it makes sense.
Kilsin said:What are your thoughts? Can it work? Do you like it better? Or are you a full open-world kind of gamer who despises any kind of instancing in games like Pantheon? Let us know why down below! #MMORPG #CommunityMatters
First off, lets remind everyone that there are various forms of instancing which are quite different from each other. You've got the version most people think of which is a zone that gets copied when the population within it reaches a certain level. You'd therefore see Thronefast1, Thronefast2, etc. Then there are the 'micro zone' which is a copy of a smaller subset of a zone that spawns extra copies as people enter it. Finally, there is the version I call 'separate but together' in that it is a physically separate part of a larger zone, it does not spawn extra copies of itself and everyone still shares the same chat channels, etc. The Plane of Justice trials or the hedge maze in Plane of Nightmares in the EQ1 PoP expansion are examples of this. You reach this area through a portal of some type. The Emperor of Ssrawhateaver raid was also of this type, within the Temple of Ssra zone but physically separate.
I think that each of these types has a place and can be good for the overall health of the game if not over used. Where you apply it should make sense for the content, for the story or for the NPCs involved. A quest for a powerful wizard is one where that wizard could summon a pocket dimension or cast you into a small sliver of another plane of existence to complete the quest (or to fight him), for example. Why couldn't there be a zone, stricken by untamed magical energies, which has somewhat shattered reality and fragmented the surroundings? Instancing can be fully described as a magical effect, intended or not, depending upon the circumstances.
The last reason why instancing has a place is that the playerbase for this game is older. I'd say it is a safe bet that the vast majority of the potential playerbase will have families, jobs (sometimes several) with lots of responsibilities that will impact the time they can commit to playing. With VR having spoken at length over the years about this mythical 2 hour timeframe for people to feel like they have accomplished something, instancing helps a lot with this. Instancing of some content can help people make much better use of the limited time they have. They can schedule things ahead of time.
Instancing also helps reduce, if not outright eliminate, toxic competition for content. But, I don't think that needing instancing for this is actually necessary. If the world is large enough, with enough content, without the ability to move vast distances quickly, and a server population of the appropriate size such that there are not enough people to simultaneously engage in all the content, the use of instancing to avoid competition is a moot point.
Tl;DR Instancing, if used properly with an eye on thewho, what, where, and why of the specific content, can be a great boon to the overall health of the game. To summarily dismiss any use of instancing is shortsighted.
Instancing is kind of an old thing dating back all the way to Might and Magic, Lands of Lore, etc. The problem with instancing (in my opinion) are the load times and the probability for the computer to lockup before the instance loads completely. The more instances you have per server, the higher the chance of lockup (therefore needing reboot).
However, the good side to instancing is that it detracts from time spent on a single area, giving Devs time to concentrate of other aspects - the engine itself, the items, the spawns, the monsters, each of which are endless pages upon pages of stats. One single monster can have a sheet of specs for it that stretches miles.
Open-world sandbox is newer, sort of an "unchartered" territory - like playing chess in the dark. But, is an entire MMO that is "all open world," as the side of the box states /truly an 'all open world'/? Probably not. So to address this, there would need to be an all open world MMO without a single Instance. Wait was Legends of Aria all open-world sandbox? In either case, it would run alot smoother and there would be no crashes, but you get an area that gets particulate effects from a thousand players at one time on screen is another huge task upon itself.
I think it would be interesting to have a situation where a specific zone had, for lore reasons, a tainted copy of itself in existence. Even though they would have the same terrain mesh, in their base state one version would be inhabited by creatures of a chaotic evil faction and in the other you would have the exact opposite. One would have foliage that was lush and green and the other, scorched and burned out.
There would be this constant tug of war between the two versions, whereby certain player actions within either of them could cause one version to start appearing in the other. At the extreme end of this mechanic, players could shift the balance to the point where one version has completely taken over the other where you end up with two identical instances, both in terms of mobs and the state of the landscape.
To make this even more interesting, let's say the drops from the chaotic evil mobs are completely different from the drops from the neutral good mobs. As the tug of war between the two instances shift the balance in terms of the state of each instance, you could incrementally block access to either of the two line of drops until the scales are shifted back the other way.
Not preferred, or just no. When I Played ESO I could not even enjoy what the artists and world builders created. It was race, race, race, grind, grid grid, as the other players from groupfinder already been through the dungeon 10 times. so it was exactly what I did not want. could not read quest dialog, nothing... the pacing sucked did not enjoy it.
if you do have a "Group finder", and I am not suggesting you should, then at least have a check box for "New to Area" for filtering, so I can connect with others who would like to enjoy the content as it was designed.
I think the answers are already out there. Consider, what issues instancing was meant to address? Mob-blocking/intentional locking out. This is resolved with First To Engange mechanics if I am not mistaken, over Most Damage Done. In the case of a multi-group boss perhaps a subroutine that looks at guild tag and allowed only those with that tag to engage, If no tag LOADING PLEASE WAIT. this also solves the one person checking if the mob is up. if they can stay alive, more power to them (Bards may NOT get selo's or something like selo's) if not, see above and Open season. I think the subroutine might be easy enough for such an encounter.
Consider also, the old design of spawns being on a rigid timer or worse yet, subject to a percentage of RNG. Instances also were a quick answer to this. These were perma-camped by industrious players that didn't "get it" to sell the item if it was droppable- one of the solutions was a Trivial Loot Code, another was Bind on Equip. I think a work around to this can be coded into the Living Codex like a sort of Bind on lore where if you loot it once, you cannot loot it again. The problem of MQ'ing still remains which also has been solved by having only the quest owner able to trigger the loot table with the quest item- above- once looted-so only one person can get it at one time.
There may be places where instancing is unavoidable but that would depend on design.
Personally, I like seeing other people in dungeons or zones.
I'm a huge fan of non-loading instancing. One example could be if you've completed a quest, you now have access to an area that exists within an instance that excludes those that haven't completed the quest - but the area within the game looks the same until you enter the area. If following someone that had completed the quest they would simply disapear upon crossing a threshold, but to the person that crossed the threshold, they wouldn't notice a thing.
I would be fine with instanced (but open) areas that can be self containing ecosystems... like changing continents or realms.
I'm not a fan of walking across an open field and suddenly hit a loading screen to walk across the other half of the field (I'm looking at you Plains of Karana!)
Most of the time instances are no good as they naturally seperate people into cliques even more effectively than high school lunch tables. Even if you don't group with someone, you can certainly have positive interactions with them.
Personally, in Wow, I almost never met new people outside of my guild, and I think instancing had a lot to do with it.
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Sometimes, in situations already detailed here, instances can be all right. Player housing, sharding overpopulated areas, and perception related story telling, being my personal favorites.
For me instancing only for raids - and even here limited so that the raid is actually in a normal zone , but trigerable (and locked) via some method. Kinda like Venril Sathir in EQ.
Only other instance I want is for story events with minimal/no combat so people can experiance them without a gold seller spamming and an inpromptue /dance emote squad obscuring major characters in the middle of a dramatic event. Also would be fine having tutorial in an instance which would be more scripted and isolate newbies to teach them the basics.
Also would have some world bosses that are not intanced at all, and some that are instanced but spawn an 'open' version with more loot.
Vandraad said: ... Instancing also helps reduce, if not outright eliminate, toxic competition for content. But, I don't think that needing instancing for this is actually necessary. If the world is large enough, with enough content, without the ability to move vast distances quickly, and a server population of the appropriate size such that there are not enough people to simultaneously engage in all the content, the use of instancing to avoid competition is a moot point.Tl;DR Instancing, if used properly with an eye on thewho, what, where, and why of the specific content, can be a great boon to the overall health of the game. To summarily dismiss any use of instancing is shortsighted.
IMO:
I agree with Vandraad. Nothing demonstrated to date shows that any zone created by Visionary Realms will support 10, 20, or 50 groups concurrently, in a particular area. Nothing shown is big enough, in my opinion, so far.
If they do, though, and for whatever insane reason, VR simply isn't sharing this amazing piece of information that would gather millions of dollars in pledges? Awesome, no need for instancing, /pickzones (or equivalent), sharding, phasing, or any hand-drawn facsimile of instancing.
However, some of the boss fights shown so far ARE a form of content isolation, which IS a form of instancing to SOME portion of the potential target demographic.
So even if it isn't pure instancing in the sense of "you zone into your own private content for your group, raid, or allies", some form of content isolation has been designed and demonstrated so far.
Personally, if it were my problem to solve, I would have instanced/isolated forms of important quest content, and have all other content be competitive.
This stems directly from seeing, first hand, 19+ years of content denial in EQ1 for epic quest mobs in the Planes.
Even WITH /pickzone, because Epic quest mobs only spawn in the primary/first/real zone.
Yes, an implementation issue. Yes, still an incredibly annoying problem for TLP servers.
Guilds simply do not care, act out of ignorance, or worse, take every opportunity to actively prevent anyone else in the game from completing their quests. That's just.. not cool. I don't share the opinion that this specific form of competition is healthy for maintaining or attracting subscribers.
I'm also a fan of actively preventing jerks from ruining the paid play time of others, so whatever is required to ensure that, I'm 100% in favor of those mechanics, for Pantheon, regardless of the content scope.
Having said that, I enjoy some reasonable concurrency & competition, provided there are viable options for everyone. I don't mind travelling far and wide, again, provided there are actual real multiple viable options for everyone. Not just "Oh, you can just go to Kerra Isle if you don't like fighting over 6 beetle spawns in Unrest" ;)
That means if the server is intended to have 2000 concurrent players, and after 12-16 months, 1000 of those players are at max level and all trying to move, XP, and quest through, in and via Amberfaet, because there is no other "good" content avialable? That will likely make the subscribers very unhappy, me included. Trying to put 1000 players at prime time in a single un-instanced zone that can't handle or provide content for 100? Recipe for disaster, and entirely preventable by learning from history.
If VR cannot build out the content to make everyone happy in the first 6 months, our guild would be fine with a temporary /pickzone implementation. Of all the forms of instancing, it's among the easiest to implement, technically, and among the easiest to remove.
I think instancing can work for times when the player is pretty much solo as required. For example, if there are trainers, then when a player goes to level up with a trainer it could be instanced. This could be to engage the player with the trainer in some fashion - maybe a solo contest with the trainer or his pupils - doesn't have to be to the death. Or new skill checks to try out before leaving the training session. The player would be instanced with the trainer but it wouldn't prevent others from interacting with the trainer at the same time - and perhaps also getting their own instance. Folks for whom this is not their trainer would not get any instancing and just plain old world interaction.
I also think this could work with tradeskills - not by default but as part of something specific or special - something only a tradeperson would comprehend and appreciate. For everyone else, move along nothing to see here.
I also think this could work with banking.
Basically, what vjek said above.
I think for many raiding guilds, some form of instanced content should exist so they can plan their playtime around that. With a single group of players, you can easily go to a different place if you find your intended camp already taken. That's not (so easily) possible for raids. So I'm definitely in favor of some form of instancing for raid targets, be it fully instanced zones as for the EQ TLP servers, or "shadowed" overland raid mobs as Vanguard had.
I know there are difficult-to-quantify problems with instances effecting community, etc, but, like any feature, nothing should be denied just because it is 'suspect'.
I've never seen much of a problem with instancing of overcrowded zones, for example, as long as it's done well, eg. the player can choose to join friends or even the 'crowded' zone if they really want. In the case of over-crowding, instancing is worth the negatives, though perhaps if there are important 'boss' monsters, they should only exist in the 'main' instance? I throw in that idea as a stray thought but also to suggest that instancing/sharding of zones doesn't have to be done like it was in earlier games.
As with everything, I trust VR to innovate even as they take strong inspiriration from old school MMORPGs.
Yes, instancing has caused issues in the past. It doesn't have to in Pantheon, either if VR decide to not use it, or they decide to do it better than it has been.
Currently watching the April roundup.
Hearing that the intention is to make all dungeons and raids open world is deeply troubling.
Ive been playing MMOs for over 20 years and in that time i've noticed one thing, people get more toxic every year.
While i hope a more oldschool MMO attracts a more mature audience, there are always some that ruin it.
So my question is, what will classed as toxic behavior when people are camping bosses, tagging bosses and running away, and in pvp servers killing raid teams for fun.
I personally find the idea of competing for bosses absolutely horrible, it will add hours to every dungeon/raid in a bad way.
This is a hard question to answer. VR has said over and over they are totally against instancing except in very specific situations. I'm ok with that. I'm not as personally opposed to instancing as this, however it's hard for me to know what this non-instanced game will look like.
I do know what previous non-instanced games looked like and there were frequent problems outside of just being contested. Besides potential griefing, artificial bottlenecks are created to slow or stop progression of guilds who aren't as "elite" by those who want a monopoly on content.
To really answer this question, I think I would neeed to hear more about the solutions to these and other problems that VR has mentioned trying. Whether that's infamy, lockouts, horizontal progression, tons of content, limited instancing, or other ideas. I do think the game is able to go from no instancing to using instancing if needed much more than the opposite direction.
This thread came to mind after reading a summary of MtG Commander. A few sentences stood out in terms of the overall intention behind that format, which I think could be used to bolster arguments in favor of limited instances.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/ways-play/introduction-commander-2016-10-28
Commander is designed to promote social games of Magic.
It is played in a variety of ways, depending on player preference, but a common vision ties together the global community to help them enjoy a different kind of Magic. That vision is predicated on a social contract: an unwritten agreement that goes beyond these rules to include a degree of interactivity between players.
Where competitive formats seek to balance the playing field for all styles and strategies, we want to encourage a style of game that is more open and directed toward all players having a good time regardless of who wins. This is summarized as "Create games that you'd love to remember, not the ones others would like to forget."
Or, in so many words, Commander is a way to focus on having fun with friends playing Magic rather than simply defeating opponents. It's not the victory but the experience that matters.
This isn't to say that there shouldn't be deeply felt losses in a competitive environment; there absolutely ought to be lows that counter the highs. However, bad blood from the 24/7 raid guilds does tend to spill over into other zones, the world over, and that ruins the fun for the average player who maybe only has a few hours of available playtime. Having witnessed this happen on numerous occasions, I can say that only suspensions seem to help push back against this issue. Currently it has reared up its ugly head once again, and in more personal ways, though the offenders haven't taken it to extremes yet.
Members of the server's most dominant guild recently lost out on two raid targets and were quick to imply that the opposition skirted the rules by being in cahoots with each other. Since then that guild has denied content in other zones whenever the opportunity has arisen. Ignoring a longheld gentlemen's agreement, they took what has essentially been a timeshare camp at a time belonging to one of the opposing guilds. The same night, they claimed a boss via camp check without having the numbers present for it, only doing so after noticing pulls had been ongoing to get that boss into another part of the zone after repeated attempts and one wipe. In both cases, the opposing guilds had no recourse and went elsewhere or logged off.
No one wins if the offending players have lost interest in creating memories that they'd love and if those on the receiving end are left with memories they would rather forget. Competition is all well and good, and it can make the resulting win/loss more memorable than any loot table, but there are players who become overly territorial, to the extent that they will grief the opposition off of "their" server. Instances are part of the world that cannot be claimed by any one guild, group, or player. If added in sparingly, at the higher end of content in particular, instances would at least lessen the number of petitions and allow for some really unique encounters to look forward to with each upcoming expansion. While instances do take away "a degree of interactivity between players" those specific interactions aren't why I have ever played MMOs and are often why I return to RPGs, at least until the problem solves itself or the troublemakers are suspended.