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Instancing shouldn't be a dirty word.
robert4818
Member UncommonPosts: 661
Its funny to see this community start foaming at the mouth whenever they hear the phrase "Instance" in a game. Many players immediately tune out the minute they see a game has one, that in segregating players with an instance, they have completely destroyed what MMOs are all about.
I frankly disagree. Instances are an ingredient in a game, no more, no less. Like any ingredient, they can be used right, or they can be used wrong. Its like salt. Chocolate chip cookie recipies contain salt. However, there's a big difference in the result when you use the 1 teaspoon of salt vs 1 cup of salt in the recipie. Same goes for intsances.
Instances should be used, but used right. What do I mean by that?
First, instances should be used where, immersion wise, it makes sense. Instances should be used in spots where it would be immersion breaking to find lots of players running around at the same time. For example. If your game has an all-powerful evil necromancer, who is feared throughout the land, his castle should not have 3 + groups of adventurers running through it at any one time. If hes so powerful, so feared, why in the world are people able to simply wander through his home at will? In this case, instancing his castle makes sense.
Second, Instances should be used if a game is very, very, dungeon centric. (By dungeon I mean any enclosed space where you run around and kill things.) The reason for this is that very dungeon centric games need an eponentially large number of layouts to remain fresh and effective. Simply put, creating a static world to hold all of these variations is practically impossible. If you have a game that at its core requires running dungeons (COH/COV, Anarchy Online, DDO, Conceptually Shadowrun, Diablo, etc) Instances (and the processes which can be used to randomize dungeons) become a very valuable tool for the game.
Third, Instances should be used if a specific job/dungeon/instance requires alot of dynamic events and environments. If you want a super hero game where you can throw bad guys through walls, knock down buildings, or have alarms that go off and summon guards, then an instance is the way to handle this. Putting these things into the "real game world" results in cities being perpetually leveled, dungeons where the alarms are ALWAYS active, etc.
That being said, there are places where instances should NOT be used:
Do not use instances as a means of population control. (Conan, Champions, Etc.) This needlessly breaks your community up, and definitely breaks immersion. If you need to result to this level of instancing you should redesign your game architecture. I should not have to worry about whether or not I'm in "Liberty City 1" or "Liberty City 15".
Do not use instances for areas that it makes sense for multiple groups to show up. If I was exploring Pompeii, it would not surprise me to find other groups there ALSO doing the same.
Instancing is not a bad word, I just find that many players have had very bad experiences with the concept and are now turned off of it. They've been eating too many cookies made with a cup of salt instead of a teaspoon and have since decided that salt is bad, and anything made with salt will taste bad, instead of realizing that the chef who used it didn't know how to use it properly.
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
Comments
I'm not entirely against its uses in MMO's, but one of the most personal, though largest, draws to me playing these games to begin with has mostly to do with the persistance of the world. If a particular game is so segregated, and so instanced that I may never in my time playing meet someone who technically shares the same spaces of the world as I do, then I think that's a problem. If it's not interfering with the world's persistance, though, I don't see the issue.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
You should add the history of instances:
Instances the way MMO use them now, were introduced in EQ to deal with the issue of Boss camping and Griefing.
EQ had open world bosses and guilds started griefing each other by permacamping them, so the solution was instances.
However, Brad McQuaid hates instances, that's why Vanguard had none. EQ only had them starting in PoP.
I personally only like instances when they're limited to dungeons, the world itself should all be non-instnced, and there should be non-instanced dungeons too.
Let's break away from the typical WoW/EQ style dungeons for a minute.
In my opinion, instances shouldn't be used in a dungeon centric MMO. Why? Because it encourages lazy, steamlined one-path-only dungeon design. Instead, dungeons should be large enough to accomodate multiple raid partys, and should have multiple boss rooms which can each be accessed via multiple paths, making it more unlikely that you end up bumping into another group or killing the same boss at the same time.
Also, create dungeon /shout chat, so each party/raid can organise themselves so that they do not encounter a boss at the same time. Obviously, some guilds would rather show up as someone else is attacking a boss and try to PK for the taking in this environment.
In my opinion, instancing should be used purely to help newer, low-level players in a PvP-centric game. If instancing is the main ingrediant of a games "endgame" (read: like WoW), then it is more of an online RPG than an MMO.
An MMO should be built around the fact that is plays within a persistant world, afterall isn't this the point of the genre?
_________
Currently playing: Black Desert Korea (Waiting for EU)
Always hating on instances in MMOs! Open worlds, open PvP, territory control and housing please. More persistence, more fun.
Instancing and sharding is an indredient in any recipe. Use too much garlic, then the recipe calls for a pinch, and you have crap. Fact remains that most mainstream mmorpgs have over-used this ingredient, and left millions of mmorpg enthusiasts experiencing. . .well you know.
Well.. There are 2 ways of instancing. A good way, and a bad way. If you look at GW1, everything is instanced, and that is something that I don't really like. I like to play games and see other people running around as well. But on the other hand, when it's used for dungeons/raids/story I can live with it. As long as there is a big persitent world too.
Lol.. you're absolutely right...
There's not much discussion here to be made :]
Yes, yes "instancing" SHOULD be a dirty word. It completely seperates you from the WORLD as a whole as well as from other people.
If you wanted a single player experience, or 6player coop....don't play an MMO. Instances ruin emersion. Fortunately, it changing from a "dirty word" will never change, and it looks like the market will start to shift back towards the core essence of what it means to be an "MMO" after SWTOR fails
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The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
It's NOT a coincidence that PoP is considered the expansion that "ruined EQ". O_o
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
I take a look at two different areas in EQ. The first is Crushbone(or BlackBurrow) and the other is Befallen.
Crushbone and Blackburrow are home towns of Orcs and Gnolls. These are, for the first few levels of the game, the "Big Bads" and the threats for the players. They are constant threats hanging over the heads of the near by settlements. Yet, how scary can these places be if there are multiple groups of people, calmly sitting down laying waste to the population at one time? It would make as much sense as if you went to your starting city only to find it perpetually occupied by hostile orcs wandering around while you try to shop. In these two areas, I would suggest an Instance makes a level of sense.
On the other hand, Befallen is a tomb sitting outside of the city of Freeport. There's no special significance about it, other than it is a large set of ruins. Its not surprising to find multiple groups wandering this area, as the treasures it holds could draw all sorts of people at all sorts of time. An instance here wouldn't make any sense.
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
i'm of this same feeling. especially that last sentence. this idea brought on by WoW that there's this mystical dividing line between overworld and dungeon areas, where one should be instanced and not the other.... makes no sense to me.
if you like the positive aspects (which aren't for me, but i can understand why other people see them as positives) of instancing for dungeons, why wouldn't you want the same thing for the overland zones too? no more competing for the same mobs, or swarms of people breaking your immersion for a place that should be desolate, etc.
if there's something good about non-instancing for overland why wouldn't you want dungeon persistence too?
and why in gods name does NOBODY let you make up your own mind and CHOOSE which you prefer for either type of zone?
interested in hearing an explanation of why the 2 types of zones should be handled different from each other.
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Corpus Callosum
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Years ago SOE tried to replace BOTH Befallen & Blackburrow with instanced versions of them. Not so surprisingly, entire guilds threatened to quit the game because if it would have been allowed it would have meant a turning point in how EQ is handled dungeon wise.
Instaces detract, and in most cases destroy, the COMMUNITY aspect of MMORPG's. Blackburrow && Crushbone are no different.
Instances are terrible, and it's time people realized that just because it was in their starter MMO (WoW) doesn't mean it should be in every single other game to make them good MMO's.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
Some thoughts: First, don't make assumptions about why people think what they think. I started EQ back in 99 and have been playing MMOs since. I'm still playing it today. So to blatantly say that peoples "starter MMO(WoW)" had them they think every game should have them is simply asinine.
Second. As I said earlier, Instances aren't the problem in games, its how they are used. I'm sorry that you think every game should be played exactly the way you want them to (Ironically the same argument you made against people who favor instances).
Third. Nobody in this thread is making the case that games should be heavily instanced. The case is made that instances sshould be used in the right ways. Blackburrow and Crushbone are examples of areas that it would make sense to have instances. However, nobody made the case that they should be changed after the fact.
Its funny to see how some people are so hard-coded in their beliefs that just because games have used them badly that the entire idea is horrible. Get over yourself.
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
Again, if you're looking for a single player MMO...SWTOR is just around the corner sir.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
Not a fan of instancing overall. I think under certain circumstances it may provide more benifit than the alternative ie. Large scale raid dungeons or even the individual missions content of a game like Anarchy Online. However when I see the effects of constant instanced content like Warhammer online had the consequences of which meant the community pretty much spent their entire gameplay sessions just waiting for the next instanced pvp encounter to pop and completely ignored what was otherwise a well constructed open world game environment.
I can see the pros and cons of instanced content in an MMO but in any game I intend to pay a monthly subscription fee to play I would prefer to see it used either sparingly or not at all.
Critical thinking is a desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and hatred for every kind of imposture.
Interesting that your initial counterpoint to "instancing shouldn't be a dirty word" is that instancing ruins immersion by seperating you from the world and its population. As soon as robert4818 pointed out how proper instancing could improve immersion, you seamlessly switched over to arguing for the majority, saying that instances ruin not immersion but community. Nevermind the fact that "entire guilds threaten to quit" over just about every major change to every MMO, regardless of how the players in general view those changes.
We have to get over this sacred cow called "immersion". Robert made one of the few posts I can recall ever seeing on these boards where the term is being used correctly rather than as a catch-all defense. He's actually talking about what makes a pretend world seem like a real world... the factors that make or break a game's internal consistency. Too often, we see people throwing around the stock phrase "That would ruin immersion!" to protest anything which they don't like.
Instancing is fantastic tool, that is usually not used properly. Spawn camping was not game play it was a aspect of games like EQ (my first MMO) because of technological limitations, it is not content, and anyone who argues that it is content is simply defending something to defend it.
Instancing only furthers immersion, and really has zero effect on community. Community is built through players interacting, on small scale, not on large scale. This is why things like global chat alone never build community, you need reasons to interact be it in an instance or in a persistant zone.
Fortunately most developers know that instancing isn't the problem, unfortunately most of them resort to it to answer far too many problems. Some games are handicapped based on their tech and thus over utilize instancing. Had Mythica acutally made it even to just open beta, many people would have loved their instancing and seen a dev team that understood how to use it.
The best game to use instancing currently is STO, it has many a fault, even with the instances (specifically no real "persistant" aspects to the game), but what the devs of STO understood from day one is that you can't create a Star Trek feel if there are 200 ships orbiting planet X. Love or hate STO (and trust me I sometimes love to hate it), they got the idea that the universe should be instanced correct.
Now I'm going to leave this thread alone because I know someone is going to come by and say, "but you are a stoopid noob who is lazy and has no idea what a real MMO is like". I'll just laugh a little inside knowing I was playing EQ from day one, and got to see parts of Vanguard before most people, I've been in the old games, they have some wonderful things about them, but their lack of instancing isn't among those wonderful things.
The problem isn't instancing. The problem is dungeon design.
Instancing became needed because some MMO dungeons were designed based on SP or coop RPG formulas. Walk into a dungeon that is small and has a linear design and there's no way that 20 teams of "adventurers" can have an appropriate experience.
Design a non-linear dungeon that's large enough for 20+ teams and non-linear and the problem goes away. Randomize boss rewards and eliminate the need for boss camping.
EQ took the first step of turning MMOs into large lobby based coop games. WoW simply perfected it.
There's no doubt that instancing saved the MMORPG genre. There's only so much of each other that we can take.
The OP is entitled to his/her own opinion of course. However, in my opinion instancing is bad due to it equating to lazy, last century technology pure and simple.
It separates players from each other and is immersion-breaking. Why immersion-breaking important? Because you can ask any developer out there and the main thing they want is a player to be sucked into their game world and want to devote their time to it, hence, immersion. Instancing breaks immersion, therefore it is bad, simple.
Any current developer that relies on instancing for zones is lazy basically and falls back on catch phrases to try to excuse their laziness and lack of inovation(and lack of funding) in using modern technology.
I'm all for open world, but the highlighted portion was a concern in the genre's earlier years. Still, I'm wary about things that divide the player population from each other. It's going to happen to a certain extent at the minimum, but I don't like it when there's too much. I prefer the random encounters with other players, even while hacking through a dungeon or whatnot. Sometimes you combine and team up (esp. with the older games that large groups were fairly common), sometimes you still go your own ways. I got a bunch of friends because of those open world run-ins or while in dungeons when we worked together.
That was a big problem I had with some prolific names in recent years. GW1 would have been better if the game world was more open and seamless, so you can find people while out adventuring. AoC was VERY instance driven to a great fault. You had people walking around world map regions on different "instances" even though they were all on the same server. That caused massive confusion when the game came out when people were trying to get together to work on a quest. You're standing in the village center, all by yourself, not able to find the others in the group, while they're all in the same spot but can't see you since you were on a different world "instance" than others.
Instances need to be kept to a minimum. There should be little to no dividers between the server populace.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Instancing allows developers to create dungeons of a far higher quality than you can find otherwise. If there was some evil necromancer that was designed to battle a maximum of 10 players, you don't want half a dozen other raids waltzing into the middle of a battle, right? That completely kills the immersion and challenge. Open dungeons can be fun to explore but often are extremely crude, and certainly cannot have any relevance to the main storyline (if an MMO has any). Not to mention the hassle of having to endlessly wait for a shot at killing a boss simply because other groups are farming it's spawn location...
That's a foolish thing to say, since instancing has been around for a very long time and shows no sign of vanishing.
Also, funny since there are BoP/No Drop items which are the definition of a single player experience.
Whether we agree or not, this has turned into a single player genre with the expectation that we will group with others to obtain epic items once we've gained an arbitrary amount of levels. The economy in these games suck. Its basically a single player economy due to BoE/BoP.
So claiming that if we want a single player experience we shouldn't play MMOs is actually laughable, because MMOs are pretty darn close to that.
Peoples main concern with open dungeons seems to be the boss camping issue... There are PLENTY of ways to eliminate boss camping without turning our MMO dungeons into a regular, co-op online RPG dungeon (which COMPLETELY kills the immersion. I don't understand the argument that instancing HELPS immersion, this baffles me infact).
A dungeon should have multiple bosses of similar difficulty, dropping different items. This design wouldn't exactly eliminate camping completely though, because if UberBoss drops the UberGlovesOfDestruction and DrunkenMonkiesClan wants to farm it to gear all their members, then camping is still gonna happen.
Here are some ways, right off the top of my head, to eliminate boss camping in open dungeons (and these are right off the top of my head, a developer could do much better I'm sure):
A dungeon could have a (daily/weekly) time limit which each player is allowed inside for. After this time is up, you can't enter 'til tomorrow
Once a person has killed a boss (or is member of a party/raid that has killed one), they should be denied access to the boss room of that boss. This could be done by making a gate to the boss room close (or a force field blocking entry) when it has been killed, so people who've killed it can't get in for the rest of the day/week. And this gate would only be seen by people who don't have access to that boss.
Once a boss is killed, the party could be teleported outside the dungeon so they have to run through the mobs again to get to it (immersion breaking design, I don't actually like this too much).
Can't be arsed thinking of anymore, I'm going to go and play Poker. But you get the idea, their are plenty of ways a developer could eliminate boss campers, and their methods would be far superior to my little 5 second quick-fixes.
_________
Currently playing: Black Desert Korea (Waiting for EU)
Always hating on instances in MMOs! Open worlds, open PvP, territory control and housing please. More persistence, more fun.
Imagine if Lord of the Rings took place in an non-instanced MMO:
"Sorry, Mr. Frodo, you can't throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom yet! Another Ringbearer got here first, and now you have to wait 20 minutes for Gollum to respawn."