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[Column] General: Is Instancing Bad for MMOs?
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Welcome back to another edition of Player Versus Player, the bi-weekly debate column that pits two MMO writers in a battle over the issues you care about. Like you, we at the MMORPG offices have been paying a lot of attention to Skyforge lately. Even though there is an awful lot players are excited about, the amount of instancing has players divided.
Read more of Christopher Coke's and Ryan Getchell's Player vs Player - Is Instancing Bad for MMOs?
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Comments
So the reason you don't see roleplayers is just coincidence. Which also makes me think you don't actually play the game, but merely read about what they planned before launch...
Instancing, phasing, and loading screens all over the place just kill an MMORPG for me. I have a hard time getting into that game and eventually drift away from it.
I like immersion, the feeling of being in a living breathing world, and instancing / phasing / loading screens do not allow that. And I wonder what the point of playing a MMORPG is if one does not like or care about the 'living world' aspect.
I am trying ESO now. Loads of phasing and zones are segregated. It is actually a good game in other ways. I like the art style and graphics. I like it that the quests have stories behind them (so sick of WoW type, mindless, 'go pick 10 animal dungs' quests). I like a lot of things about it but I know I will not be able to play it for more than a few weeks at best, because the world is not there due to being split into a million pieces as a result of all phasing, instancing, and segregation of zones.
Two of the worst design decisions to be shoehorned into MMO's. Kills immersion and interaction. Might as well play a Single Player.
INteresting read...
and it prooves that anything currently happening in instances could as well happen in the open world... Just everyone would have its own version of that open world, only sharing whats wanted and necessary with others.... The world would however feel seemless and alive...
certain choices would. Open up certain people, like joining a PvP quest would pit you in the same version of the area as other people involved in that pvp quest, PvP quests could totally replace instanced battlegrounds and arenas... Hell, you could even have areas where based on a choice you only meet ffa people... Or just PvE people..
however fixing this megaserver would require a real smart server.. And thats something that ESO promissed and did not deliver uppon.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Instancing is great for a controlled environment, say, for a guild, or a group of 5, to tackle boss content. It's also great for pvp, if you want a more competitive environment.
Yes, i know some people will say we're talking about the open-world here, but instanced dungeons and pvp came to be, due to griefers in the open-world, so it's related.
As for instancing the shared open-world environment, well, i lean more towards a seamless experience, because this is supposed to be a massively-multiplayer environment.
Phasing and instancing the open-world environment, is antithesis to the genre.
Megaservers/Cross-realm technology has really been great to blend people together in a shared environment though, and it pretty much eliminates server segregation.
If an MMO must have segregated servers, then they need to use something like WoW's bnet feature, which allows friends to "guest" on each other servers, or GW2's guesting feature.
I don't care how they do it behind the scenes. I like feeling like I and all the other players are in one huge world.
I really don't know what the deal is. There's two ways to this.
Once upon a time....
It was an idea I very much wanted to see implemented and I hope they revisit it at some point. It's ironic that the one part of the game that does not use the megaserver tech, Cyrodiil campaigns, provides you with the best sense of community since you see the same players often enough that you get to know them by name. Everywhere else you see random strangers.
Play style filtering would accomplish something similar in the megaserver parts of the game.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
How "Massively" Multiplayer does that end up being? Doesn't it make it a "Kind'a Large Multiplayer" game?
Does it really boil down to anything else from Lobbies, with some overflow added in?
Once upon a time....
I think almost all of us prefer a seamless world as long as it still looks as good as the instanced one would. But up until now have memory been pretty important for the mid range computer. Soon the ram will be up from 4 gig to 8 or even 16 as a standard and that makes creating a seamless world easier.
And in the not too distant future will the ram memory and the harddrve be the same thing making instanced worlds pointless. The technology to make this already exists (Samsung have been using it in cameras and Smartphones already).
So I think the problem will go away by itself in a few years.
Still, the important thing is that the instances don't feel too small and the loading time isn't annoyingly long. EQ2s Queenos and Freeport are (or at least used to be, was years since I played last time) examples on how you can trash the mood with small instances. Sometimes moving from one point to another in the town gave you several loading screens.
Compare that to GW2s Divinitys reach, that town is well made and feel huge even if Freep and Q was just as large but they still felt small.
MMOs used to feel like living and breathing worlds. Now it feels like a glorified 3D Diablo 2 - but with boring and redundant loot.
IDK what your point has to do with anything I said. That separation into pop-cap limited areas is already part of the megaserver: if an area is "too crowded" according to their criteria a new version of that area is spawned on the fly. The difference is that the assignment to versions of an area are now random instead of filtered by play style.
They could easily bias their algorithm to favor population so that there is no splitting if an area has not reached the cap but once the splitting starts to happen -- as it does during prime time and weekends in the non-vet zones -- the play style filter can be applied instead of using random assignment.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
The biggest thing I have against a system like a filter is that no system can be perfect. I can easily see a player getting corralled into a filter that doesn't really fit them. And what do you do of you decide you want a change of scenery?
Maybe a reset button?
My own personal thing is that I want a world (that I like), and then I want to make my way in that world. I don't want it siphoned off to appease someone else's opinion of what I want.
Once upon a time....
I think it depends in part on the type of game. For instance if you want to make an open world/virtual world sandbox MMORPG instancing just doesn't fit. For something like City of Heroes where you had a huge city and instances for missions at doors it made sense. Even in early World of Warcraft instancing was pretty good, you had blackrock, molten core, and some pretty sizable dungeons but then in burning crusade the hallway-boss-hallway syndrome started.
So the next thing other than what type of game your making would be the actual content of the instances. Burning Crusade had some really linear hallway-boss-hallway going on and they just got lazy. In part to make the dungeons shorter and for the sake of convenience. One point some people bring up is that instance provide better content and easier ways for the devs to script stuff and a lot of the time I feel that just is not true and they are being lazy with the content and providing less of an experience. The LFG cross server and mega server stuff turns people into one time meetings and you never see them again. We are at the point when Heroes in Guild Wars 1 are more vocal than any player running a dungeon in WOW. Moderns MMOs facilitating socialization in action.
And that's instances in a nutshell. Convenience.
It wasn't always the case. You had Everquest with open public dungeons that were huge. This is also one of the reasons I don't buy the performance/ technology limits argument at all. Also Darkness Falls from DAOC.
To sum up, instances are a tool not intrinsically good or bad but how they are used is the determining factor.
Edit: Also Skyforge and it's solo instances, that's the exact opposite of massively multiplayer.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/And again, how "Massively" multiplayer is that? I see your point, and it boils down to the type of game a person wants. But it does leave that question.
It's a good answer to the problem of population overcrowding, but I'd prefer a world and dungeons that are built bigger, with social means to soft-direct players into spreading out more in the first place. Player built cities and resource zones are a start in doing that, as an example.
Once upon a time....
Yeah, I agree. I said something similar earlier. The key point is that if you're going to make an MMO, know your audience and stick to their wants. Themepark and Sandbox can't be blended. Although features and be mixed. But blending them together for play style waters down the game to both types.
And I wouldn't be surprised at all if a largish percentage of gamers wouldn't like both games in their stable.
Once upon a time....
In the non-megaserver version of this that has been the way forever since the beginning of MMOs is called a "server transfer" which they'll usually charge you $ to do and often just a "server merger" when the population of the server you chose yourself when you started playing reaches a critical low population state.
I mean... you do know that "servers" are just instances of the world with their own population limits, don't you? People usually self-select a limited number of play styles when they choose a server: Normal, RP, PVP and RP-PVP being the typical 4 choices.
And I know of at least one MMO with a traditional server-based split that further subdivides the population within the server into multiple versions of a zone to deal with the very same overcrowding issue that megaserver games like ESO and TSW run into. GW2 does it and there may very well be others that also do it.
EDIT: as to your other point of how massively... the Cyrodiil campaign servers in ESO currently have, I believe, a population cap of 1800 (600 a side) down from 3000 at one point to try to improve performance. That's plenty massively enough for me
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I cant stand instancing, I hate it so much. There is no place for that in MMORPG's :!!!!!!!
Thats why WoW is still played and loved so much, its the only MMORPG with a real WORLD.
They might suck at everything else but they created the best worlds in this genre.
What's the population limit of a WOW server instance? They seem to have a whole shitpile of those.
Within the server itself, aren't phased areas where you only see the people fighting through your own "before" phase instance and then see a whole different set of people after you finish, instances? Are dungeons and raids and PVP scenarios not instanced?
There hasn't been an MMO with zero instances in a long, long time. Even DAoC had one very large instance inside theiir server instance: Darkness Falls.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
First and foremost, the genre is called MMORPG, with the MM standing for Massively Multiplayer. The principle behind instancing is antithetical to massively multiplayer gameplay. You are literally removing the massively multiplayer element for the sake of convenience.
Instancing breaks down the immersive qualities of a virtual world. I know convenience and accessibility are all the rage today, but its come at a very steep price for me, one which I've seldom been willing to pay. That price has been the elements of realism which make a virtual fantasy world believable. You have to wait for good things in life, so removing that principle from a virtual world will inevitably leave your accomplishments feeling hollow.
Instancing removes opportunities for socialization and variation in static content. Mechanics like instancing are the antithesis of emergent or dynamic gameplay.
Instancing removes the competitive aspect from content and progression.
Instancing hurts the economy by introducing an unlimited number of items and/or cash into the world. With an open world, the number of items that exist on any given server is limited by the number of players and the time it takes for both contested mobs to respawn, and by the amount of time and effort necessary to acquire said items. Those same constraints don't exist in instanced, cross server, globalized economy, lobby game mmos, so of course its necessary to add artificial restrictions for the sake of balance. Designers then must go through the trouble of balancing this influx by creating further unrealistic classifications for items like bind on equip and bind on pick up to prevent mudflation. If thats not enough, they then have to counter the gold generated by said uncontested items with other money sinks.
Instancing and convenience in general trivializes progression and creates a greater burden for developers to produce new content.
I think this covers at least the basic reasons why I believe instances have no place in an MMORPG.