I am new to online gaming, but have read about it for years and the stories conjured up WORLDS in my mind, worlds where you could rape and pillage or avenge and save, if you so wished. Worlds where there were no vendors, kings or monsters (unless your character or a dungeon master was one of those).
If you think about original PnP D&D, all vendors, kings and monsters were real people (Dungeon Master), and that makes the world alive. When i was reading about Ultima Online, that was the impression i got. I thought I would be paying to play this game in order to have people employed to make it fun for me (Dungeon Masters). Likely you can imagine my dissapointment when i bought my first MMORPG title just to realise that it is nothing more than a single player game which a lot of people play together.
Yes, i want to buy a house (ingame) and then buy a catapult to blow it to bits, just so when people walk by my plot of land they can have a laugh.
THERE IS ENOUGH PLAYERS, but there are no Dungeon Masters... dungeon masters are the world, they should be able to change and manipulate it through the actions of the players. How irratating that i have never seen a MMORPG where i can scale another man's wall and remove some rooftiles instead of pushing my lockpicking for months.
World of Warcraft has 5,5million subscribers. At $15/mnth per player that's $82million dollars a month. Certainly they can employ some dungeon masters in their game, even if it was two per capital, with business hours for the shops if they must. That's a job i would do one one time.
hello foopie, i dont know if u had the chance to play UO for quite a bit cause it takes time in all of those games until u can reveal their full potential due to complexity.
UO for example offered many of the things and tools u needed to take the role as a dungeon master even if just beeing a normal player. So to reduce it to just:"i bought my first MMORPG title just to realise that it is nothing more than a single player game which a lot of people play together", is just plain wrong/unfair. Many of the interactions of UO and even WOW which is in my eyes very limited, offer quite more than a normal single player experience can offer Maybe your choice of words here were not that lucky...but anyhow to come to your point about having gamemasters or so called DungeonMasters and such in Online Massivly Multiplayer Games would be something very interesting. And it has been tried on a very low level in many of the known Games. In UO for example even the creator/Leaddesigner Richard "Lord British" Garriot and others of the team did show up in their roles on the servers and tried to do that job. Accidentally they would have to do that very regularly and on every of the 15 different servers which was not doable. There are many other examples for this approache other people defintily can outline much better i may could do.
But to get to the point. In WOW for example i cant see your wish comin true cause this game is definitly mainly driven by money issues. And not by dreams what fantastic things could be done (This is very harsh to say and i dont want to hurt the developers cause i dont have an insight on how desicions were made during development of WOW). Therefor a group of people - lets say 50 or another hundred employees for blizzard to bring in "moderated experiences" will cost them another XXX $ per month and therefor will push down their performance at the stock market. And thats where the pressure comes from. I dont want to know how many big companies right now have knocked at Blizzards door and offered them a buyout and such things. They were maybe able to resist such acquisition yet. But if the fish that want to swallom them is big enough he will do so. I cut it here.
On the other hand i am pretty sure that in future a game and a company will come up and will offer what u asked for. First of all we already have seen so called premium servers which were more expensive than other servers but therefor offered more moderated content (Wasnt that in EQ1 already available? I cant remeber but pretty sure the concept was tried already; maybe some of the fellow boardmembers can remember it precisly). So yes one day a company will show up in future where moderated content is the main approache and wanted from day one and by design, cause i see that as another part of the future entertainment industry and therefor i am pretty sure it will be there one day. But experience form the past shows that this step will be done first when all other "already known" concepts are milked to the maximum cause we are still talking about money in the nowadays world and nothing else ;-)
Damn i have to get better saying things with less words *coughs*
A game that uses instancing for more than a fraction of its content can't really be called massively multiplayer anymore, IMHO. That's not to say it can't be fun, but it's not MMO at that point. Consider the newest big name on the field, Dungeons & Dragons Online. The entire game is based around instanced dungeons, with the "city" being a glorified chat room that allows people to run around and find groups. All the meat of the game takes place in instances, with a 6-man party limit. I saw that there was an option for raid groups (groups of groups), but didn't get to see if you could do a normal mission with a raid, or just "epic" missions.
Now, like I said, that doesn't mean it isn't fun. I enjoyed the preview event for DDO quite a bit, enough to pre-order the game in fact. But, I don't see the difference between that game, and Diablo II's concept of creating instanced shards that up to 8 people could join. For that matter, it's not that far removed from the days of multiplayer Age of Empires or Starcraft. If you gave Starcraft a 3D common area where people could run around as avatars, with loot derived from wins on the battlefield... it would qualify as an MMO by the same standards DDO uses.
My favourite game is EVE Online. It's a small game (as far as MMO standards go), but with a single shard that all 23,000 players travel around in, it feels much bigger than you'd expect. Yes, there are annoyances with people "camping", or someone stumbling upon your mission goal before you do... but if the game were instanced, it would feel cold and lonely (not to mention, utterly safe).
Where *I* would like to see instancing used to good effect is in quests. Not all of them, just ones where it really matters that you complete it alone. Or even better, if the party seperates in a dungeon, split it into multiple instances so one group can finish (or fail) in different ways than the others. Overall though, I find instancing to be a cheap trick to avoid developing server technologies that can actually handle the kind of player loads we've come to expect.
Just want to point out for your post that it is about PvE only. For people that like PvE only and only want PvE "Instances" are a really great thing to avoid all the mentioned problems form EQ1 and 2 and such games. But those are almost pure PvE concepts and have nothing to do with the question about "Isntances" in a world where u want to see PvP.
So this discussion is really geared toward instances in PvP? Sorry I don't PvP and I guess if you do this would not be a good thing. Those who PvP like the thrill of not knowing when they are going to get attacked and instances would take that away I guess.
I thought it was how it affected MMORPG Games over all not just PvP.
I cannot speak for EQ2, but in WoW I can say that it has diffinately hurt the game and the community feel to it.
I recently decided to quit the game because I was not having fun anymore. I am a boarderline Hardcore gamer and have been through all the 5-15 man stuff endlessly. All I have left is Epic endgame stuff. Well, there is no PUG's going to these places. It is generally accepted that PUG's suck. So to do places like ZG, MC, and BWL I need to be in a guild that raids. Well, my guild did raid, but it was not a raiding guild so raids were hard to put together, and often times did not happen.
So I decided to leave my guild and try another. The problem is that the friendships and bonds I had made were all broken once I left the guild. Now in the new guild I have friends, but it is not the same. I am not part of the core group, and despite the fact that I know these places inside and out, I am not a leader. I also have to adjust to a new raid schedule that really doesn't fit my schedule very well.
Now I am sure over time I could build myself back up to a leadership roll, but when I have been playing since release, I don't want to have to start from scratch again.
Don't get me wrong. Instances have their place in MMO's, but they have become extremely overused IMO. I see too many companies centering their games around instances. This is destroying the fabric of MMO's since it is no longer the larger community accomplishing goals for their side. Goals are instead based on your guild, and with the differnt rates that people progress, it is really hard to keep smaller, more casual guides together, since even the most casual gamer will eventually get past the content in a game.
In my most humbled opinion... Instancing is fine when there is an equal amount of none instanced dungeons. How ever when taken to the extreme like Guild wars, and DDO it ruins the game entirely and makes a comunity non exsistant
In my most humbled opinion... Instancing is fine when there is an equal amount of none instanced dungeons. How ever when taken to the extreme like Guild wars, and DDO it ruins the game entirely and makes a comunity non exsistant
Originally posted by Gikku Just want to point out for your post that it is about PvE only. For people that like PvE only and only want PvE "Instances" are a really great thing to avoid all the mentioned problems form EQ1 and 2 and such games. But those are almost pure PvE concepts and have nothing to do with the question about "Isntances" in a world where u want to see PvP.
So this discussion is really geared toward instances in PvP? Sorry I don't PvP and I guess if you do this would not be a good thing. Those who PvP like the thrill of not knowing when they are going to get attacked and instances would take that away I guess.
I thought it was how it affected MMORPG Games over all not just PvP.
I still would say that instances hurt MMOs beyond the PvP. The game looses a lot of interactivity and creativity between its players with every single instance in which people cant meet.
I ll try to explain with only one example: In UO there was a Dungeon where in a certain area deamons spawned (tough critters). But some people thought; Man that would be a nice spot to open a bar. So they placed tables and chairs and all the equipment down there for the deamon bar. Imagine me comin down there expecting only the angry deamons! No way, now it was a great entertainment park with a nice girl playing the barkeeper, the possibilty for a chat with others while getting some fun fighting the mobs. Or even getting some help if u sucked and died haha. It was great fun created by players not connected in any sense to PVP. But u wont see such fine things if the game offers only instances.
Originally posted by Stevesan I ll try to explain with only one example: In UO there was a Dungeon where in a certain area deamons spawned (tough critters). But some people thought; Man that would be a nice spot to open a bar. So they placed tables and chairs and all the equipment down there for the deamon bar. Imagine me comin down there expecting only the angry deamons! No way, now it was a great entertainment park with a nice girl playing the barkeeper, the possibilty for a chat with others while getting some fun fighting the mobs. Or even getting some help if u sucked and died haha. It was great fun created by players not connected in any sense to PVP. But u wont see such fine things if the game offers only instances.
Oh great "I went to hell and they'd turned it into a themed bar"; personally I find that an arguement for instancing not against it...
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." -- The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
haha well that is left to everyones personal perspective (and for the fact that u havnt been there u cant judge it anyways). But to bring u back to the point of my example. With instances u dont see such kind of interactions between the players. And that really cuts the richness of virtual worlds no matter if thinking about PvP or just PvE (<- which was the original point my post was referring to)
Originally posted by Stevesan haha well that is left to everyones personal perspective (and for the fact that u havnt been there u cant judge it anyways). But to bring u back to the point of my example. With instances u dont see such kind of interactions between the players. And that really cuts the richness of virtual worlds no matter if thinking about PvP or just PvE (<- which was the original point my post was referring to)
I may have been there; it's been a long time since I played UO. I stopped when I realised that it was so lousy with exploits that character progression was a joke and the shopiing-mall dungeons were about as unimmersive as you could get... oh and I could run across the continent without breaking sweat. it was a dissapointment.
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." -- The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
the official UO has changed a lot i think.. I left when they introduced trammel and that shit (must have been about two and a half years after release or so) today UO has champion spawns, items with insane stats and what not that ruined the original game.
But besides that and due to the fact that u played UO yourself (hopefully in its best and early days), what do u say about instances hurting PvE MMOs? My point is clear; I say it hurts the lvl of creativity and interactivity. The level of feeling a virtual world as a virtual world and not as a summary of "levels".
I think it helps, I'm speaking from a Wow and FFXI perspective, first WoW. I think that it helps in the sense that it gives the guild a chance to just do their thing, large dungeons take long enough and you don't need rivalry inside of them to double the time (10 hours MC anyone?). WoW also has the world bosses, Kazzak, Azuregos, the 4 dragons, all of which are open to anyone who can claim them, and that in itself is really annoying when your competing for them on a pvp server against opposite faction, but I do enjoy the encounters since it all comes down to persevirace. WoW has a good mix of both instance content and world content, in the other hand... BG's are different. BG's have encouraged closed pvp and literally extinguished world pvp, which is a pity since that was always a blast, they should maybe lower BG honor and raise world pvp honor, but that is one thing I believe needs revising.
FFXI in the other hand, is quite the opposite except for Dynamis and such which are instances. Most of the bosses are world bosses and anyone who plays that game and wanted their "phat lewt" has camped many monsters for countless hours only to have him taken by a farmer who will just sell the item online. This aspect of the game isn't alot of fun, and its something that instances fix, yet they can also just make all the items soulbound/rare,ex, so that farmers don't go after them.
Overall, I believe it helps. Most of these games have an even supply of both and thats always the best, see what y'all think.
Originally posted by Stevesan the official UO has changed a lot i think.. I left when they introduced trammel and that shit (must have been about two and a half years after release or so) today UO has champion spawns, items with insane stats and what not that ruined the original game.But besides that and due to the fact that u played UO yourself (hopefully in its best and early days), what do u say about instances hurting PvE MMOs? My point is clear; I say it hurts the lvl of creativity and interactivity. The level of feeling a virtual world as a virtual world and not as a summary of "levels".
As I said earlier in this thread Instancing has its place but over use is harmful. IMHO if used properly players in an instance should be completely unaware of it. Seemlessness and immerssion is the order of the day.
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." -- The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Well my first post here and its in a debate, go me! anyways, i personally like the instances, ive played WoW and all those games but see, i would hate to get to the end of a dungeon and find a line of groups waiting for the same boss, in some ways instances are quite benneficial. See, i believe that only dungeons intended for quest should be instances, while when you are just exploring the common just hole in the wall dungeons should be a part of the immersive world you joined the game to be a part of in the first place. I am currently playing Guild Wars Factions though, in which the towns are the only parts of the game that are not instances, but I like it in this game because they gameplay in it is fun when your with a small group, cooperation is something not commonly found just outside of town in WoW, ive never really seen anyone who said this on WoW, "LFG just for level grinding outside of town..." it just doesnt happen, but in GW it does, which kind of brings the community a little closer in, on Wow there is the greatest idea ive been able to experience in an MMO though, the ability to move into another race or factions territory and actually kill even the NPC's, raiding on WoW was done very well, but, for those who are low level players and they suffer to the wrath of a level 60 undead mage, it ruins thier experience, im torn between the two honestly, but truely i am more for the instances, just in GW there is too much of it, i just believe that wandering the plains and forests and even in just little hole in the wall dungeons should not be an instance, but large scale dungeons intended for quests and elite monsters should be instances, just to keep from having to stand in line for "your turn"... it completely kills the feeling you get while you and your group are out and adventuring... instances help, but when the game is centered around them it can be very damaging to the actual MMO part of the game, but some how GW thrives from it, simply because it was done well. so instances are good, but only when experienced in small doses, if you ever played pen and paper DnD (which i have) then you know having a close knit group of friends is something that just cannot be experienced online unless through an instance, but i enjoy playing games where i can interact with large communities because its like real life, standing in a room with people you dont know, but some how just because of the game, you can make a new friend, or an enemy... its all about how you intend on playing the game, and what you plan to get from your online experience... thank you if you actually took the time to listen to my long winded opinion, and just play a game you are confortable with, GW is fine for now, but i already know that i will tire of it soon enough, mostly because the level cap is 20 though.... c ya
Instancing in most game just makes it more boring, cause the only reason they have them in WoW is to get better gear and more gold, and the high lvl guilds just dont let anyone in anymore.
No, if you don't have instances like in old games you would go to some endroom of a dungeon and when reaching it you would see 100 ppl (afk or not) spamming specials to get the rights to loot the spawn first.....hence the word spawncamping.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
I put it helps because you can make it very story concerning and apply unique mechanics to a specific zone that would not take place in the open world... I also think open world would eventually be better if anyone could implement complicated dungeon mechanics that support the possibility of hundreds fighting said boss... See the problem with open world everything is to many players ganging up on something eventually take away the strategy or difficulty of a possible PvE encounter... I'm shocked 59% think a raid dungeon hurts the game as opposed to raids not existing and people already complain about lack of content.
Comments
Hi,
I am new to online gaming, but have read about it for years and the stories conjured up WORLDS in my mind, worlds where you could rape and pillage or avenge and save, if you so wished. Worlds where there were no vendors, kings or monsters (unless your character or a dungeon master was one of those).
If you think about original PnP D&D, all vendors, kings and monsters were real people (Dungeon Master), and that makes the world alive. When i was reading about Ultima Online, that was the impression i got. I thought I would be paying to play this game in order to have people employed to make it fun for me (Dungeon Masters). Likely you can imagine my dissapointment when i bought my first MMORPG title just to realise that it is nothing more than a single player game which a lot of people play together.
Yes, i want to buy a house (ingame) and then buy a catapult to blow it to bits, just so when people walk by my plot of land they can have a laugh.
THERE IS ENOUGH PLAYERS, but there are no Dungeon Masters... dungeon masters are the world, they should be able to change and manipulate it through the actions of the players. How irratating that i have never seen a MMORPG where i can scale another man's wall and remove some rooftiles instead of pushing my lockpicking for months.
World of Warcraft has 5,5million subscribers. At $15/mnth per player that's $82million dollars a month. Certainly they can employ some dungeon masters in their game, even if it was two per capital, with business hours for the shops if they must. That's a job i would do one one time.
Thanks for reading,
Foopie
hello foopie, i dont know if u had the chance to play UO for quite a bit cause it takes time in all of those games until u can reveal their full potential due to complexity.
UO for example offered many of the things and tools u needed to take the role as a dungeon master even if just beeing a normal player. So to reduce it to just:"i bought my first MMORPG title just to realise that it is nothing more than a single player game which a lot of people play together", is just plain wrong/unfair. Many of the interactions of UO and even WOW which is in my eyes very limited, offer quite more than a normal single player experience can offer
Maybe your choice of words here were not that lucky...but anyhow to come to your point about having gamemasters or so called DungeonMasters and such in Online Massivly Multiplayer Games would be something very interesting. And it has been tried on a very low level in many of the known Games. In UO for example even the creator/Leaddesigner Richard "Lord British" Garriot and others of the team did show up in their roles on the servers and tried to do that job. Accidentally they would have to do that very regularly and on every of the 15 different servers which was not doable. There are many other examples for this approache other people defintily can outline much better i may could do.
But to get to the point. In WOW for example i cant see your wish comin true cause this game is definitly mainly driven by money issues. And not by dreams what fantastic things could be done (This is very harsh to say and i dont want to hurt the developers cause i dont have an insight on how desicions were made during development of WOW). Therefor a group of people - lets say 50 or another hundred employees for blizzard to bring in "moderated experiences" will cost them another XXX $ per month and therefor will push down their performance at the stock market.
And thats where the pressure comes from. I dont want to know how many big companies right now have knocked at Blizzards door and offered them a buyout and such things. They were maybe able to resist such acquisition yet. But if the fish that want to swallom them is big enough he will do so. I cut it here.
On the other hand i am pretty sure that in future a game and a company will come up and will offer what u asked for. First of all we already have seen so called premium servers which were more expensive than other servers but therefor offered more moderated content (Wasnt that in EQ1 already available? I cant remeber but pretty sure the concept was tried already; maybe some of the fellow boardmembers can remember it precisly).
So yes one day a company will show up in future where moderated content is the main approache and wanted from day one and by design, cause i see that as another part of the future entertainment industry and therefor i am pretty sure it will be there one day. But experience form the past shows that this step will be done first when all other "already known" concepts are milked to the maximum cause we are still talking about money in the nowadays world and nothing else ;-)
Damn i have to get better saying things with less words *coughs*
A game that uses instancing for more than a fraction of its content can't really be called massively multiplayer anymore, IMHO. That's not to say it can't be fun, but it's not MMO at that point. Consider the newest big name on the field, Dungeons & Dragons Online. The entire game is based around instanced dungeons, with the "city" being a glorified chat room that allows people to run around and find groups. All the meat of the game takes place in instances, with a 6-man party limit. I saw that there was an option for raid groups (groups of groups), but didn't get to see if you could do a normal mission with a raid, or just "epic" missions.
Now, like I said, that doesn't mean it isn't fun. I enjoyed the preview event for DDO quite a bit, enough to pre-order the game in fact. But, I don't see the difference between that game, and Diablo II's concept of creating instanced shards that up to 8 people could join. For that matter, it's not that far removed from the days of multiplayer Age of Empires or Starcraft. If you gave Starcraft a 3D common area where people could run around as avatars, with loot derived from wins on the battlefield... it would qualify as an MMO by the same standards DDO uses.
My favourite game is EVE Online. It's a small game (as far as MMO standards go), but with a single shard that all 23,000 players travel around in, it feels much bigger than you'd expect. Yes, there are annoyances with people "camping", or someone stumbling upon your mission goal before you do... but if the game were instanced, it would feel cold and lonely (not to mention, utterly safe).
Where *I* would like to see instancing used to good effect is in quests. Not all of them, just ones where it really matters that you complete it alone. Or even better, if the party seperates in a dungeon, split it into multiple instances so one group can finish (or fail) in different ways than the others. Overall though, I find instancing to be a cheap trick to avoid developing server technologies that can actually handle the kind of player loads we've come to expect.
So this discussion is really geared toward instances in PvP? Sorry I don't PvP and I guess if you do this would not be a good thing. Those who PvP like the thrill of not knowing when they are going to get attacked and instances would take that away I guess.
I thought it was how it affected MMORPG Games over all not just PvP.
Gikku
I cannot speak for EQ2, but in WoW I can say that it has diffinately hurt the game and the community feel to it.
I recently decided to quit the game because I was not having fun anymore. I am a boarderline Hardcore gamer and have been through all the 5-15 man stuff endlessly. All I have left is Epic endgame stuff. Well, there is no PUG's going to these places. It is generally accepted that PUG's suck. So to do places like ZG, MC, and BWL I need to be in a guild that raids. Well, my guild did raid, but it was not a raiding guild so raids were hard to put together, and often times did not happen.
So I decided to leave my guild and try another. The problem is that the friendships and bonds I had made were all broken once I left the guild. Now in the new guild I have friends, but it is not the same. I am not part of the core group, and despite the fact that I know these places inside and out, I am not a leader. I also have to adjust to a new raid schedule that really doesn't fit my schedule very well.
Now I am sure over time I could build myself back up to a leadership roll, but when I have been playing since release, I don't want to have to start from scratch again.
Don't get me wrong. Instances have their place in MMO's, but they have become extremely overused IMO. I see too many companies centering their games around instances. This is destroying the fabric of MMO's since it is no longer the larger community accomplishing goals for their side. Goals are instead based on your guild, and with the differnt rates that people progress, it is really hard to keep smaller, more casual guides together, since even the most casual gamer will eventually get past the content in a game.
I think Hero's Journey is going to destroy every other MMORPG out there.
la-te-da
I hope they do their PVP good too...
HJ-Diviana
Hero's Journey GM
Hero's Journey Official Site
Hero's Hall
So this discussion is really geared toward instances in PvP? Sorry I don't PvP and I guess if you do this would not be a good thing. Those who PvP like the thrill of not knowing when they are going to get attacked and instances would take that away I guess.
I thought it was how it affected MMORPG Games over all not just PvP.
I still would say that instances hurt MMOs beyond the PvP. The game looses a lot of interactivity and creativity between its players with every single instance in which people cant meet.
I ll try to explain with only one example: In UO there was a Dungeon where in a certain area deamons spawned (tough critters). But some people thought; Man that would be a nice spot to open a bar. So they placed tables and chairs and all the equipment down there for the deamon bar. Imagine me comin down there expecting only the angry deamons! No way, now it was a great entertainment park with a nice girl playing the barkeeper, the possibilty for a chat with others while getting some fun fighting the mobs. Or even getting some help if u sucked and died haha.
It was great fun created by players not connected in any sense to PVP. But u wont see such fine things if the game offers only instances.
Oh great "I went to hell and they'd turned it into a themed bar"; personally I find that an arguement for instancing not against it...
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
-- The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
haha well that is left to everyones personal perspective (and for the fact that u havnt been there u cant judge it anyways).
But to bring u back to the point of my example. With instances u dont see such kind of interactions between the players. And that really cuts the richness of virtual worlds no matter if thinking about PvP or just PvE (<- which was the original point my post was referring to)
I may have been there; it's been a long time since I played UO. I stopped when I realised that it was so lousy with exploits that character progression was a joke and the shopiing-mall dungeons were about as unimmersive as you could get... oh and I could run across the continent without breaking sweat. it was a dissapointment.
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
-- The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
the official UO has changed a lot i think.. I left when they introduced trammel and that shit (must have been about two and a half years after release or so) today UO has champion spawns, items with insane stats and what not that ruined the original game.
But besides that and due to the fact that u played UO yourself (hopefully in its best and early days), what do u say about instances hurting PvE MMOs? My point is clear; I say it hurts the lvl of creativity and interactivity. The level of feeling a virtual world as a virtual world and not as a summary of "levels".
I think it helps, I'm speaking from a Wow and FFXI perspective, first WoW. I think that it helps in the sense that it gives the guild a chance to just do their thing, large dungeons take long enough and you don't need rivalry inside of them to double the time (10 hours MC anyone?). WoW also has the world bosses, Kazzak, Azuregos, the 4 dragons, all of which are open to anyone who can claim them, and that in itself is really annoying when your competing for them on a pvp server against opposite faction, but I do enjoy the encounters since it all comes down to persevirace. WoW has a good mix of both instance content and world content, in the other hand... BG's are different. BG's have encouraged closed pvp and literally extinguished world pvp, which is a pity since that was always a blast, they should maybe lower BG honor and raise world pvp honor, but that is one thing I believe needs revising.
FFXI in the other hand, is quite the opposite except for Dynamis and such which are instances. Most of the bosses are world bosses and anyone who plays that game and wanted their "phat lewt" has camped many monsters for countless hours only to have him taken by a farmer who will just sell the item online. This aspect of the game isn't alot of fun, and its something that instances fix, yet they can also just make all the items soulbound/rare,ex, so that farmers don't go after them.
Overall, I believe it helps. Most of these games have an even supply of both and thats always the best, see what y'all think.
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
-- The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Well my first post here and its in a debate, go me! anyways, i personally like the instances, ive played WoW and all those games but see, i would hate to get to the end of a dungeon and find a line of groups waiting for the same boss, in some ways instances are quite benneficial. See, i believe that only dungeons intended for quest should be instances, while when you are just exploring the common just hole in the wall dungeons should be a part of the immersive world you joined the game to be a part of in the first place. I am currently playing Guild Wars Factions though, in which the towns are the only parts of the game that are not instances, but I like it in this game because they gameplay in it is fun when your with a small group, cooperation is something not commonly found just outside of town in WoW, ive never really seen anyone who said this on WoW, "LFG just for level grinding outside of town..." it just doesnt happen, but in GW it does, which kind of brings the community a little closer in, on Wow there is the greatest idea ive been able to experience in an MMO though, the ability to move into another race or factions territory and actually kill even the NPC's, raiding on WoW was done very well, but, for those who are low level players and they suffer to the wrath of a level 60 undead mage, it ruins thier experience, im torn between the two honestly, but truely i am more for the instances, just in GW there is too much of it, i just believe that wandering the plains and forests and even in just little hole in the wall dungeons should not be an instance, but large scale dungeons intended for quests and elite monsters should be instances, just to keep from having to stand in line for "your turn"... it completely kills the feeling you get while you and your group are out and adventuring... instances help, but when the game is centered around them it can be very damaging to the actual MMO part of the game, but some how GW thrives from it, simply because it was done well. so instances are good, but only when experienced in small doses, if you ever played pen and paper DnD (which i have) then you know having a close knit group of friends is something that just cannot be experienced online unless through an instance, but i enjoy playing games where i can interact with large communities because its like real life, standing in a room with people you dont know, but some how just because of the game, you can make a new friend, or an enemy... its all about how you intend on playing the game, and what you plan to get from your online experience... thank you if you actually took the time to listen to my long winded opinion, and just play a game you are confortable with, GW is fine for now, but i already know that i will tire of it soon enough, mostly because the level cap is 20 though.... c ya
-Cyelis
Right...
No, if you don't have instances like in old games you would go to some endroom of a dungeon and when reaching it you would see 100 ppl (afk or not) spamming specials to get the rights to loot the spawn first.....hence the word spawncamping.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
i like what EQ2 does
- have a mix of public and instanced dungeons
some of EQ2 public dungeons also have instanced boss rooms
EQ2 fan sites