147915-instances-killed-the-mmo-star

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Running to experience a boss fight for the first time, as my party of 3 long time friends fresh and excitedly racing to max out our character's level.. running towards this cavern under the capital city....  We stop in our tracks..
 
"What is this? A force field?"
"careful."
"Could be a trap."
"Well, I only see one way in..."
 
I run and jump, with no clue with what is about to happen..... A Loading screen?!
Poof... I am alone, in a dungeon.
 
"What is this?!"
 
I turn back and no longer see my friends on the other side of the loading screen force field.
 
Party chat flickers: "Where did you go?!"  "You disappeared!! Into Empty Space?!!!" "Warriors get stealth!?"
 
"It's... ....ok?" I reply to the astonished party members. "Jump through."
 
Soon after one of the party members says, "Oooooh, It's something called instancing" after returning from his alt tabbed search.
 
We all listen in horror as my friend explains something called an Instance.
And the soul of the MMO died that day.
 
 
 	
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			ugh....i remember open world dungeons...ugh...the horror. Especially when it was crowded, oh man...	
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Instances didn't kill MMOs... whiny players who complain about the smallest inconvenience did.
 
Seriously, a loading screen prompted you to make this post? It took you longer to come here and whine about it than it did to just deal with it in game.	
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			I'm 37 and have been playing MMORPGs for 16 years, trust me when I say instancing didn't kill anything.  If anything, instancing made games more accessible.	
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			Every mmo I've ever played has used it to one degree or another. No idea why it would come as a shock unless this was your first time playing one.	
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ugh....i remember open world dungeons...ugh...the horror. Especially when it was crowded, oh man...
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			Anyone who was playing WoW when the AQ gates opened will understand the benefit of instances. 	
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Anyone who was playing WoW when the AQ gates opened will understand the benefit of instances. 
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Anyone who was playing WoW when the AQ gates opened will understand the benefit of instances. 
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The soul of the MMO is dead because you're roleplaying game mechanics?  Couldn't you just not? 
 
Also, have you never encountered zone lines or loading screens in other games?  I remember people hunkering on either side of the zone line to Crushbone back in 1999, so if that's all it took to kill MMOs, they've been dead for well over a decade.	
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Damn, nobody mentioned Karnor's Castle.
 
/yell train to zone!
 
 :lol:	
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The soul of the MMO is dead because you're roleplaying game mechanics?  Couldn't you just not? 
 
Also, have you never encountered zone lines or loading screens in other games?  I remember people hunkering on either side of the zone line to Crushbone back in 1999, so if that's all it took to kill MMOs, they've been dead for well over a decade.
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			Funny enough, I think instanced content tends to be the most popular in MMOs. I look at FFXIV and SWTOR, and the most popular content is single player instances and small group stuff.	
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Funny enough, I think instanced content tends to be the most popular in MMOs. I look at FFXIV and SWTOR, and the most popular content is single player instances and small group stuff.
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			and I think the players that camped the Shin Lord for 78 straight hours (after waiting in a LINE) for a 1% chance at the black bladed scimitar are glad the MMO scene went that route. :)	
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Why on earth would anyone want to try and do dungeons competing against god knows how many other players? There's PLENTY of larger open world content for you to participate in.
 
Did the OP and his mates just come out of some time bubble from 10 years ago?	
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Yeah, instances took over mmos.
 
It's amazing, you have a game world that holds hundreds of players and developers never use the mmo aspect to build neat game play.  Instead the open world is a queue zone for smaller group dungeons.
 
It seems 95% of mmos took this route.
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 There's PLENTY of larger open world content for you to participate in.
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			Instancing is my favorite part of MMOs.	
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I'm 30, playing mmo since I was 12, I was Guild Leader, GM, Mod, I like poetry, I was second of my class, I have a respectable coin collection, trust me bla bla bla <-- I love curriculum-guys LOL XD
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instances killed the MMO?
 	
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Pokin' my designer head in to give my two cents on why you see instancing in most MMOs these days. People have covered the technical concerns, largely, but I'd like to talk about some pure design reasons why instancing is favorable.
 
An instance allows you to define a more cohesive and responsive piece of content. The designers know where you'll be and what direction you'll be coming from. They also know no one else has come through that space before you in this version of the content. This allows us to make things trigger based on your position and actions with no concern that someone's just done it a few minutes ago. Everything is clean and the content correctly feels as though it's responding to your specific actions and movements. That's a lot harder to do in the open world. For every cool moment where you think about sweeping in to help someone who's gotten in over their head, there are dozens of other instances where players encounter fights or almost-dead bosses with no context and little impact. In short, instances can make things feel a great deal more fun.
 
Instances also allow designers to design around a specific number of players. Scalability is important (and we do play with it!) but there's also merit in knowing precisely how many bodies will be in a space so the encounters can be tailored around that group size. It can lead to more interesting and fulfilling encounter design. The open world dungeons of the past often had little danger in them, as they were so populated people were spending hours hanging out in rooms waiting for things to drop.
 
Lastly, instances can also easily define the length of a play session. In today's day and age, people are looking for play sessions that best fit their schedule. An instance defines an obvious stopping point where you can consider yourself well-rewarded for your time investment.
 
There are benefits to doing things in the open world, and we play around with a number of those in WildStar. However, instances bring a responsive and tailored experience to a given play session. There are methods behind the madness. :)
 
EDIT: And hey, everyone, let's be excellent to each other, okay?	
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Were you also in a hardcore raiding guild in Vanilla WoW? You weren't talking about how those were the good ol' days and now everyone wants everything handed to them. So I'm a little skeptical about your credentials.  :P
 
Instances used to scare me. To this day, I like doing Open World stuff more than anything but I kinda have max rep everywhere and it's kinda getting repetitive to repeat dailies over and over. Raiding is also fun, but I actually enjoy the social aspect of it more than anything. Most instances don't feel that social to me which is funny because some like to say that those of us who don't like running instances are anti-social.
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I once died in a mmo because of instances. My first time in mmo and leveling in wow. I ended up in an endgame raid at lvl 10-20(?) because I thought I had a quest in there. If instances didn't exist perhaps that raid wouldn't have been there for me to by mistake go into. But it didn't break my mmo experience that I died, I leveled up and learnt the hard way to get better at understanding the minimap and environments and so =)
Perhaps if you look a bit more close at your map and learn environment you won't end up in instances you don't want to be in by mistake. It take some practise but we all have to learn. 	
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Pokin' my designer head in to give my two cents on why you see instancing in most MMOs these days. People have covered the technical concerns, largely, but I'd like to talk about some pure design reasons why instancing is favorable.
 
An instance allows you to define a more cohesive and responsive piece of content. The designers know where you'll be and what direction you'll be coming from. They also know no one else has come through that space before you in this version of the content. This allows us to make things trigger based on your position and actions with no concern that someone's just done it a few minutes ago. Everything is clean and the content correctly feels as though it's responding to your specific actions and movements. That's a lot harder to do in the open world. For every cool moment where you think about sweeping in to help someone who's gotten in over their head, there are dozens of other instances where players encounter fights or almost-dead bosses with no context and little impact. In short, instances can make things feel a great deal more fun.
 
Instances also allow designers to design around a specific number of players. Scalability is important (and we do play with it!) but there's also merit in knowing precisely how many bodies will be in a space so the encounters can be tailored around that group size. It can lead to more interesting and fulfilling encounter design. The open world dungeons of the past often had little danger in them, as they were so populated people were spending hours hanging out in rooms waiting for things to drop.
 
Lastly, instances can also easily define the length of a play session. In today's day and age, people are looking for play sessions that best fit their schedule. An instance defines an obvious stopping point where you can consider yourself well-rewarded for your time investment.
 
There are benefits to doing things in the open world, and we play around with a number of those in WildStar. However, instances bring a responsive and tailored experience to a given play session. There are methods behind the madness. :)
 
EDIT: And hey, everyone, let's be excellent to each other, okay?
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@ the OP:
 
*I put on my robe and wizard hat*
 
So the alternative is what...fighting with the 500+ other players in the same uninstanced plot of MMO land over quests, monsters, loot, resources, and boss drops?
No thank you kids, MoonGate and Meridian 59 say 'hi' and get spit thrown at them by your fancy graphical MMO faces.
 
Clickbait must've worked; it even got a dev response.  /wellplayed
			
				
	Edited December 8, 2015 by FantasticCupcake	
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I can see how instances are preferable, even necessary, for story / quest driven content and also for complex boss encounters. But they have become a bit of a design crutch. Partly because MMOs now seem totally dominated by story and scripted events. Plus also obsessed with making players the 'chosen one', so everything has to be set up for them to have a pristine story experience. Even if this means there's lots of other players simultaneously living out the same story in their own instances, only to emerge proclaiming "I saved the world" at the same time a whole bunch of other players do the same.
 
Personally I think that for straight up dungeon crawling you can't beat a good public dungeon. It has to be large enough that players and groups aren't treading on each others toes and difficulty set so that some areas are possible solo / duo whilst teamwork is required to get to the deepest and toughest corners. Bosses in these places should behave just like world bosses do. Public dungeons, if designed right, can be far more social and "MMO-ish" than instanced dungeons. Design them wrong though and there's all sorts of silly issues with spawn camping, mob tagging, loot stealing etc (loot needs to be personal loot that everyone who participates gets so that there aren't any arguments).
 
In other words, both instanced and non-instanced dungeons have their place.
 
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To counter this, instances are the most realistic option for making excellent sandbox content in an MMO. There'd be no way for Wildstar to do housing as we know it without instancing. There'd be no way for City of Heroes to create the Mission Architect system without instancing. Just like any development decision, it's about choices and what technology gets you the most of what you wanted without opening yourself up to problems. You call it a crutch, I call it a good pair of shoes that lets a developer get a lot farther than they would normally, most of the time.
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Damn, nobody mentioned Karnor's Castle.
 
/yell train to zone!
 
 :lol:
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Here's my two cents.
 
Instances are are a good thing, if there is also competant world content to keep people out and about. Wildstar's lack of this is part of the reason why the world's so empty. Everyone is in GA, Datascape or PvP, because instanced content is endgame content. There is no world content in Wildstar that is endgame.
 
World bosses, while not as big of a joke as they used to be, are still pretty much a joke. There's no reason to do anything like that once you're in Genetic Archives, because it's all easier, less rewarding, and less fun. So once people get to endgame, which they inevitably do, they stop doing world content and only do instances, which really kills the MMO's "world".
Wildstar Developers need to get off their asses and realize that they need world endgame content. Like, ENDgame. Avatus level. A Mega Worldboss or two that drop amazing loot and are a big challenge even for 40 to 50 players. A PvP zone with persistent points to capture and allied and enemy NPCs to fight with and against.
 
 
Why do you guys have to be such filthy casuals with your world content, Carbine? Can't Timetravel and co. get together and say: "Hey, let's design an optional worldboss and make it as stupidly difficult as possible, because we're jerks like that. With some nice Datascape level loot or some unique equipment so people will actually strive to do it."
			
				
	Edited December 8, 2015 by Seztren	
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I think we might be talking at cross purposes. Wildstar's housing isn't instanced. Yes it's behind a loading screen because it's a different zone. But it's not instanced in the sense that there is only one version of your house, my house etc. So if I'm having a party on my Wildstar housing plot and everyone is invited, everyone will be in the same place (unless there's some overflow code which would open a new instance after a certain number of occupants is reached?).
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I think we might be talking at cross purposes. Wildstar's housing isn't instanced. Yes it's behind a loading screen because it's a different zone. But it's not instanced in the sense that there is only one version of your house, my house etc. So if I'm having a party on my Wildstar housing plot and everyone is invited, everyone will be in the same place (unless there's some overflow code which would open a new instance after a certain number of occupants is reached?).
 
Instanced dungeons of course behave very differently. Your Skullcano won't be mine, unless we're in the same group of course.
 
The reason I feel over-reliance on instanced content is a crutch is because it is easier to develop for (as Caydiem explained) so it becomes the de-facto standard. Open world and sandboxed content becomes less and less of a priority and so the technical problems associated with that form of content never get properly addressed (hence all the lag at zone events like Scorchwing etc). Why bother fixing the lag when lots of players honeypot if you can parcel them up into instances instead?
 
But every time you do this, you lose a part of the "massively multiplayer" experience of MMOs.  MMOs with too much instanced content end up with a diminished sense of community and the only contact players have with each other outside of instances tends to be capital cities which become like lobbies.
 
On the plus side, Wildstar does have quite a lot of zone events and world bosses and players are encouraged into these via Contracts, dailies etc. This is good. Sadly the associated lag isn't. I can see the attraction to the devs of trying to move as much as possible into instances, but I wish there was a way to solve the lag issues so we can have more non-instanced content.
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I'll take instanced content any day.  I don't get why you're so keen on slideshows in major cities with all the players around.
There isn't some automagical 'fix it' button for these types of latency spikes and fps drop issues in major cities and in areas with tons of players around.
Some older MMOs managed to do it, but those same MMOs are also shut down or on life support.
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Yes, they did. And they did it with far inferior hardware and at a time when most players were still on 56k modems. A lot of older (often sandbox) MMOs were much better at coping with honeypots of players, within limits of course. Probably because most of these MMOs had engines designed for the purpose of being massively multiplayer and of course graphics and animations were more rudimentary. Theme park MMOs just aren't designedso well for this. their focus is different. Hard to forget WoW's first attempt at world PvP, with the Tarren Mill lag fests. Yet other competing titles at the time, many of which WoW eventually forced into life support, could have handled such battles so much better.
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The ' I'm 30 etc etc ' was a joke-point directed to a guy here xD. Not really doing a 'curriculum' thing XD. I'm actually neutral to this discussion. I have no problem with instances. but I understand why someone can struggle with them for various reasons, however I don't think that they're effecting (affecting?) negatively a/the game in any way. Check the last CRB Designer post for a different, complete, POV =3
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Because spending limited time & resources on stuff that few or no people will bother with is something that Carbine doesn't wanna deal with?
Ok then.  If you want stupidly-difficult and nonsensical 'world boss' content there is always that Ultimate-whatever boss Final Fantasy 11 and a few other MMOs out there to give a whirl.  Then see just how 'fun' it is when you actually get your wish and come back to WildStar.
 
Aion Online did exactly this to try to get higher levels into 'world PvPvE' in the near-empty Abyss zone.  It worked for a while until the dominant faction basically trolled everyone else and the others just went back to instanced content because imbalanced factions are imbalanced.  Then new content came out that rendered that boss a joke and the gear worthless so it is yet another piece of outdated content again.
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Trust me, if it drops good loot, EVERYONE WILL BOTHER WITH IT. The only reason people don't farm World bosses right now is because the drops are trash. Literally the ONLY thing that people really care about in MMOs is where to get the best stuff.
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			Is this a joke?	
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Is this a joke?
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			No wonder why people prefer instances, I never saw an MMO (at least post-WoW) that could handle more than 20 people at the same place... WBs and large scale world PvP are totally unenjoyable. Nowadays I'm happy if I can solo-quest without FPS drop, I can't even go through the main city without it... so what are we talking about...? And it's not just WS, I'm totally disappointed in pretty much all MMOs in this regard, and lost my hope long ago...	
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The only reason people don't farm World bosses right now is because the drops are trash.
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Personally I think that for straight up dungeon crawling you can't beat a good public dungeon. It has to be large enough that players and groups aren't treading on each others toes and difficulty set so that some areas are possible solo / duo whilst teamwork is required to get to the deepest and toughest corners.
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Instancing = less lag.  How often do people in wildstar complain about lag/performance issues?  Oh wait, i mean, all the time!
 
I want MORE instancing to eliminate performance issues for the player base and make the game more enjoyable.
 
Let's instance world bosses and instance thayd with a lower cap, please?  would make many people happy.	
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			Ah, the days of... /yell CAMP CHECK	
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About the "make one silly hard boss" argument.
 
I think Oondasta from Mists of Pandaria WoW was a bit like that in the beginning - hard DPS check with enrage, and mechanics that punished stacking together and bad positioning, bouncing spells or sth.
 
They had to nerf it. People cried or whatnot.
 
One of the problems I guess: completionism. Huge percentage of players are completionists + casuals, kinda goes hand in hand. And MMOs themselves exploit completionism hard with all the achievementfest, progress bars, points, etc.
 
There's always someone crying in WoW when PvPers get exclusive mounts for example. Don't want to pvp but want to have all the mounts (as if it didn't work both ways). Generally, many people are like: I want to have all X but don't want to do content Y.
 
Can't blame them though, if the very definition of MMO is for them "gotta catch 'em all". But it's a bit of an uncompromising stance to take in an MMO genre, which by very definition has to be based on compromise. (Wonder if it tells something about our society btw).
 
Since open world is where the casual completionists rule, the open world will always gravitate towards easy grindfest (not that there isn't considerable amount of grind involved in instanced end-game).
 
I'm not ridiculing anyone, it's neutral observation. I'm casual myself but I'm in it for story and art, not collections. Everybody has their own playstyle, it's just hard to keep everyone in the same game world.	
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Instancing = less lag.  How often do people in wildstar complain about lag/performance issues?  Oh wait, i mean, all the time!
 
I want MORE instancing to eliminate performance issues for the player base and make the game more enjoyable.
 
Let's instance world bosses and instance thayd with a lower cap, please?  would make many people happy.
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