This week's Community Spotlight focuses on a thread by pencilrick entitled, "'Instanced' gameplay is 'offline' gameplay," which levels a heavy argument against the use of instancing in MMOGs. In this article we take a look at what the community is saying on both sides of the issue, as well as examine the merits and pitfalls of instancing altogether.

Community Spotlight: "Instanced" gameplay is really "offline" gameplay.

 That's the beauty of EVE: Same universe, same characters, same.. everything.

What do i care if, on MMO xOx (guess), you got a sword double your size on server A, but on server B, you're a nobody? That's just silly.

Some things like KSing and camp ighting lend more credence to the online "world" feel. Not everyone in the world is friendly with everyone else. "Bad things" happen to people. Course, the industry has 99% given up the idea of creating online worlds. They just want to make online games in which everyone wins and "loss" or "adversity" don't exist. Sometimes bad happenings create some of the most powerful and positive memories in MMO gaming. We just find ourselves in a day and age were the majority of people playing these games have forgotten how to adapt and overcome. And I'm not talking about things like ganking and player respawn camping. I'm talking about relatively lighter things like KSing.

Let's say your in a WoW(or EQ2) instance with a raid of 24. How exactly is that offline play? Not to mention you can still send tells, talk in guild chat, and interact with anyone online.

C'mon guys, get a freakin' clue. Instancing is perfectly fine.

Originally posted by brostyn

Let's say your in a WoW(or EQ2) instance with a raid of 24. How exactly is that offline play? Not to mention you can still send tells, talk in guild chat, and interact with anyone online.

C'mon guys, get a freakin' clue. Instancing is perfectly fine.

You aren't in the game world anymore, you are in your own little special custom world. Some people like the idea of an online world, and instancing kills that feeling. It kills immersion.

I have 6 years of EQ that I look back on and thank the MMOG gods that I no longer have to put up with that crud.

I got so sick of doing a dungeon getting to the end and finding some group farming the end boss. Or worse yet be about to do it yourself, and as you are killing the last of the yard trash seeing another group rush past you and attack the boss.

Yeah... That was fun... NOT.

And of course it is never OFFLINE the closest it comes is a small online server hosting only 5-25 people. Always online, just not always Massive.

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You aren't in the game world anymore, you are in your own little special custom world. Some people like the idea of an online world, and instancing kills that feeling. It kills immersion.

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How does it kill immersion? Heck seeing 3 other parties hacking through a dungeon kills the immersion far more then not seeing other parties.

When you run into another party you have to decide to be polite and let them finish the boss, maybe helping them. Then wait for the respawn so you can kill the boss. In a instance you don't have the jarring effect of knowing you need to wait on a boss respawn.

 Immersion? I hunt all the time. Want to know one thing I have never experienced?  I have never in real life finally tracked down my prey and seen someone else jump in to get the kill. Being alone and picking what and when you hunt without outside interference is real life. Only a noob who has no reality based opinion or who is too uptight to suspend disbelief would have a problem with this. Ever been caving? Same thing. I've climbed/crawled through maybe ten major cave systems and have never run into someone I didn't walk in with. 

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Originally posted by hogscraper  
Immersion? I hunt all the time. Want to know one thing I have never experienced?  I have never in real life finally tracked down my prey and seen someone else jump in to get the kill.
Being alone and picking what and when you hunt without outside interference is real life. Only a noob who has no reality based opinion or who is too uptight to suspend disbelief would have a problem with this.
Ever been caving? Same thing. I've climbed/crawled through maybe ten major cave systems and have never run into someone I didn't walk in with. 

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Well said :)

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BTW a lot of instances in Tabula Rasa were well done. They had their own story (nicely explained in videos and continued by NPC dialogs/transmissions), it was way more fun in group than solo (sometimes rather impossible to solo) and your group had a break from that war-everywhere-around-you free world and was going trough your own little adventure.

Clearly there is a role for instancing.  A group of people gather to accomplish a specific goal that could take 4 to 8 hours, its merely sanity that provides them an opportunity to do so without being griefed.

HOWEVER to go from that to what AoC and Champions Online did for example, where ever single part of the game is instanced is, imo, completely counter to what MMO's are about.

As usual, with most debates, the answer is moderation. Thoughtful extremely strategic use of instancing greatly enhances play for all. No instancing can be intense but often counter productive, total instancing is just completely pointless in an "MMO".

1st of all i wanna say that without instancing mmo's would not be as much fun and there would be a lot of frustration and such.

Just as someone before me said, imagine you and your group working your azz off to clear a dungeon and just as you are busy with the last set of trash you see a group that was hiding in shadows behind you dash and mark the final boss. How would that feel? Friggin Frustrating that's how it would feel. And since i have quite some experience in mmos (about 5 -6 years i'd say) i can allso tell you that there will allmost always be a lurking group behind you to do that just because they get off in annoying people.

On the other hand, if we are to compare instancing i would like to say i LOVE the ideea of instancing for solo play. Let me explain. I've been playing WoW for the last 2 years or so and i think everyone will agree with me that it has an AWESOME story. But there is a problem when you want to do the last 3 quests from a chain that takes you to an instance or a raid. That becomes a problem especialy now when no one will instance with players the same level. Everyone calls up a lvl 80 friend who will farm a lvl 30 -40 instance in less than 15 min (i know cuz i did it for my wife's hunter :D).

Recently i picked up Dungeons and Dragons Online and discovered that they implemented the Modes for instances. They have Solo Mode so you can go through with your quest on your own, Normal Mode that deffiently requires a small party, maybe 2 -3 ppl, and Hard Mode that requires a well geared 4+ party. I find this awesome. The rewards fit the dificulty level and everything is hunky dory.

I mean i for one go online to play. Socialising is a bonus in my oppinion so when i have to wait fo 30 minutes to get a full party to go anywhere i get pissed off and log out. And if that hapens for 2 months consecutively, i delete my subscription and as much as i love the game i move on. That just happened with WoW. Love the game, friggin hate the players.

That allso raises the "importance" of some classes in the game well above others, thing which i really find unfair. I mean you want to get a group together to go somewhere and you just can't find a tank or a healer partly because most of them are saved, some of them don't want to do the instance and so on. And eventualy you  find a crappy healer or tank that will cause repeated wipes cuz they are not good enough but you can't really say anything because they will leave and you will be back to looking for group but with a very nice repair bill on your hands. That just sucks.

Well that's my 2 cents anyway.

 In my humble opinion there is good news and bad news when it comes to instancing for MMOs.

Good News is Instancing helps game development. Content is easier to create and maintain. It is more flexible and immersive. It is this immersiveness that attracts the general crowd of gamers. These are the single rpg and console gamers. It brought more gamers into the MMO circle.

Bad news: It brought more gamers into the MMO circle. The small MMO veterans who planted their "Mine" flags for Ultima Online, Runescape, EQ, DAOC are being drown out. Game companies saw World of Warcraft and knew this market was untapped. however, they listen not just to the MMO vets, but the general console gaming masses. As a result, MMOs are evolving into co-operative games or multi-player modes.

Originally posted by dhayes68

Clearly there is a role for instancing.  A group of people gather to accomplish a specific goal that could take 4 to 8 hours, its merely sanity that provides them an opportunity to do so without being griefed.

HOWEVER to go from that to what AoC and Champions Online did for example, where ever single part of the game is instanced is, imo, completely counter to what MMO's are about.

As usual, with most debates, the answer is moderation. Thoughtful extremely strategic use of instancing greatly enhances play for all. No instancing can be intense but often counter productive, total instancing is just completely pointless in an "MMO".

your mixing your MMOS, for shame.

City of XXXX is instanced, Chapions is mostly open world.

On a side note:

I love the idea of a persistent world but concesions have to be made for greifers.

in the real world some people may not be 'nice' but if i go on a killing spree and slaughter everyone in LA i'm not dodging the goverment..MMOs....not so much...and if that does happen

"alts"

you can alt out of trouble irl

As I have said before... No fantasy author ever wrote an epic tale of brave heroes standing around in a cave with a hundred other brave heroes valiently waiting for the dragon someone just killed to reappear so they could take their turn.

That is no more immersive than being loaded into your own copy of a dungeon

Newsflash: MMORPGs are NOT REAL WORLDS. They are computer video games. They are limited by the fact that they are computer video games. WoW is, UO is, EvE is. Period. Nothing on the market right now will ever fool you into not realising your playing a video game, within the ruleset of that video game, unless you are literally mentally handicapped. I can't do whatever I want to do in EvE, I can only do what EvE allows me to do, it's no less true in EvE than it is in WoW, the two just let me do diffrent things.

The fact that you like what EvE let's you do better than what WoW let's you do is no diffrent that te fact that you like Halo and I like Civilization IV. WoW is what it is, and has the ruleset that it does, because that's how the developer decided it was going to work, and obviously they founf a customer base.

Instancing is nothing more than one way of creating an expirience withing and MMORPG, not amount of like or hate validates or invalidates it. It simply is.

Originally posted by NotNiceDino

As I have said before... No fantasy author ever wrote an epic tale of brave heroes standing around in a cave with a hundred other brave heroes valiently waiting for the dragon someone just killed to reappear so they could take their turn.

That is no more immersive than being loaded into your own copy of a dungeon

Newsflash: MMORPGs are NOT REAL WORLDS. They are computer video games. They are limited by the fact that they are computer video games. WoW is, UO is, EvE is. Period. Nothing on the market right now will ever fool you into not realising your playing a video game, within the ruleset of that video game, unless you are literally mentally handicapped. I can't do whatever I want to do in EvE, I can only do what EvE allows me to do, it's no less true in EvE than it is in WoW, the two just let me do diffrent things.

The fact that you like what EvE let's you do better than what WoW let's you do is no diffrent that te fact that you like Halo and I like Civilization IV. WoW is what it is, and has the ruleset that it does, because that's how the developer decided it was going to work, and obviously they founf a customer base.

Instancing is nothing more than one way of creating an expirience withing and MMORPG, not amount of like or hate validates or invalidates it. It simply is.

^This

Such an asinine thing to discuss IMHO. Just another way for the few who hate instances to create nonsense out of nothing.

Originally posted by dhayes68

 

Clearly there is a role for instancing.  A group of people gather to accomplish a specific goal that could take 4 to 8 hours, its merely sanity that provides them an opportunity to do so without being griefed.

HOWEVER to go from that to what AoC and Champions Online did for example, where ever single part of the game is instanced is, imo, completely counter to what MMO's are about.

As usual, with most debates, the answer is moderation. Thoughtful extremely strategic use of instancing greatly enhances play for all. No instancing can be intense but often counter productive, total instancing is just completely pointless in an "MMO".

This is pretty much dead on. Full-instanced games are bullshit. But instances are an effective way of present scripted encounters or activities (ala WoW). Of course this assumes that players WANT scripted content... which obviously player who prefer 100% Sandbox, 100% of the time don't, which is completely valid and completely a matter of taste. What I'm sick to death of is people implying that anything that isn't to their taste is not valid i.e. ""Instanced" gameplay is really offline gameplay" or that anyone with diffrent taste is wrong (WoW Kiddies). I also find it distasteful that MMORPG.com would create a Community Spotlight actually encouraging such drivel. More and more, it seems like the management here is actively trying to encourage the silly flame wars this site has become so notorious for.

There are a few related major problems in MMOs that instancing attempts to solve:

1) Limited virtual real estate

2) multiple thousands of adventurers per server

3) No penalty for failure

4) Respawn

In your PnP D&D world (or maybe fantasy novel/movie), there are rarely more than a handful of adventurers besides yourself. I have yet to come across a game where there are thousands of people competing against each other to kill the one dragon menacing the town. The idea would be ludicrous.

Lets take this scenario out of the PnP instance and put it into a common MMO area.

Dragon menacing the town number 2,000,000,001 spawns. It's not exactly a unique encounter, and everyone knows the spawn rate. You can now potentially fight every single other player on the server for the final blow, most damage, or first blow (depending on how rewards are granted) for the opportunity to loot the dragon. There is no real death penalty, so if you die trying to get the last blow - so what? If there are no loot requirements, any bystander can loot-ninja the dragon as it hits the ground. Once it's dead and looted, everyone stands around waiting for it to respawn and do it all again. Whee. The immersion factor is completely dead for this encounter. I may as well be playing cart driving in Free Realms, since this is really just a race to kill and loot.

Let's move this encounter to an MMO instance. The encounter becomes owned by the group in the instance. No outside forces can kill-steal, drag other mobs into the encounter, kill your healer, or in any way disrupt your attempt to kill the dragon. No loot-ninja (except one brought in by you) can get to your loot before you do. There aren't a bunch of free-loaders or gawkers watching your every move (unless there are NPC gawkers). You don't have to run up to the dragon and slay it quickly before someone else can, you can take your time and approach the encounter strategically. The designers can ensure that the path to the dragon is strewn with certain test mobs to verify that you deserve the shot at the dragon. Instancing really adds to the immersion factor and removes the griefer factor.

Non-instanced content is really paradise for griefers. Unless you're having a massive city battle or a very public quest, I see no reason not to instance all important encounters.