EQ Never

Wasnt intending my post to be interpreted as posting an opinion on instances one way or another.

Also, the instance I'm referring to is in Plane of Justice, where you had to enter an instance to fight the justices there. Pretty sure PoTime was not made an instance until GoD-OoW

I wasn't directing it at you specifically, but like I said before, this conversation has been had countless times, and people still don't get it - they still think instances belong in an MMO.

They don't, at all. It's a copout, a lazy design decision to avoid certain mechanics, but those mechanics that are avoided are thecoreof mmo gameplay itself: playing with other people, expectedly and unexpectedly. Note what I said. I didn't say it solved any problems - instancing doesn't solve anything, it simply avoids by removing the very thing that puts the first m in the acronym in the first place.

I've worked in this industry, and the amount of retardation is astounding. Devs actually think WoW is the example of an MMO. There are designers out there, MMO designers, who have only heard of Ultima Online. It wouldn't surprise me if there were some who've only heard of EverQuest. They design SP and MP mechanics and slap a MMO sticker on the box, and they do this because 1: they're too incompetent to design massively multiplayer mechanics that work, and 2: since the Koticks and financial beancounters have run roughshod over any creativity left in this industry, those designers, even if they could design correctly, likely are shackled from doing so. And this has left a wasteland of an industry where no progress or innovation is made, and when the 27th WoW clone fails, the blame is tossed around to the devs by the marketing heads who told those devs to make the 27th WoW clone based on their 'marketing and focus group' data. Brad might be a coked up, terrible manager, whose success and mechanics were unintended and accidental, but it happened and it was close to the best MMO design to date, in 2013.

I took Furor to task on his stupid bullshit. I've taken others, in other forums and in real life. I was once very passionate about this industry, this genre. But now all I see is complete and total shit, and I don't see it getting any better unless a Miyamoto-esque hail mary saves the day again.

We need to start with bringing back the essentials. Like storing the heads of dead bitches we decapitated in our houses. Dumar and I don't agree on much, but when it comes to Ultima Online I think we have both always been on the same page. I miss the fuck out of that games heyday. I'd give anything to see a modern version.

While we're on the topic of instances, I don't think they belong in mmos at all except for one thing which I have only seen done before in minor ways: that is instanced drugged/debuffed states.

Say someone crafts/smuggles a powerful hallucinagenic potion that after drinking, puts you in dreamland, where you run around and interact with things in an instanced way that no one is else is a part of *directly*.

But your player should never disappear from the game world. The drug or debuff could have them hobbling around senselessly in a small radius while they're off exploring space or whatever else in their instanced head. Their sub-comatose char should even be able to be killed, effectively snapping out of the 'instance' and back to their spawn point.

Heck there could even be skills to specialize in making ever more powerful instanced states, or a class could incorporate the mechanic into some spiritual journey-esque way.

I don't know why I try though. I don't think theyll ever introduce new features into mmos.

I think instances are decent for dealing with overcrowding. Mcdungeons are fucking lame, but so was the overcrowding in guk at times. I would love to see giant, sprawling dungeons intended for 30-40 people, and when they fill up, open a new server instance or something, but keep it to server instances if possible, to preserve that sense of community. I guess let X people make their own, since people will whine about their mob being camped or whatever, but have the default be a public version.

LachiusTZ_sl said:

or not.

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So what then...people should get on the camp list and play when the people that have 18 hours a day say they can? I understand the need to have a world full of people, but allowing others to impede another players progress is a recipe for a ghost town. The only exception being people blacklisted and shunned on the server for their own idiotic behavior.

Their has to be a better way to deal with overcrowding. Large world. Multiple camps in all level ranges supporting large amounts of players. But being realistic, no dev has the resources to make a world that big or support content for 200k-1 million players simultaneously.

Can't dungeon spawns just be dynamic? Why does target_mob_01 only have to spawn at location X? Why can't he spawn at location X, Y, or Z? Why can't all the named in a dungeon's population have a %chance to spawn anywhere in the dungeon, or at least in several pre-determined places?

LachiusTZ_sl said:

Insanely easy fix = Play PvP server

Click to expand...

Not gonna get many PVE players in your game...

Never mind the inherent imbalances that exist in a good MMO with unique classes. Yeah...pass.

Can we agree that with a given budget/time/manpower you can at best create content that only serves a certain amount of people?

Under that premise the max amount of players on a server is limited to less then the player numbers on current servers. Even more so on any game that diminishes the borders between their servers. That is pretty much all of them, via dungeon finder (WoW), guesting and cross-server instance groups (GW2), or some other version thereof. Any mega server ideas are obviously out of the window if you dont want instancing, you as the developer will never be able to provide that amount of content with dynamically generating it. It works for EVE without instancing because their planetary systems are *really* vast, but I dont see it working with a land-based game.

If you want no instancing, the game will have many more servers but with less players on each. Is that a good development for the players? Does it make sense for the dev team (financially and technically)?

I'm actually torn on the idea. Certainly a smaller number of players in the pool would help with social interactions, but on the other hand they have to lock servers under such a model because players dogpile onto the same server anyway (coolest name, circle of friends there, internet_community_01 declares it their server all brazilians/russians/spaniards declare it their server, etc). And hard-locking the server for new players creates another set of issues.

Seriously what overcrowding of Lguk are you talking about? Dozen of camps in there each supporting a whole group of 6 players and when thats full you were able to head to solb, or camp that other rare utility item you are still after (hello quillmane), and thats only if your not with your friends breaking in (or recover from a breakin gone bad!!) in a plane.

Quaid_sl said:

Can't dungeon spawns just be dynamic? Why does target_mob_01 only have to spawn at location X? Why can't he spawn at location X, Y, or Z? Why can't all the named in a dungeon's population have a %chance to spawn anywhere in the dungeon, or at least in several pre-determined places?

Click to expand...

EQ had that in outdoor zones, many zones had a cycle of named in different corners of the map where they could spawn starting in Kunark.

Dozens of camps x 6 players per group x 200k people on a server. Hmm something isn't adding up here.

Flipmode_sl said:

Dozens of camps x 6 players per group x 200k people on a server. Hmm something isn't adding up here.

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Back in the day ofc werent 200k per server, but when youre talking about bringing eve like megaservers you gotta bring hundreds of dungeons and camp spots to play with, but companies will try the easy instance out method and/or rely on player made mcdungeon content, which wont work out long term as pointed out couple of times by now.

What's a good number to cap servers at that won't leave the population decimated in 6 months?

And for the record, I don't like the use of over instancing anymore than you do. I hate the mcdungeons too. I'm saying if the answer is so easy, why hasn't anyone figured it out?

Back before EQ turned off the numbers at login that showed how many per server what were the numbers? A couple of thousand for the low population servers and up from there if I remember right.

Of course if you make a game where content can be chewed up in a month and you obtain max level and have nothing to do most of those won't stay on.

If server sizes are capped, they should do like rift and offer free transfers once a week or something just in case yours becomes desolate.