I LOVE the instancing!

Though the concept was first introduced as "Private Zones" in Jaleco's Pulp-era MMORPG project Lost Continents (which was unfortunately cancelled in 2002 ), I'm finally experiencing instancing in Guild Wars. From what I understand, instancing was also implemented in Worlds of Warcraft and Everquest 2, and will be implemented in future MMORPG projects as well.

And guess what? I love the instancing! I love it! I love it! I love it!

Besides the obvious gaming benefits of the instancing (no camping, no kill-stealing, etc.), I love the fact that I (or my party) am the hero of the story. That my/our actions matter in the game world and that events change accordingly. It's the instancing that's finally allowing for actual overarching stories in MMORPG's (or in the case of Guild Wars, quasi-MMORPG's) that the players can follow and advance, allowing the quests to have more substance to them.

Anyone else here also excited about this relatively-new trend?


-G

What's instancing?

I guess he means how when you do a quest or mission in Guild Wars, you get your own private version of the map, rather than sharing with dozens of other people.

trancejeremy said:

I guess he means how when you do a quest or mission in Guild Wars, you get your own private version of the map, rather than sharing with dozens of other people.

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That still makes no sense to me. But then I don't play MMORPGs.

reveal said:

That still makes no sense to me. But then I don't play MMORPGs.

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Neither do I, but I've got a friend who is obsessive.

Imagine going through a dungeon and facing all/most of the stuff in there, expending your resources, and generally going through the crap that adventurers do. Now, you're facing the dragon lord (etc.) at the end. Just when you kill him, after having three members of your party die, you find out some rat bastard has been following you the whole time as he swoops in and grabs the Lance of Souls (or other mcguffin) and runs. The Lance is only dropped by the Dragon Lord, and cannot be dropped, sold, or otherwise transferred between characters (to prevent eBay abuse). Everyone in your group just spent the last six hours of their lives for this express goal. Now, you're out all the money/xp required to raise everyone and have to do it all over again.

The other solution to the issue is to lock areas of the map while a party is in them, so that it is unavailable to the rest of the world for those six+ hours.

Note that the sneaky bastard tactic can be used in other ways, like taking the killing blow on the Dragon Lord and, thus, all the XP. Or, people can do things like, instead of caring about the Lance, they want the XP for the Dragon Lord, so they "camp" -- wait for the server to reset and "respawn" another instance of the Dragon Lord. While they're doing that, you basically can't complete the adventure.

Instancing makes it so that all "dungeon" areas can have multiple instances. Each party can play in their own world, so to speak. Only back in town does everyone interact.

Okay, imagine you are running an adventure in the normal form of D&D. But instead of just having your players, there are 1000s of other players, all going through the dungeon at the same time. That's what a MMORPG is like, sorta. Because there are so many players on the same map/dungeon, there's not much to do, because there are far more monster killers than monsters. So people often camp around the locations where monsters appear (or spawn) from, because otherwise, they won't have monsters to kill.

But in Guild Wars, you get your own private map. So you get to kill all the critters yourself.

To an extent, it does fix the problem, but at the same time, it doesn't feel so much like an online game. It feels like Dungeon Siege, with chat rooms in towns.

trancejeremy said:

But in Guild Wars, you get your own private map. So you get to kill all the critters yourself.

To an extent, it does fix the problem, but at the same time, it doesn't feel so much like an online game. It feels like Dungeon Siege, with chat rooms in towns.

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Instancing sounds like something I could sink my teeth into. I pray that the DnD (Eberron) game will use it.

Heh, and in case anyone's still confused by the explanation I'll give the FRP-friendly version that popped into my head as I read the first post of "Still don't get it".

Think Pocket Dimentions. Every time you go to an Instanced dungoeon/boss/whatever you're acutaly getting your own private little copy of said place/NPCs that exsist as until the right conditions are met. Usualy that's just leaving the site or completing the quest.

One thing I'd seen in City of Heroes' use of Instances was putting a timer on an instance, usualy described as a bomb timer. You'd therefore have to find all the bombs before they 'went off' or you were kicked out of the Instance and either re-try or just fail. It's been a while, I forget which they used, mabye both depending on the setting.

The only real down-side to it is that you can't do one of my favorite passtimes, going to the lower level things that would not warrent an Instance (ie: boss room of a dungeon, ect) and sit there with a 'support class' character, and just help the inevitable n00b groups that stumble into mroe than they were bargaining for thier first time through. But the benifits greatly outweigh the down-sides of Instancing. It's here to stay, and I'm all for it.

I'm pretty sure that The Matrix Online uses Istancing as well.

I don't know that that really constitutes instancing (well, the lobbies are instanced, but that's not an adventure area)... Guild Wars is a lot more like Diablo II online than a true MMORPG.

City of Heroes does instancing. The general areas are all the same, but at high traffic times if they're heavily populated they'll split and when you zone into them you have to choose, say, Atlas Park 1 or Atlas Park 2. Indoor missions, however, are always unique. It's quite common, in fact, to be sitting in front of a door waiting for your team to get there, and see someone else enter it. Of course, when you enter, it's not the same place they went.

I've been playing both World of Warcraft (WoW) and Guild Wars (GW) recently, and I like the instancing, although they are implemented differently.

WoW has instance Dungeons - ie, when you go into an Instance, you and your party (or even raid group) get their own Instance of the Dungeons. So, for that dungeon you are the only ones there - no help from anyone else (except maybe NPCs in there), no treasure or kills stealing from anyone else - and the best part - no lag, as the server isn't having to deal with dozens or hundreds of people being in the area.

In WoW the Instance Dungeons are elite areas for the appropriate level in the region (eg, say a region supports characters levels 20-30, the instance dungeon would probably be for 28-30), and sometimes take a fair time to complete. It usually involves several quests to complete in there, and is often one of the main challenges for the region.

In GW, *everything* outside of towns is an instance - ie, you walk out of the town and you and your party are in your own version of the world - no other PCs exist, just NPCs and monsters.

I prefer the feel of WoW, but GW is still a good game. WoW to me, seems to be a much more mature product (I don't mean the players, I mean the game), which GW still seems to be fairly immature in development (for a comparison, WoW has a very useful "who" command, which allows you to use partial matches, matches by class, level, location, guild, etc to find people, while GW doesn't even seem to have a "who" command at all).

Hope this helps to explain it,

Duncan