f13.net

They couldn't fix it, so they instanced it.  I couldn't house train my puppy, so I killed it.

Are you serious? They instanced it? Was that an official announcement or are they running instances on the beta servers right now? Is it possible it has always been instanced and it just has a really high player cap on the instances? Have I asked enough questions yet? Not that it's a huge deal, but it does go against their original plans somewhat and could put an odd twist on group finding as people zone out and back in to check each instance. Hrm.

They don't seem to have officially announced it, they just did it.  I saw the thread on the beta forums and devs have replied to that thread stating   that they are "not done optimising'" and that we could expect some "very nice speed gains in the next patch."  They didn't say if it was a temporary situation and I believe they would have if that was the case.

If true, that's ugly.

The thread in the beta forums is getting huge.  Most, and by most I mean about 99% are in favour of this and many have suggested that all zones be instanced.  I was going to play this game in release for a bit, but I might just fire up Morrowind again and wait for Oblivion.  It's one thing to have little bits of the game instanced such the crafting areas or quests (ala CoH), but large chunks seems sort of naff.  They shouldn't call it a MMORPG, then, should they?  Maybe Semi-Single Player Online Roleplaying Game would do better.

It just all seems rather anti-clever to me.

Hmmm...sounds just like a multiplayer RPG (ala Diablo, etc).  Without the "MMO" tagline, how can a monthly fee be justified?

"Buy a poorly designed, unfinished product for only $180/year plus retail costs and you can play by yourself or with a few random instance dwellers."

Yeah people were talking about this in-game on Beta 1 last night/this early morning, commenting about the lack of people in Antonica and others saying how they had previously been in "Antonica 2". I tried zoning in and out of Antonica but never got the option to pick among instances so I don't know if it had been taken down by the time I tried or if they still have some kinks to work out of the system.

CoH does this with all the city zones. As the zone fills up, they open another one. It really didn't make much of a difference IMO, especially once people levelled out into the rest of the world.

Not to mention that with instancing, you're more likely to have the 20 hour camp spot for the sword_of_l33tn3ss all to yourself!

COH also let you pick which instance to zone into, and invite group members across instanced zones.  Does EQ2 allow this, because it sure didn't let me pick which instance of the Newbie island I would wind up on.

You don't have a choice of which IoR instance you get dumped off on but you can switch freely once you are there -- just go back to the dock you started on and ring the bell there. There's also a "zone to friend" feature available on that bell though I never was able to get it to work.

This is pretty much the same thing as what COH did. When you have all your player base starting at 2 points with one big bottle neck zone between them and the ability to spread out I don't see that instancing antonica is a bad thing.

Likely it will work like coh for the inital month you will see it instanced alot but once the server matures you just arn't going to have half to 2/3 of your server population trying to xp in one zone.

In COH I cannot recall the last time I saw one of the main city zones instanced now that the servers are mature and people are spread out fully.

kaid

I've found this to be exactly the case in CoH.

I like instancing, good deal.

In these types of zones, they only start instancing when the populations start getting too high.  So its not like they are making a new instance for each group.  I've heard the number 300 mentioned but that is kind of a guess I think.  So when you reach that many people in the zone, then a new one becomes available.  There is a soft cap to trigger a new instance and then a hard cap that will only allow so many people in (to keep the game from crashing).

All in all, its really not a bad solution at all and I think it will be very important in the early stages of the game when a lot of people are moving through the low and mid levels.

So far the devs claim antonica remains stable up to about 350 people after which things start going to hell. If they start instancing at like 250 people thats still a shit ton of people in your instance.


kaid

Yep. That should work just fine. It does in CoH.

I also would guess they have probably been heading this route for a while but they WANTED antonica crush tested to see how optimized they could make it so the instances could be as large as possible. Again this is pretty much what COH did during beta.

kaid

Okay now I am confused.

If I zone into Antonica, what makes it a zone or an instance?  What is the difference?

I am assuming as an instance it screws up LFG tools...

A zone is really just a geographical area, "zoning" is passing some arbitrary geographical boundry into the new region and generally means your connection is being passed to a different set of servers.

Instancing happens when you go into one of many copies of a zone. You might be in the Magic City, copy 10, while your friend might have been put into copy #512.

If I want to join my friend in Antnonica - do I get to choose the instance?  Or is it random such that I may not be able to join him?

So far, I've not been asked what instance I would like to join, which presents a problem for me if I want to find certain people.  Lag still seems to be pretty nasty in Antonica.  It just dumps me into Antonica 2, as it does with some other instanced areas.  Maybe it's simply not fully implemented yet.  I don't know.  If each instance is only generated after 300 or so people, maybe it'll be ok.  Well, unless only 301 people decide to mess around in Antonica and I'm the only one in Antonica 2... ;)

-OR-

Maybe I'm just making it more confusing for myself and I've got the whole concept completely muddled in my poor, aching though perfectly formed brain.

I got offered the choice between two instances of a hunting area last night when I tried it.  Whatever the hunting area the elfies near qeynos have to collect citizenship tokens in.

Yes. The smaller instanced zones appear to offer you that option, but the large zones (Antonica and Commonlands) do not appear to do this. Not sure about other larger zones like Nektulos, etc. I ran to Nektulos last night, but there were hardly any people in the zone so only one instance of it was running.

Tonight I was given the choice of which instance of Antonica to zone to (1 or 2) when ringing the Travel Outside Qeynos bell in Willow Wood on the Beta 1 server.

I can see it now - Guild X assembles for a raid or event - but just before everyone arrives.... the zone is "full".

Happened to us in CoH all the time, so we just did instanced missions instead of hunting for mobs.