f13.net

All the talk of smaller zones and "cozy worlds" aside, what's the (non-technical) problem with having a seamless world where zones are not obvious to players?  Presuming you are able to manage load and have mechanics in place to deal with extreme local population spikes (like protests), what would be wrong with offering a gaming world where players can seemingly travel "uninterrupted" anywheres?  I am thinking mostly of Eve, which is a single game world and has open travel and seems to offer this design.  Thanks.

Ask Blizzard. It seems they've mostly done it.

Maybe im not following your questions, but aren't 90% of the reasons for doing distinct zones vs seamless world technical ones?

From a non technical standpoint, the only thing that sprang to mind is the concept of sharing content.  If you only have a single seamless world, then there is only one occurance of any given piece of content on the server.  Thus, if you go to Crushbone to kill the orc king, you may find tons of other player there doing the same thing (or they may have killed him already), or it could be a enemy guild/faction is using the area for a pvp battle, or perhaps some pc orcs are hosting an orc wedding there. etc etc.  So, your desired playtime can easily take a backseat to whatever else other random people are doing.  Now, some people like that idea, that the world is always in a state of flux and they never know what to expect.

But, lots of people just want to kill the orc king for their quest to get the shiny loot so they bitch about having to wait around for him to respawn, kill stealing, spawn camping, ninja looting etc etc.  Thus oddly enough, for many the very seamlessness of the world contributes to making it feel not very worldy at all.  As long as we have static quest that are doable by lots of players and thus static content, you'll get this issue.

Which is why I think we're seeing lots of games which use a combination of both seamless "public" world areas and zoned/instanced "private" areas.

Xilren

I have fond memories of spending three hours fighting my way to the bottom of the Geonosian Cave in SWG, only to find that another group had just killed the acklay and that he wouldn't respawn for another two hours.

Wait, "fond" isn't the word.  What's the word I'm looking for that's the opposite of that?  Anyway, the whole experience was very seamless.  Not a single loading screen.

When I meet people in RL that are playing the same MMOG as me, I'd like to be able join up a play with them whenever possible.  Games split in to shards don't allow that.

I think the logistical issues would be even bigger than techincal issues given that market's taste for handmade content (or the lack good algorithim for automated content.)  Who could hand-build a seamless world with quality content that could hold WoW's  population? SWG is the closest to having technology to do it and most people think its pretty bland.  And Eve's zones look like they take 5 min to create.

So far as I can see the seamless world has two advantages, both phrased negatively:
1. You don't have to worry about your friends being on another shard.
2. Nobody likes load times.

Immersiveness is a nice side benefit, but only because load times are so destructive. I wouldn't qualify it as an advantage. As nice as it is to know you can actually walk to that mountain you see on the horizon, crawl down into the cave in it, and come out the other side... seamless worlds also feel more obviously small than split and instanced ones. That mountain range isn't huge and impassable, I happen to know there's a forest on the other side and it's not that huge either. The whole place starts to feel a little like Disneyland... discovering that the false fronts on stores  in Elf Land butt right up against the back of false fronts in Volcano Land. To take an example from WoW, DIRECTLY behind the giant vault door in the Ironforge bank is... the throne of the dwarven king. Literally they're no more than a few feet apart. The boat ride from Auberdeen to Darnassus feels shorter than the one from Auberdeen to Menethil even though it TAKES longer. It's annoying rather than immersive... and don't get me started on flight paths.

The fact that lots of people are doing what you want to do is a flaw of the current game model, not of seamless worlds in general. It's not a lot of  fun to be Conan or the Grey Mouser or Rincewind or Drizzt if everybody else has the same idea... and if all the great epic quests have already been done to death. Worse yet, given the choice between an epic journey requiring hours or days of preparation and a quick teleport to the "boss"... people always choose the second so long as the reward's not that much worse. Epic is in the telling, not the playing.

So "seamless"? Meh. We have more important things to worry about. Load times can be disguised (I'm still waiting for a game that lets the chat window co-exist with the load screen), and instancing can make the world both small enough and large enough to let anybody group together who wants to.

You'll be waiting a long time.

There's an enforced patent on the books, on having a game that lets you do something while the load screen is displayed.

Unless an MMORPG maker ponies up to Namco (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=/netahtml/search-adv.htm&r=10&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&p=1&p=1&S1=(namco+AND+loading)&OS=namco+AND+loading&RS=(namco+AND+loading)), or until they decide to make one, all you can do is stare at the loading screen.

--GF

There is a UI mod for EQ2 that lets you chat while zoning.  It basically makes the 'loading' UI window much smaller, so you can still access the normal UI elements.

Alkiera

I'm pretty sure that Asheron's Call 1 (developed in the 90's, released 1999) you could chat while zoning into/out of dungeons and recalling.  You could look though your inventory also. 

Yes you could.

But Eve is also were the most "player created content" is appearing these days.  An empty box must function just as well as a box full of sand.

SWG's lack-of-content whines seemed to abate once they actually got mounts and vehicles into the game.  Precisely because people could then travel farther distances to their PA cities.

There is no real reason a 'seamless' world couldn't have instanced areas in it.

In a seamless world the next zone is simply loading behind the scenes while you are moving, there is no reason the zone loading in the background couldn't be specific to you, your group, your guild or whatever delimiter you choose.

Are we talking single shard games or no zoning games?

Eve is a single shard but lots of zones. WoW is pretty much seamless except for entering dungeons (instancing) and going to another continent, but also billions of shards.

Personally, I don't mind zoning as long as it's not intrusive ..  long as it's done well (Eve and WoW are fine for the most part, aside from instance issues in WoW when I played). But I do hate 500 billion shards.

I think the orginal post by Soln talkes about both.  Shardless would be more important to me.

On related note to my last post, I think issue might have played a role in Wish's downfall.  I believe it was their goal to have one large seemless world.  At some point they probably calculated how much work it'd take versus how much funding they had left and decided to give up.  It didn't help that the fanbois were chanting "more quests" over and over again.  At least the fanbois got what they want from EQ2 and WoW.

Aye, was thinking single-shard. 

Somebody never played AC1.  It was seamless, and felt HUGE.  Most of the surface terrain was computer generated, but it was still unique enough to navigate.  I had times when I took "guides" to show me the way to places (before all the mapping programs).  I learned to navigate by hill, tree, and rock in the areas I frequented.

I never got into AC1 or 2.  I presume they are both gone now, correct? 

It's funny, I love exploring and its risks in the wild, but it's true that if there's no meaningful feedback from the game on this kind of gaming then it just becomes unwanted travel. 

I wonder if games with large worlds actually provided incentives and feedback for exploring you wouldn't have as many maps.  Or more precisely, I wonder if they made mapping actually a part of the game meaningfully we wouldn't have so many spoiler sites and mods.

Zone/area maps are often some of the first spoiler site material, but typically the only points of interest worth noting on them are static spawn points, dungeon entrances, quest targets, etc... basically dev designed points of interest.  Adding the ability to meaningfully interact out there in the wilds helps that explorer mindset, but, it's a tough balancing between largeness of the world (which challenges the explorers to FIND something interesting, and easy of travel (to get back to that interesting bit).  Exploration and land onwership in some fashion have always seem linked to me...

Shadowbane and player cities hit this concept partially.  You could found a player city almost anywhere, and there was some travel time involved to get to an enemy town, but the world was still not THAT huge.

One concept i'd see kicked around was give players the ability to "discover" resource nodes, like say a sliver vein or gemstone mine, and either have players be able to harvest those resources for their own use, or report said find to the npc governmental authority for a reward (sort of an explorer quest if you will).  The idea of letting players set up their own mine, which may jump start a player town around it, has appeal. But you'd better have some mechanism for not having 3am ninja raids be able to claim jump it while no one else is around to defend it.  If you aren't going the pvp route, you could make such places focal points for npc mob raids and vice versaa (i.e. if your guild clears a goblin mine, it becomes yours).  Hiring npc guards, or road builds to cut a path to the nearest town, fort building could be done as well.

In one way, i think having a huge world (be is fantasy or space for that matter) is just ripe for a true exploration models;  Small civilized starting areas, and players are basically responsible for exploring the wilds, making discoveries, pacifying them, and basically increasing the civilization borders.    Thats for much more of a "worldy" game than we generally see where the entire map is "known" and travel is not odious, plus you cant trivialize travel time, and the world would really need to be large enough that a bunch of 24/7 catasses can't circumnavigate it in a weekend.

Xilren

Xilren

Xilren,

Some of the stuff you mention was supposed to be in Horizons, but it was PvE only, and underpopulated, and laggy as all get-out.

If someone were to implement something like what you suggest, with a non-level-based advancement system...  I'd play.

Alkiera

Dark and Light was also one where all sorts of stuff like that was promised.  They even advertise on their login screen for SoG (because SoG is actually the DnL beta with a different name and even more stuff disabled)  "Dark and Light.  The Biggest MMORPG You'll Ever See" or some such rubbish.  The SoG beta is allegedly only a fraction of the seamless world.  Good thing that... they can't keep what they have from crashing.  The models look like ass too.  If they could actually produce what they promised, it would be the shock and awe game of the century.  Too bad the hype was all bollocks.  They did a good job of snarfing up 500K, though.  They told people they could get a refund if they asked for one before January 7th and I heard a rumour that nearly half made that deadline.

In that case - it works for Eve.  There are usually as many as 25000 people on thier single shard on a busy night, the universe is so big though that, at least in the safe newb areas, this still only amounts to a few dozens < 100 at most in a single system.  Heck a system is so big that even at that rate you only see a person every now and then at a POI (station, asteroid belt, whathaveyou).

Having a larger contiguous player base all able to interact with each other has some good points.  For one thing more people means more people doing thier own thing, i.e. variety.  Which is good.

Down side is that asshats appear to find comfort in each others presence and seem to gravitate together, and in a single contiguous landscape I imagine the asshat-collective can get to be pretty intimidating when all clustered into a single area.

I wonder if it's feasible to design something to mitigate the grouping asshat/catass contigent.  Maybe stronger NPC's?  Surely if someone is griefing and has a -1 security rating in Eve (Note Raph and Haemish they got rep working it seems) why not have NPC's want to gang up on them? 

Bah.  Edited.

If the technology exists to introduce instancing, then a seamless world may be a nice idea.  The problem as I see it is that it would become a tough nut to crack in creating interesting content that also could be designed to be instanced for small encounters. 

Large seamless worlds are attractive to those trying to build that "online ant farm" but offer little for the casual player (well... beyond waiting in lines).  I think that zone boundaries still offer too many advantages (population control, instancing, drastic scene changes with no need for a transition, ways to partition encounters, etc.) to move away from them.

From what I understand, this is in-game, but if you have bad standing with Serpentis Co., for example, and you never go near one of their stations, you are free from attack.  Not sure I can get behind a coordinated NPC-mounted attack, but then I don't play in 0.0 space.

I don't think EVE is a awesome example, merely a good one.  The POI are so far apart that it would be ludicrous to implement in another game and make it work (reference ATITD2).  The EVE galaxy isn't instanced, but it can behave as if it is simply due to the vastness of space.  There are many, many POI as well, and there are huge numbers of POI that have perhaps three players in the general area at any time.  This works great in EVE because every player you meet should be immediately suspect if they don't belong to a friendly corp.  Not sure how you would apply this directly to something like a fantasy world, but there are lessons to be learned. 

Getting open PVP right is, I think, EVE's greatest accomplishment and relates to their single-shard implementation directly.  Being able to set standing to both individuals and corporations (even NPC corps as far as I know) in-game is a big part of this.  My F13 corpmates show up with an easily-recognizable icon on my radar and in space, while there are many others which immediately disambiguate what you are looking at.  People with low security standing stand out, as do people who have PKed, and people you have set to have good standing.  Even without the icon system, if you are not sure about someone's standings you can easily see who likes/dislikes them, who they like/dislike, and by how much.  You can see if they have a bounty on them, and how much.  This isn't just a three-state colored flag or a list of plus/minus votes.  Without a tool like this in-game, you have to use your brain or scribbled notes, neither of which work very well when there are 25k people on your shard.  Also, there isn't any good way to have up-to-the-minute information unless it is implemented in the game itself.

Yeah I think you're right, but having an Eve-like environment is my play preference only because it feels more attractive to be able to claim "my space" for my little bit of player-created-content solo or with friends then waiting in any bloody queue just to get in a BG (let alone the shard itself).  Ultimately, it could just be a decision on the kind of game being designed for -- level-treadmill or sandbox.  Maybe if designers were honest about that from the start it would help the right kind of players into the game more easily (and I'm presuming the game was trying to specialize to some degree). 

At the very least it seems to me that having a very large open world creates more potential for a longer run of play than a sealed-world of zones and levels.  And that like the design priority could be ascribed to a business strategy -- lots of sales up front and on expansions, not worrying about the "long tail" of subscribers OR slow growth (like Eve) and deliver on the user experience for a longer subscriber base (and lower churn).

Admittedly there are still lots of extra design issues like travel, travel times and mob and POI placement (# of static to # of random) that a seamless world requires.  Plus the very real effect of somehow including a "coziness" to allow players to socialize to some degree.

You certainly could. I have fond memories of sitting in portal space and having long chat conversations about why the game wasn't going to let me back in...

The seamlessness of the world in AC1 was a huge draw for me, personally. It always appealed to the explorer type in me.

Yeah I just started putting personal dislikes/likes and notes on everyone in our little area of space.  I put in notes whatever ship I see them flying just in case I ever find myself thinking I might need to shoot them, while anyone who I suspect is a pirate scouting alt I have starting setting to a minus standing and they get a nice little orange icon with a minus on it so I immediately recognize that its time to be careful.  Evaluating our own little minor community has become a minigame by itself, as I'm starting to be able to recognize the faces/names in local and know if the people in Arzi are ratting or mining.  I've learned all the active corps tags so I can tell who has been in system recently from the loot cans and check if they are still around clearing belts or if they have left and there are a handfull of people I even discuss how many BC's have been spawning that day as if it was the weather.

Not to mention I caught wind of the first politics of the area rumblings when somebody from Wings was asking us if anyone had been messing with our members and requested kill mails for that one guy with the Raven and told us they would hunt them down and possibly issue a wardec.  Also had an interesting talk with some of the Loyola folks about some other pirate corp in local which prompted him to warp out in a hurry as there were 4 of us and 1 of him.

People who say players = the content is a stupid flawed concept are people that just love DING!GRATZ and dont want to admit it...

>People who say players = the content is a stupid flawed concept are people that just love DING!GRATZ and dont want to admit it...

Politics as content is that most of the interesting stuff happens behind close doors between a handfull of people.  Find a way to bring to the forground, I'll be more interested.

check it out, blew my mind when I first saw it not long ago:  Eve political map (http://www.battleclinic.com/eve_online/political_map.php).

Thing is, it would be better if somehow there were UI mechanism or even newbie NPC content that was not combat based; that is, "political" or "diplomatic" content that you could work through via normal negotiation skills in game.  It's still conflict, just not with blood.  It would be interesting maybe in a seamless world to have stuff that might prepare you for the current situation.  Of course, I don't know enough about the Eve end-game and current politics to really talk about it.  But it looks like the larger the game the better the chance for players to stake out their territory and go at it with each other.  Only other thing is that I wonder if you would not need a world that continues to grow with new territory to give some hope to new players.

Did you read everything I said?  Yes the politics that involve moving large zerosec alliances of thousands of players into heated war involve a few select individuals in positions of power.  But what I was trying to point out was how even in our little backwater area off the main pipelines used mostly by what seem to be solo mining corp operators and pvp alts in training there are local politics.  The major alliances may get more news coverage and their actions may result in entire regions changing hands but that doesn't mean everyone isn't involved on smaller scales.

Not to mention, drawing from my SB experiences, there are plenty of times when the actions of some random grunt in a tense situation can swing the balance in one way or another.  Heavy pirate activity occurs whenever the empire pirate corps decide that an alliance is stretched too thin to defend its borders.  Again little fish, but they can often force said alliance to try to elevate some corp to control that area as long as they can take care of things, if they can't they'll be thrown out and replaced by someone else.

Not everyone can be the head of a major alliance, and if that means you can't appreciate that real people are shaping the gameworld and therefore making it eleventybillion times more interesting then any static diku horseshit, well lets just agree to disagree then.

I am not disagreeing with you.  I am just wondering if they're game mechanics to bring this hidden content to light. Right now its handled through mainly through tells which degenerates to he said/she said whining very quickly.  At that point, I lose interest. 

If you just WANT to know what is going on in the universe.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=channel&channelID=109588

and

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=channel&channelID=3521

I check those boards on my lunch break, whichever threads deal with the alliances in the Southwest (BoB, FIX, SA, TS) because in theory it might be good for me to know about that stuff sometime in the future.  I like those two forums, the propaganda machines, the accusations, the history re-writes, its entertaining even if it really doesn't effect me directly at the moment. 

The best threads are any time one of the major merc corps declares they are on a new contract and everyone tries to guess who hired them, those always entertain me.

I'm not sure what you mean by in-game mechanics, can you elaborate on what your thinking of when you say that?

EVE is not easy if you want to compete, just like any other game and probably moreso.  Hoax is talking about player politics anyway; you have plenty of NPC politics (game lore, events) handed to you via missions and the logon screen.  That stuff is about as interesting as it sounds.  The point that EVE brings to this discussion is how it manages to create a real sense of community in a world where 20k pilots are online at once.  This is not an accompishment that should be overlooked.

If you want PVP political content, you are just going to have to do some work and get involved in the community.  It's not hidden, either.  The fact that someone can easily be a shady rogue, fall through the cracks of society, or operate outside the thrall of the big powers, is one of the draws just like one draw is the chance to become a big-name CEO.  The game mechanic is the standing system and notes; as mentioned, it makes it really easy to keep tabs on your enemies, relative to any other game I am aware of.  When I set a positive standing on someone who engaged in honorable trade with me and the game puts colorful, friendly icons on his ship, his drones and his floating containers, it just doesn't get much easier than that.  This is important in a game where seconds count in identifying friend or foe.  Add in an address book, in-game mail (evemail, nyuk, nyuk), chat channels, and direct tells... that's a lot of tools.

Hmm, interesting points and I agree with them, but this is for MMOs. I think one of the hardest bits of MMO world building is adding the interest points. Instancing (which means zones) makes it possible to share content among multiple parties at the same time, ie the designers don't need to add a place for every person online at the same time to be able to adventure by themselves. Throw in instances, and bam!, lots of people are on the rides at the same time, instead of stuck in the lines for those rides.

PvP MMOs could use instances for arenas, although it prolly wouldn't take much to make arenas non-instanced (except for $$$). I'd think a primarily-PvP MMO would want to be seamless.

For single-player games: zones might better hide the fact that you don't want players to walk on foot from city to city, which could take hours. Zones take out the boring bits. One option is Oblivion's approach, which is to make all of the action take place in a small area, but if you want a world -- something bigger than a city and a few outlying towns -- then either that world is artificially small (so that it's possible to travel in reasonable time), or there's zones.

There's major technical reasons for zones. Solving concurrent-asset limitations is much easier with zones, etc etc.

I don't think there's major suspension-of-disbelief problems with artificially small worlds. Azeroth is tiny; Mulgore is smaller than the housing development I live in. I think it takes me longer to walk to the nearest gas station than to get from Undercity to Tarren Mill. My point being: my mind, hour to hour, isn't on how small the world really is. And seamless is way cool. Seeing how WoW does zone transitions, the stark changes in EQ aren't impressive. They just seem like a cop-out because they couldn't overcome the technical hurdles of seamless worlds.

Another example: Dungeon Siege. I liked their seamlessness.

If I understand the OP correctly, one of the biggest problems of totally seamless worlds that have a lot of variety is your computer's RAM. It takes a lot of RAM to load all the game assets for the entire world at once.

The little 'S' shaped maze before a city is when the art is being switched... notice how plane that little 'S' always is. :)

Morrowind for example has complex interior art, which is why there is always a loading screen when entering/exiting and why there are never windows.

The less RAM needed the lower the minimum requirements, allowing for an increase in accessibility.

They don't load all the game assets for the entire world at once.

Yes, I know Trippy. Which is the problem I thought I stated :(

At some point the art must be loaded, hence a loading screen when your character walks into a place that does not have the assets loaded.

If there was more RAM available on an average computer more assets could be stored before the game actually starts, reducing the amount of loading screens seen throughout a play session.

You can avoid loading screens in that way if you do something like GTA, where you load the world piecemeal as you move through it.  I'm not suggesting this as an improvement.

I'm sure that this has been stated a million times in a million similar threads, but a seamless world just isn't realistic in an MMOG unless you have so many shards that you can restrict the population.  Everyone fighting for every resource all the time is what made instancing popular.  There needs to be some mixture of instanced areas and open areas to keep the game playable for a larger playerbase.  If you wanted to limit shards to a set number of online players per world, that could work too... but paying customers don't take kindly to queues.

I believe there's at least 1 professional DBA in the f13 community (me forgets) who can comment, but the main issue is access I think.

I believe it has a lot to do with scaling. If one player needs to inform the world of his actions at a rate of lets say 1kb/s. Then if there's 100 people standing in the same area everyone of those need 1kb/s from the others, totalling 10 000 kb/s of bandwith, or 100 kb/s per person. Depending on how close they are to each other you would face the same problem with collision detection, if the game has that between players. There's also issues with processing time. If you divide the world into zones you could divide it between multiple servers fairly easy. If you want it seamless I guess you'd have to either go with a really advanced connection system where the server park throws the connection around and share data with each other. Or I guess you could use some form of processor clustering. Of which I'm guessing the later is a lot more expensive to upgrade. Anyway, I'm mostly practicing theorycraft since I haven't done a seemless MMO world specifically  :-P.

The Hoax/tazelbain argument/dichotomy (ok, tazelbain wasn't really arguing with Hoax, but let's pretend he was. also, I said "dichotomy"!) is the most pertinent one for me.  If you want to be the hero/important a greater amount of the time, the more shards are better (with a single player game being the logical extreme where you are the hero/important the whole game).  If you want to be the hero only if you really deserve it, or simply thrive on being in a game with 25000 of you close friends, a single shard is the way to go.

I guess that it's possible that someday hardware/software might allow for a game to be written where the NPC population was much greater then the PC population, and the PC characters had much greater capabilities then NPC characters, and the NPC character interaction trees were sophisticated to the point of passing the Turing test, so that every player would feel heroic/important for a large percentage of their play time (while still allowing interaction with other players).  A game like that will be the most addicting thing ever created and will change humanity irrevocably (if not completely destroy it).  Course, that's just my opinion.

It's probably not worth mentioning, but one thing about  a "large" world and the ability to manage it I would think depends on how much an illusion of space you can create.  I am pretty sure that part of my FPS problems with EQ2, for example, is that when I have my anisoptric filtering up high, all the mountains etc. render but they are there AS 3d models.  I would've though there'd be some economies if they could be painted with the illusion of 3d.  I wonder if that's not possible or beyond the basic MMO PC realm.  I do know that CCP has a real advantage -- with limitless black backgrounds and wispiness of gas clouds they have a much easier time manking things feel BIG.

it's all about voxels these days

(poor attempt at mixing the Graduate "ballbearings" reference with a technology that has always sounded very good on paper... you know your joke blows when you have to explain it up front)

Guild Wars (ironically NOT a seamless world) pulls this off spectacularly with a number of goofy tricks:

1. Disneyland geography. Hints of expanse wherever they can be stuffed into otherwise crowded spaces.
2. Steep valleys, sheer cliffs.
3. At a particular distance everything literally turns into a painting. Trees, buildings, dunes, mountains... whatever.

So unless there's something in the way (like a sheer cliff) you can always see all the way to the horizon. Nothing ever fades out of view, it just turns into a painting and recedes into the distance.

MS R&D had a go at this in the late 90s, where at a certain distance the 3D model is turned into a 2D texture. Looked like total garbage in even the simplest of demos.

One thing you can certainly do is model the far-off things at lower resolution, or use some sort of Dynamic Level of Detail scheme. It is quite possible to show objects in the distance without taking a huge perf hit.

Another trick is to mark really big or important objects and render them in the distance but leave out other junk. For example if you have a huge mountain with a house on it, render the mountain at a distance but don't bother with the house at all. Essentially you mark the mountain is big enough to render from far away but don't bother with the house. Note that it doesn't have to be just big, you can also do it for things that are more/less important. If that house is really important maybe you want to render it from afar as well, even if it is only 3 pixels tall at that point.

Because of floating point precision in zbuffers and things like that you need to do the rendering in multiple steps but that isn't a big deal.

...and admittedly, if you actually watch the transitions in Guildwars they look pretty crappy... but it looks good in screenshots, or whenever your eyes stray up from combat and take in the sights.

Only thing I would add/correct is that just about all engines nowadays support one of two forms of LoD, and just about all have a last level of a 2D texture on a two poly surface.

I could possibly see some games deciding not to use the last level of "billboard" detail, but just about everyone I know of does.

Now, you did bring up precision errors in zbuffers, and that's a really critical point because basically the farther your view distance, the less "room" you have for precision in your zbuffer--which leads to really bad "which shape is in front of the other" issues--massive jitter at shorelines since the distance between water surfaces and the terrain underneath is so small it can easily tunnel under your zbuffer precision.

I'd be very interested in seeing (never happen of course) how Vanguard corrected for that--tech, or scene layout, since that's not something I've heard mentioned (shoreline jitter, etc.) in the reviews.

I agree that this is one of the major issues.  There is a certain issue of matching up the powerlevel of the PCs with the nature of the gamesystem and the expectations of your IP that have been problematic in the past.  SWG, for example, had a good game system for playing 'random guy in the universe', and the size of the world/shards pretty much supported that.  The problem was that it was advertised as 'Come be the mega hero Jedi!' not 'Come be a moisture farmer!'.  Even when they tried to explain what they expected, players have this expectation from SW-related stuff that they will be playing the heroes of the story, not storm_trooper_0120542.

There is a ratio of world size to PC population that should influence both game system design and your PC powerlevels.  In a 'powerful PC' game, like EQ, WoW, etc, you generally want a very 'hero's journey' plotline, with a goodly development curve, and to support this, you want a relatively high number of players per land area.  The players need other players, because NPCs are either too weak or too busy to help you.  For lower powercurve games, like (original) SWG, you need room for the populace to spread out, so they can do their own thing.  Moisture farming and town construction take up lots of room, after all, and you want the vast wilderness for explorers to wander in, looking for the best place to put said town/farm.  Unfortunately, much of SWG was too flat and terrain had weird effects on movement (no falling damage nor jumping).  I also agree with the person that commented on steep cliffs, rivers and waterfalls, etc, being far more interesting that just endless rolling plains.  However, such objects also take up room, so you need even more space to allow for those, as well as the open spaces needed by the game style. 

UO ran into this issue, where they intended on having you be 'Joe Random', and it was marketed that way, but they had far too large a population for the amount of land on each shard, such that the 'wide open spaces' were all filled with housing.  With the world crowded with people, fighting over mineral deposits, housing plots, etc, you ended up with the same kind of adversarial environment you get on EQ where people are fighting over epic mob spawns.  The EQ problem was one of server population as well, because there were so many people in the 'late game' and the late game was so small, that it was difficult to catch mobs before they were killed.  In early EQ, there were just two big targets, and they were difficult enough that you needed a large percentage of the current level-appropriate population to take them out.  Thus, there wasn't much competition until the mob was dead, and you tried to figure out how to split 3-5 pieces of loot with 70+ people.  Again, this pointed to the 'you are specialer than everyone else' mentality built into EQ.  If you won a piece of dragon loot, you could lord it over everyone else for weeks.

Part of the reason people push instancing is that they want to write quests where 'you are the only one who can save us, $insert_name_here', yet allow all 2500 people on the server to do the quest.  Single-player game quests like that don't work well in a public MMO-space, as you're always arriving just as someone else killed the leader of the bandits and rescued the maiden.  It could work in an Eve-like environment, where the likelyhood of another player happening by that particular location to do that particular quest would be fairly low, however.  The PC/land area ratio really defines how 'special' the PCs can be in the world, depending on their powerlevel.

By powerlevel/powercurve I mean things like the difference in power between a 1 day played and 100 days played character, as affected by exp/stat system, items, resources, etc.

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Alkiera

I don't want one shard because I want to sit around the campfire with 25000 people.  I want one shard because I don't want to have to choose a shard a be excluded from playing with other people players on different shards.  The goal should be to bring as many people together.  In my world, WoW would have 1 NA shard and it would be heavily instatized.

The problem with LOD stuff in general is that it almost always lags a bit behind what you need. The idea that you can use a billboard really far away where it doesn't really matter anyway is a good one, the problem is in practice it usually switches from a billboard to a model too late, and from a low-res model to a high-res model too late as well.

The MS R&D project I mentioned had some complicated bits, like turning the background into an image on the fly, or something like that. It wasn't just degrading from a model to a billboard, it would take the rendered scene, grab the things towards the back of the scene, turn them into a texture and then use those instead of actual models...or something like that I forget...