@lithose great post. How do you feel about contested raids?
Sorry, I missed this.
I actually agree with Draegen--it depends on how you make your game. Are mobs meant to be a kind of measuring stick in and of themselves? Or are they more like fancy, interactive resource nodes, where the challenge isn't about killing them, so much as it is about controlling their spawn area and farming them. That leads to another question, are your mobs complex, and heavily scripted, or are they relatively simple and the bulk of the difficulty comes from perpetration/long term strategy and not discreet player skill? (Some would argue this means gear vs skill, but I feel that's myopic).--which would answer how much content you can produce. These and a lot of other questions, I think, would all have a bearing on it.
I think, on the whole, instancing was done in an effort to reduce time investment and therefor increase accessibility. But it spawned it's own set of problems--one of them, ironically, being that it made the game less accessible by requiring "encounter skill" (APM ect) to be the "resource" by which content was slowed down, until they had to literally add an "easy mode" switch. As I said earlier though, without instancing and without precise control over numbers, the players were able to set an "easy mode" for themselves, at a trade off of more "time" difficulty (Larger raid force). Before the WoW easy mode, did we, as a genre, believe it was easier to get more
skillthan it was to get more
time? If you gave Soccer Mom Casual the choice between working another hour on something, or learning how to stop keyboard turning and memorizing patterns of fire on the floor--what do you think would be easier for her? Instancing answers that with skill, but was that the right answer? Maybe the problem was tackled at the wrong level, what if the fundamental design of the game should have been changed instead?
I'm not saying instancing is bad BUT, I think, if I were to design a game, I'd go back and seriously look at the other options that were never iterated upon to deal with the problems a server like P99/old EQ faces. That's actually what I really like about EQN, actually. SoE is trying to look at it from a different perspective, from the ground up, they want to see if they can tackle the problem of "time vs content" in a way that is fundementally different from simply offering the player content in a different format (IE instancing, easy mode, hard mode, skill bottle necked vs time bottle necked, exploration vs encounters, social vs tactical difficulties)--in order to stretch it out.
I think any game that's going to be a "good" game, really needs to go back, and examine that in the same way. Not just reject instancing out of hand, but go and ask why it was used, and maybe, how different systems could be used to fix those problems (And even ask...Did those problems need to be fixed to the degree they were? Maybe a lesser alternative was more appropriate--or COULD be more appropriate if the fundamentals of the game were different--again, like EQN is doing, changing the fundamentals.)
Anyway, a long way to say a lot of nothing, I know. But the truth is, it's enormously complex, and the overall game design has to plug into that answer for it to make sense. Which is why I always say, it's not fair to judge the failures of some games off of one component not working, if they didn't build the game from the ground up to accommodate it, then they didn't give that component/system a real chance. Instancing was a solution to a game that was built like Ever quest. But does the game even HAVE to be built like EQ? I think that question of perspective isn't one tackled by a lot of designers. (Well, until recently.)
