Your comment reminds me of a 2004 article by Bartle (I could have sworn I linked to this recently, but I can't find anything with a search, so maybe I'm just going mad):

Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbi...



Is it just my imagination, or does instancing seem to be playing a larger and larger role in modern commercial (particularly graphical) muds?

I like instancing (and even use it myself), but like many features I find it's best used in careful moderation. I think there's definitely such a thing as "too much", and personally I think some games have gone well past that point. I'm curious to see whether we'll see a U-turn in the near future.

Curiously though, I very much enjoyed Diablo2, which was pretty much completely instanced. Perhaps that's because I didn't view it as a graphical mud, but rather as a regular PC game, and so my expectations were different. Maybe I'm being unfair on the modern trend towards instancing - perhaps such games shouldn't be viewed as muds, but as hybrid games.

Where do you draw the line? How much instancing do you like, and how much can you accept?

It really depends on the game.

If you are creating an RP-heavy worly or a world where player competition is the primary focus, instancing makes little sense. If you're trying to make a PvE multiplayer adventure, a lack of instancing can be a real issue in games that actually have player bases (e.g. not MUDs). Popular areas get overloaded with players making finding mobs or such very difficult. The only real work around is to have a far, far larger amount of content per player, but that either requires a massive increase in development cost to make all that extra content, or it requires servers to be keep at relatively low player counts, which decreases the number of people you can potentially meet and interact with.

Games with mixed-mode PvP – like arena modes – also need instancing, otherwise it'd be impossible to run a fair match without forcing players to wait in long lines for the arena to become available. You can also run into other technical issues in a popular game independent of its game mode related to load. Making a single area where all players can interact with each other that can scale to any number of players is non-trivial; almost impossible without making the code mind-bendingly complex. Look at WoW and you can see how some of the cities (non-instanced) can become so crowded that lag and general performance are huge issues while the dungeon instances never have that problem (as each instance can presumably be handed off to its own thread/process and doesn't need to interact much with the other instances).

A particular reason I want instancing is that I want randomized dungeons. Without instancing, and on a server with enough players, there would never be a point in time to re-randomize the dungeon, because someone would always be in it. I could re-randomize portions of the dungeon, but that has gameplay side-effects that I very much do not want. Complex boss fights like those in WoW also kind of require instancing to make the whole scene play out properly.

So far as the inability for players to impact a virtual world, that's pretty much the same damn way just about every MUD works. You kill an important NPC and it just respawns. There are no true unique characters (outside of special quests and events, perhaps) in any online game because of the cost of content. Developing content takes time, and time is money. Having a writer draft up a story, an artist create models and animations (or character descriptions in a MUD), a level designer creating a whole dungeon, a programmer adding tons of code to support new behaviors and features, and Q&A testing out all these new features, and then having one over-powered gamer sweep through the area and kill the unique boss without even looking at or caring about any of the backstory or the general novelty of the new area and unique mob… yeah, that's just stupid. It's a waste of money, and the number of players who appreciate the dynamic world are vastly swamped by the number of players who want to power game and prove they have biggest virtual dick, and you pretty much have to cater to the latter group because that's where the money is.

Smaller games and MUDs have more freedom here because they, being hobby games, can focus on the players who want a dynamic world because they don't need money to thrive. Unfortunately, I don't think that really matters, because even if the time is free, people generally are still unwilling to sink a ton of time into a one-off thing that will be killed in 15 seconds.

Overall, having tried various flavors of MMO since EverQuest, I more or less give up on the genre. I'm only interested in semi-massively-multiplayer gamess at best, which include small-medium MUDs, where you can safely assume your player count is small enough that you don't run into most of the above issues (unique content is still a problem, though, but I have "fixes" for that for smaller games).

At some future point when technology makes it easier to make small areas that can handle vast numbers of simultaneous players without load issues, when content generation pipelines make it cheap and easy to create very large worlds with a minimal of development time, and when some of my "fixes" for one-off content are a bit more fleshed out and widely used, maybe MMOs will be able to drop instancing and make story and consequences meaningful in game. I kind of doubt it, though, because that's not what most people who play MMOs actually want. They like things the way they are because they are looking at these games as a social medium, not an RP medium. It's a chatroom with a built-in minigame and some goals for team to work towards in a semi-competitive (or completely competitive) manner. And there's nothing wrong with that; it's not what I want to play, it's not what many posters here want to play, but it's what other people want to play, and that's their choice.

I've played countless MMOs and beta tested as many as I can (WoW, Star Trek, D&DO, LOTRO, EVE, etc). I dislike instances, but understand they are required for certain things in MMOs. But a MMO should not be heavily based on instances, even WoW. Star Trek is beyond being "heavily based on instances" and the same goes with Guild Wars (but that is excused since it has no monthly fee).

Sometimes instances are necessary. The main MMO I play is Final Fantasy XI and that does not have many instances. There's an endgame content called Dynamis which should be instanced, but it is not. An entire server has to plan what Linkshell(s) [guild] will enter Dynamis on what day. It's silly. SquareEnix should have made it instanced. At the same time there's an endgame content called Besieged which isn't instanced and is quite fun. Mobs invade this city and the playerbase has to defend it. The area has a cap of 750 players (at one time when this expansion was new, it was always full) so you'd have 700+ people in an area trying to defend the city. Hectic yes, but this is what I love to see in a MMO.

I believe MMOs should have optional instances. I do not consider WoW to have optional instances, as you're pretty much going to have to do instances to get decent gear.

I could still envision such muds benefiting from instancing for specific things. I think the important thing is to make sure the instancing is handle carefully and in moderation.


I don't think the problem is a lack of instancing though, I think it's down to the lack of sufficient content relative to the size of the playerbase. Instancing is a quick and easy solution to that problem (and one which scales), but it can also give rise to other problems, particularly if overused.


If the dungeons are generated anyway, you have another option: Don't create an instance for each player/group, but instead generate a dungeon pseudorandomly for each geographical location you've designated as a dungeon entry point. Instead of each player having their own private dungeon, there would be hundreds/thousands/millions of public dungeons (loaded and unloaded as needed), and if you knew which one a player was in you could follow and kill them.


Well that's really a different issue. There are ways around that as well (namely through generated content), but in most cases it's simply not worth the effort because, as you pointed out, most people won't notice - nor would they care if they did. You're probably better off spending the time on something that will make the game more fun.

I agree that instancing is overused these days. Most people seem to yearn for the "golden age" of MMO's, back in the day of Everquest, Ultima Online, Shadowbane… guess what? No instancing. I'm not sure who did it first, but City of Heroes was the first one I remember that used it all over the place.

To me, instancing makes sense for two different applications. One is the group dungeon. The main reason they came up with instancing in the first place was that people on non-PvP servers complained about kill stealing. In this case, group A fights their way down into a dungeon for several hours and then group B waltzes in past the corpses and ninjas the last boss fight, getting the big reward and leaving group A with no recourse. Making the dungeon instance for each group or raid group keeps that from happening.

The other place instancing would make sense (to me) is places where you want the world to change based on a player's actions. Blizzard started doing this with their last WoW expansion. The idea is that if you haven't done a quest, you see some chunk of the world in one state. Once you've completed some quest line, you now see it as it would be after that quest is finished. For example, a small village appears normal until you do a quest that causes a dragon to burn the village down. After that, you see a burned out husk.

Of course, that has a set of problems too, since two people can stand in the same place and see different things…. but hey.. no solution will ever be perfect unless everything in your world is truly persistent AND every quest is a one-time unique thing. Hope you have a huge staff of builders. :)

This is kind of what KaVir just said, but could you allow players to decide on the fly how much instancing they want? Imagine that when entering a dungeon you are given a list of currently active instances and which players are currently occupying them, and that you can then choose to enter one of them (e.g. to pursue an opponent) or create your own new one as you see fit. That way players either socialise or jump straight to the maximum treasure according to what each individual player prefers.

One slight flaw in the above is that if you're chasing someone you maybe shouldn't be able to tell if they've entered a dungeon or not. So maybe the entry command needs to be more along the lines of "if Elanthis is occupying an instance of this dungeon, pick that one" without the game confirming whether he is inside any instance or how many instances there are.

That is one solution I had thought of. There are some others. In the end though you always end up with the problem where you have three groups, A, B, and C. All of A is in instance 1, all of B is in instance 2, some of the people in group C want to interact with group A and some of the people in group C want to interact with group B, and there's nothing group C can do about it other than splitting up.

I think the better solution might be to just generate sufficiently large dungeons that the benefits of instancing disappear, and just suck it up and allow portions of the dungeon to re-generate while other parts with active players remain stable and deal with the consequences (no way to leave trails, returning the way you came can be confusing, etc. – but then I guess with large dungeons you pretty much need town portals and the like so the game doesn't become too tedious to travel).

The amount of instancing does really depend on the gameplay style, though. A WoW raid guild would DESPISE not having instanced dungeons, because then they have to compete for resources and drops. The boss fights in WoW would be a totally different experience if people could come in and out as they pleased and not be an instanced event. But keep in mind that WoW is not in any way supposed to play like a good MUD. It's an entirely different experience focused at an entirely different user base that have entirely different ideas of what is fun.

In many games that have no instancing you end up with players still choosing to eschew the socialization and multi-client to power level their characters and be the biggest bad ass on the server. A friend of mine is taking over a recently closed-down RO server, for exampe, and well over half the players on the server are pissed that the new server is banning multi-clienting. There are just a lot of people that don't want a MUD, they want a single-player or friends-only-multiplayer game that lets them optionally compete with or trade with other players at their convenience. They have zero interest in interacting with random people in a dungeon or while adventuring. That's just the way many people are.

And that's why there's not just one perfect online game out there that everyone loves. :)

My ideal instancing situation is one where a persistent unique area is created and lasts until it is no longer relevant, in a sort of Diablo fashion. As the traffic into a given level bracket increases, the mud would begin creating more of these areas and attaching them to relevant places on the mud. This would most specifically not be the same room, but more like level one having three down staircases, each leading to a different level two. Instead of deleting the area when all the players leave, though, it hangs around and repops or evolves as necessary.

It's fairly easy to avoid the stealing of boss kills with a little bit of area side scripting, though I wouldn't be surprised if that functionality doesn't exist for builders in modern MMOs, it doesn't in most MUDs.

I think the future lies in multi-state areas that players can influence in for them strategic manners. Destroy or build a bridge to affect trade, convert a neutral city to your faction, etc. Instancing wouldn't make sense in a dynamic world.

Anything is possible with or without scripting, but then commercial games (MMO or otherwise) very infrequently have builders the same way MUDs do. Commercial developers long ago learned that giving a designer access to any kind of scripting language just meant that the designer would write slow, complex, buggy, incomprehensible scripts that a developer would eventually have to go and replace, which would take longer than if the developer had just done it in the first place. The vast majority of games instead focus on scripting to allow the developers to quickly add features and area effects that the designers request and focus primarily on flags and such in the design tools for things that need to be changed or tweaked often.



That's the kind of cool stuff most of us would like, certainly. I don't think it's the future for MMOs in general, though. I seriously doubt most MMO players would appreciate it. They don't want a dynamic economy based on what some other group is doing. They don't want to compete in intricate ways. They want to get the best fat lootz and have the highest score OR they just want to ignore the social aspect entirely outside of their friends. Most MMO players would just be annoyed if the world dynamically changed and it affected the sale price of their gear, the time it takes to get to a dungeon, or which enemies are available. Especially the casual gamers, who don't have the time to go fix a bridge before getting to a dungeon, or who are only available at limited times and want to know exactly what gameplay experience to expect for the hour or two they get to play. I'm willing to bet that the static world and instanced dungeons make up a decent percentage of the reason why WoW is still so overwhelmingly popular 5 years down the road (obviously not the biggest reason by a long shot, but an important one nonetheless). Of course, I can't stand WoW myself, because it's boring and uninteresting, which I'm sure many people here would agree with.

I suppose those MMO players are less interested in virtual world experiences and are more interested in having an action-game/chatroom experience, which possibly means I'm going off on an entirely unrelated tangent (surprised?).

Well you're always going to have people wanting to split up - that's not really anything to do with instancing, nor do I even see it as a problem with the game. It's no different to a typical DikuMUD where group A is exploring the smurf village and group B is exploring the dwarven day care centre, with group C having mixed opinions about which of those two areas they want to explore.

But the point is that if the dungeons are created based on geographical location, you can still bump into other players by accident or intent - players are no longer able to avoid each other, because "instance 1" and "instance 2" are both public dungeons at different locations in the world rather than being private dungeons tied to player A and player B respectively.

Of course you may want instancing for other reasons. But it's definitely not the only solution for increasing content and providing randomised dungeons.

It'd be a form of PvP which draws different crowds. On the other hand it also allows (and ought to encourage) cooperating in intricate ways, and having a lasting impact on the world. In most MMOs the evidence of your existence is gone the moment you quit, same story for MUDs, though that's where player building comes into play.