Does the MMO community really want to do away with ALL instancing?

Instancing, all instancing, needs to go away

The biggest issue facing modern MMOs is the lack a meaningful, persistent world - y'know, the thing that made MMOs popular in the first place. Every time you have instancing, whether it's to "change" a piece of scenery for a quest, or to create instanced raids, or to have "PVP zones" - you make that living world exponentially smaller.

The continuing focus on having players hit max level, and then go to a bunch of dungeons, raids or small PVP instances... has made the world less alive.

Why shouldn't a sandbox have dungeon queues? Because a sandbox shouldn't have instanced dungeons. The entire point of having an online community is that's it's not a controllable thing, you are not GOD able to queue up dungeons full of loot pinatas at a whim.

You want gear? You work to meet the people who can craft it, and to find the things they need to make it happen. You want adventure? You go to a city and find it - or come up with your own gold-making scheme and find some partners in crime to come along.

A real living world ceases to exist the second you add any kind of instancing to an MMO. The second you give people the so-called "option" to just run dungeons and never interact with other people, your cities empty and the community slowly evaporates.

Warlords of Draenor (WoW) is a perfect example of exactly what instancing does to your game. Launch, everyone thinks BC is coming back, they imagine big crowded cities and jumping back into raiding... then they spend the entire expansion in their garrison, and they don't need to be in a guild to raid casually.

Log in to an instance, queue for an instance, get gear in an instance, head back to an instance. Oh boy! What a great game.

So no, you can't have your dungeon queue, because then the sandbox is no longer a sandbox. Why can't we install themepark rides in your sandbox? Because they kill the game. My realistic, social fantasy world doesn't have freaking roller coaster going through a major city because you don't want to "deal with crowds" in an MMO.

/r/MMORPG Thread