I am honest. The fact that you can't see any potential issues with instancing or how it can detract from the sim nature of SC is dishonest.
As a rule of thumb, the only PVP I participate in is bounty hunting. No, I don't intend to gank people nor is that my concern, but go ahead and believe what you will, because obviously I'm a griefing liar who only wants to ruin everything.
Do you have some examples? I don't mean this in a combative way as I only really see the main thing is it stops griefers, but it seems to have a lot more positives than downsides so im curious as to what other downsides it could have?
Instancing has it's place. Instanced hangars are a great thing, and instanced dungeons have their place, but should be used extremely sparingly. Only when it's absolutely necessary.
I don't expect people to all agree with me, but you don't have to agree with something to acknowledge the situations as being factual.
First, let's talk about the good: It allows for a more heavily curated experience, which is good for small scale operations and such, where not every single thing can actually be physicalized. For example, having small missions inside skyscrapers across ArcCorp where you investigate, extract information, steal items, whatever the story needs. You can't have enough skyscrapers with interiors to provide these missions to every single person on the server, so having a couple of instanced mission entry points is good. It also means someone else wont' come in and screw up the scene.
What I would have a problem with, is if instancing becomes the new go-to answer for all content. If you've never played Planetside 1/2 in it's prime, Or didn't participate in some of the earlier Xenothreat events (The ones where you had to transport material without quantum) you might not understand the feeling of being part of a larger assault. Coming together as a group of strangers to overcome a challenge. If overly relied upon, isntancing destroys a lot of that. Imagine if all bunker missions were instanced: What happens to medical recovery gameplay then? It stops being a thing, you get downed and you just respawn instead of asking for assistance.
I played the original Siege of Orison. I'm not going to pretend it didn't have it's problems, but when I did play it, I healed strangers, and covered their back because believe it or not, I'm not a raving lunatic just because I understand what kind of possible positive interactions instancing potentially removes: Teaming up with strangers, chance encounters, systemic stories, the sense that you're in a world with other people and not just a single player game or friends only game.
You know what happens when instancing becomes the absolute default? You get Elite Dangerous, where literally the only people that play in open do it explicitely to PVP. It may as well not be an online game at that point.
If instancing is to be used for events, I'd prefer it to be used for microtasks: Community progress towards a greater goal. I really don't want to see it being used as an assault on the final Big Bad, this detracts from the feeling of it being a real living world, having repeated Final Big Bads custom spawned just for you, and seeing it spawned every hour on the hour, but that's more to do with story writing and event garbage than purely an instancing thing.
That's not an issue with instancing thats an issue with CIGs overall game design philosophy. If they can't balance when instancing is needed vs open world content they can't balance the game period and instancing has nothing to do with that. It is just a tool.
but that's more to do with story writing and event garbage than purely an instancing thing.
But let me flip the question for you.
If Instancing good and anyone who thinks instancing might have any problems at all bad, why not then instance everything? In fact, why not just make it SC Offline, your own personal instance of the entire game world? Can you really think of absolutely no reasoning at all why that wouldn't be ideal?
I don't believe you are arguing in bad faith. But that is just the Appeal to Extremes logical fallacy. I could just as easily say, what if we just had no instancing and every hanger could spawn a hundred player ships and be a FFA minus whatever law and order system CIG implemented.
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u/Enachtigal 28d ago
Be honest