Well, i didnt preorder if you meant for me Aeribian, and im hardly a fanboy either of this particular game.. I think the only game i´ve been fanboish about so far has been Oblivion :P (which ofc crashed and burned ^^)
As i said, i do understand why they opted to put in instances, but i think its a horribly flawed way of creating an mmo..
TR is a great game in all respects, i played closed->open beta for 4 months, apart from the instanceselection.. But hell, as much as i hate that concept with the teleporters, the randomness in
AoC is even worse..
The single main thing i have issues with
AoC on is this.. I dont care that the game is virtually unplayable as it stands now due to an extremely laggy client.. I dont care that i glitch outta the world on occation and have to kill myself to respawn on solid ground again, i really couldnt give a rats ass about getting pk´d to oblivion since i lag to much compared with others.. All that can and will be fixed as patching goes on..
However, the instancing wont, unless Funcom magically pulls out a way to expand the playingfield and take away the need for instanced general areas..
Gonna love instances just because its crowded and i have to wait on mobspawns ??
Dynamic spawning? More zones to spread out the playerbase? Lower pop on servers??
Those "simple" things takes care of the problem..
Im not a gamedesigner, but i do know that the easy part of making a game is to put in more content.. The hard part is to code the general gameplay..
Well, lets see where it end up in the endgame. Apparently they say that the Borderlands wont have instances, so it shouldnt be a problem then (and yeh, endgame is all that matters here, i really dont have a problem with the starterzone being instanced since that shit lasts for a few hours anyways).. But why in the nine hells do they think they can accomodate a few hundreds (thousands?) of players at the same time in a bordelands zone in the endgame, if they cant do the same in a lvl 20-40 area ?? The same problems must be there on a coding/server side of things..
How did Blizzard succeed in having about 1k people online and kicking in the same area at the launch of TBC and it actually worked pretty decent? Ofc HFP 3 hours after release wasnt smooth as soloing WC, but it fucking worked, atleast for me on my shitty rig..
I refuse to take the fact that i cutting edge mmo, supposedly of the "next generation" has to revert back a few gens to actually work..
All boils down to one sentence a smart dude wrote on the betaforums.. "I´d rather play on a lowpop server and have the chanse to meet 100% of the population at any given time, than have the potential of meeting 10 times more people that i have no sense of community with"
Anyhoo the discussion on the betaboards are ongoing, and i made a nice and lengthy post in the beta journal about it.. So hopefully i can give you more info later on as we get answers..
Oh, plen, i am trying it
And really, really dont like to get ganked, find the fucker again to smite him with my awesomness, just to see him magically dissapear on my screen since he flips instances and get a /tell "Hehe, nub"..