Instanced Content

HazardNumberSeven

What are peoples thoughts on 20% of dungeons being instanced. Is this too much, and is anyone else worried it could be abused to farm in safety? ... or maybe even lead to most players avoiding the 80% of open-world dungeons for the 20% that are a safe-haven from other players? I have concerns that solo content will be an easier and far more efficient way of playing, and so I believe they should be less rewarding.

If any forum vets/lurkers have more information on instanced content, please feel free to share/link it here.

I'm interested to hear peoples opinions on the whole 80/20 thing. Obviously from my post and concerns, I heavily favor open world content and would love 100% of dungeons to be non-instanced .. but I'm happy with the design goal so far. I'm a PvP orientated player and I acknowledge my own biases that come from that.

There's some quotes from the wiki that make me feel like 20% instanced content could be a really good thing too, though!

"Instancing is only going to happen in certain dungeons where the desire is to have greater narrative appeal. Outside of these and arenas there will not be too much instancing anywhere else."

"We're probably going to do instancing only in certain dungeons and in arenas. You probably won't see instancing too much anywhere else. What you see is gonna be what you get."

"Instanced dungeons will also be present and will cater for solo and group questlines."

George_Black

If people want to spend $15 per month to use Group Finder it's fine by me.
What's not fine by me is if it turns out that I have to waste 2h a day, doing the same old boring runs, because something EXTREMELY necessary is locked behind those PvE instances.
As for BGs, I only play them for glory, not PvP gear or rewards. I hope it stays like that.

The uglier answer is that business is business, and you wanna get your fingers in as many pies as possible.

Namil

You basically already answered your own queries in your post haha, the 'Instanced Dungeons' are primarily only associated with quest lines which I assume would be pre-determined in the world and as such probably don't scale with any nodes which would mean the reward you get from them wouldn't be as significant as the open world dungeons that appear as a result of node progression. I don't even think there's any information on those dungeons even being repeatable but time will tell.

I don't think there's anything to worry about though.

Noaani

My hope with instanced content is that this content is curated content - as in, developers spend time adjusting and fine tuning it to be a challenge for an appropriatly sized group of appropriately geared characters.

The easiest thing to point to as an example of curated content (even if it is a poorly executed example) would be WoW raids. However, rather than just beign raid content, I would hope there is also curated single group content to the same standard.

The reason for this is that without instanced content, every encounter in the game will be able to be defeated by simply throwing more players at it - and if the developers attempt a mechanic to prevent this from happening, then these encounters will be rendered impossible to kill due to people abusing that mechanic as a troll.

What I wouldn't want to see are whole dungeons being instanced. I'd rather a dungeon be open, but at the end of each wing there is a single boss instanced zone.

It is worth noting that the quotes in the OP are all from around 2017/18, where as the 80/20 comments were all from this year. When they said the 80/20 comment, it wasn't really expanded upon. As such, it is both possible that it is an expansion of the original comments, but it is also possible that it supersedes those comments - we have no real means of discerning which it is.

Fathym

This is a situation where, even if you can farm instanced content over an over, the market will fix itself on its own. The different dungeons will all have different specific rare resources in them and the instanced resources will, over time, become very cheap on the market while the contested resources will become worth considerably more. Then it just becomes a choice of risk vs reward. Do you want to spend time in safe instances but get a much lower return on investment? Or do you want to farm in contested areas to gain a higher payout per hour but risk pvp encounters? I personally find having this sort of choice to be incredibly enjoyably in a game.