It is rare to find a game today where the world is the server and everything on it is unique to those who are in the pool of that server, no one NPC is replicated like with instancing where it removes a kinda of principle immersion that everyone inherently is involved in while playing.
So for instance, a Instance of a zone, creates duplicates of a NPC. Seemingly meaningless, but really if there is only one of a name, sure he can "respawn.." but that timer of his re-spawn is part of the lifespan of that NPC.
It would be nice if devs took this a step further and named every decaying skeletons etc uniquely so each spawn is its own life and death cycle. I think this is something they were kinda hinting at with EQ Next but obviously it seems not enough people give a shit as most gamers today have no idea what roleplay means. Most play MMORPG games yet have never thought of immersion in their lives as gamers.
Even a single player game you can get immersed, even though your version of that game is completely unique or instanced in a sense, but you are playing through that world in a single player.
In a multi-player game I never understood Instancing.. It has always boggled my mind to the point I can't feel immersed anymore, this is where I personally think EQ went wrong, and where WoW went wrong too. The idea that Butcherblock has a copy version of itself is exactly why I didn't play Guild Wars 1, to me back then I was making fun of it for being a Lobby style of MMORPG rather than a MMORPG.
But MMORPGs since have completely forgotten this principle in favor of satisfying everyone by creating 1000s of copies of the same boss that people just privately camp.. Really killed anything I felt that MMORPGs had that was unique.
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