Quote:
Originally Posted by Samoht
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you guys seem to ignore one major factor in the decision to use instancing: population
if a static zone is only capable of supporting 3 or 4 groups of casual EXPers, then what happens with the server population is at a point where 7 or 8 groups need to EXP there?
think velks from velious. it's the premier EXP zone for the expansion 55-60, and yet can only support 5 EXP groups max. what happens on p99 when everybody floods that zone and you get 50+ people in there competing over spawns and arguing over loot?
i remember playing the guild wars stress test weekend between betas for wow, and the way they solved this problem was by giving zones a population cap before a new version of the zone was instanced, but you could freely switch between the two depending on where you needed to be. imagine velks is at 40 pop, you zone in as 41, but instead it sends you to your own instance where you're number 1. you realise that your group is in the other instance, and you switch over. the population goes up to 41 and after zoning, you run up to your camp. the next people that zone in are in a group, and now they're the only ones in their own zone.
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Velks was the "premier EXP zone" because people made it that way. Servers have always had population caps; Velious did not increase this cap and furthermore added another dungeon where you could level from 55-60. Additionally more "mains" would be 60 by now so you'd have yet another 55-60 dungeon for a theoretically smaller-than-before 55-59 population. There was absolutely nothing stopping you from leveling in Charasis, Chardok, etc. You can argue the loot was better in Velks, but it's not like it mudflated Kunark loot to garbage. You could always farm cash other places if you wanted to anyhow.
Your described problem is a product of a lazy population more than anything else and I see it all the time on this server. People would rather go to their one spot they know than explore than move and find something better. I don't know how many times I've been at a camp on P99 that can sustain 1-2 players at a high XP rate and seen 5+ people all sit there fighting for spawns. It becomes wildly inefficient for everyone involved when the last three people to show up could easily find different open camps.