Question about the 2.0 zones in Endwalker

[Jojoya]

Though I have to wonder why one of the newest MMOs has managed so little in regards to phasing that even far older MMOs have long since been capable of...

Might originally have been a PS3 issue. By now it's probably a design choice.

Playing through Icecrown during Wrath of the Lich King absolutely sucked due to phasing. You couldn't help friends unless you were both on the same quest. You couldn't help friends if had completed the quest already. There were multiple other phasing issues in WoW even after that ("sorry you feel to your death as we crossed over a zone where we weren't on the the same phase"). They did some tweaking on the worst of the problems but still it was generally a poor experience when what you can see and what your friends can see are 2 different things.

I'd rather not see it become a prominent feature. It's better left to single player games where it's only affecting you.

Again, Doman Enclave. And the weird area in the Pixies' quest. Both areas you access that aren't instanced specifically for you and they change physically, down to not having the same collision boxes.

I don't think they will do it. But the fact is they can do it if they want to.

But Doman Enclave only had you running around talking to NPCs and the foundations of all the buildings that changed were there all along. There was very little in the way of Interactive (for lack of a better word) MSQ content there. And while it was interesting to see the changes going on at first, it got rather boring simply because all we were doing was walking around to see the change without those changes impacting game play.

I imagine it would be a lot more difficult to pull off in areas where players need to fight creatures, and especially when players farther along in the story are trying to help friends who aren't.

I didn't mean it in a technical sense, but rather a question of whether, say, fixing up Ishgard could be done effectively even when limited to just reskinning the sides of buildings, rubble piles, etc. Such would be a pretty large design constraint if, no matter the skins, the collision boxes must remain consistent for everyone.

We've got example of where collision boxes aren't the same for everyone - Antithesis and the shield wall in Yanxia.

So it is possible, but we don't know how much work it would entail on a larger scale or how it would impact our ability to play with others. As I said above, I don't want to be experience the problems that phasing caused in Icecrown.