For the record, Patriarch, I am not against open world content in a general sense. Only when it has to deal with highly sought after items, or it is made in such a way that the people who are the "losers" (i.e. didn't get the claim, are in the wrong time zone for a pop timer, fought and died*) end up walking away with nothing but wasted time on their hands, frustration, * and are unable to try again in a reasonable amount of time.

Things like that lead to overly-hostile communities and griefing (if allowed by game mechanics). It happened way too many times in FFXI with the sought after HNMs that had longer pop timers.



Quote Originally Posted by Kiote View Post
It's less about what is available and more about how content must be presented. Contrary to popular belief, Instances are not created to prevent competition, they are created to save resources. You sacrifice variability to ease the load on a single server. If you allow for a single instance to have a large set of variables you instantly take away any and all resources saved by forcing your servers to store and load a large number of different versions of the same instances. Open world event only occur once at a time. You can have all the variable occur at random, but only one set will ever happen at any given time.
Sure, I'll give you that instances can help save resources, and that it's easier for developers to fall into the rut of having formulaic content via instances. That's not always the case, and it's not a technical limitation of instances. Can you give me specific examples of things that are done in open world that can't be done in instances, aside from having other groups around?