Open up the world, please! Part I

[Naunet]

The major problem in all MMORPG's is that you can not place 500 people inside the space of a gymnasium. There are certain aspects of computer games in general that you just can't replicate a real-world equivalent because few games actually let their NPC's have a schedule. Off the top of my head The Ultima games, Elder Scrolls, and Fallout games do this. Thus everyone knows that NPC is located at a specific location, and they will be crowded around it. You can do some lazy-instancing in this way by making the door way into the building for which the NPC is located so that only 16 people are ever in the building, but that starts to break immersion when your friends go "Hey I'm by Rowena" and they go "I'm also by Rowena, where the hell are you?" And they're both standing in the same spot in different instances.

I'm still not sure why you're lecturing me. I'm literally talking about something that plenty of other MMOs do just fine.