Rokien's new thread on Open World.

[Hulan]

It makes the world feel more alive seeing people in the open world actually fighting and watching linkshells/guilds fighting hard HNMs..you know, making a world feel alive, something people want?

I'm not going to take sides on this argument, mostly because I'm not entirely sure myself where I come down on the "instance" v. "open-world" argument myself yet. That being said, I see this point brought up again and again by people promoting open-world content. It sound great on paper, but in practice, I don't think it really works that way. I played FFXI a lot; starting at NA release and finally closing down my account when FFXIV was officially released because I couldn't see myself playing 2 MMOs at the same time. In all that time, I cannot once remember - by chance - running into someone fighting an HNM or other open world NM.

I often saw people fighting HNMs or open world NMs, but always when I had business with the same HNM or NM. For very valid design reasons, HNMs and other open-world content is invariably tucked away in the middle of nowhere, unlikely to be happened upon by other players. So in reality, quite often open world content does not, in fact, add "life" to the game for the average player. Because the average player is almost never going to interact with that content.

As I said, I'm not sure where I come down on the issue as a whole, but the "open-world content brings the world to life" argument doesn't seem to hold up to real-world implementation. You could say, "Well they know that it's 'out there' somewhere", but the same could easily be said about instanced content, for a vast majority of players, the difference is academic.

[Pixi]

I often saw people fighting HNMs or open world NMs, but always when I had business with the same HNM or NM. For very valid design reasons, HNMs and other open-world content is invariably tucked away in the middle of nowhere, unlikely to be happened upon by other players. So in reality, quite often open world content does not, in fact, add "life" to the game for the average player. Because the average player is almost never going to interact with that content.

Exactly. Generally, if you were watching another LS fight an HNM, it meant one of three things:

1. Your LS had just spent the last X amount of hours camping the HNM and got outclaimed (usually because the other LS had better bots/more people willing to bot), and you were sticking around to get the ToD or to try to claim it in case the claiming LS wiped.

2. You were planning to purchase something dropped by the HNM.

3. You were getting the ToD.