We already have something like this. Think of alliance zones: For some people a zone is level 1-10, for others it's v1 or v6. So I assume it should basically be possible to create instances with more extended rules.

KhajitFurTrader wrote: »

Waaaay before launch, there was talk in developer interviews about different zone phases, and a questionnaire for new players at the beginning of the game, according to which player characters would be put in appropriate phases, sorted by preferences: solo, group, RP, etc.

At the time of the stress test betas, this system didn't make an appearance, and questions were asked about it on the forum. I can't remember whether there had been an official statement, or there were just educated guesses, but I do remember that the word on the street was that plans for zone phasing by preference had been discontinued due to severe performance restraints put on the server architecture.

Given how server performance is a hotly discussed topic to this day, zone preference phases failing to materialize was probably for the best.

So, to answer the question: in theory, yes, they are possible, but may just not be practical. Each of the original zones has, at the minimum, three phases already: one for the Alliance it belongs to, and two VR copies for the others. I don't know if, and how often, this is done, but there may also be multiple copies of the same zone to funnel and distribute population, i.e. once a zone reaches its pop limit, another copy is opened to alleviate system load by overcrowding.

Thanks for the lesson @KhajitFurTrader . I could see the performance issues being a problem. In hindsight, the Megaserver technology seems to be more a hindrance to ESO than it is a boon.

I'd love to see "special rules" phases implemented, though I doubt it will happen.

There are already multiple 'instances' of zones that go over x population, to avoid clustering.. but overall, nah... i liek trolling people and i think the world would be safer if i couldn't stab people.

First off, I agree that terminology can be a hindrance while discussing different techniques. For example, a "phase" might more fittingly denote a dedicated set of visible surroundings that the client displays to the player, which depends on the character's state of progression (e.g. in a quest), and not on any state the server is in. Players might be in the same instance of a zone, but in different phases, and thus not be able to interact with the same NPCs or each other. Phases are usually local to "cells", i.e. the smallest unit of a zone for which mutual visibility is computed. When leaving the phased surroundings, others in the area are phased back into view.

An "instance", on the other hand, is one of several identical, but separated copies of the same landscape or surroundings for a group or even a larger subset of players. As you said, Glenumbra has three different instances (one for each alliance) with separate rulesets regarding MOB, NPC, and resource levels. With the upcoming discontinuation of VR levels, we might even see the "Cadwell zones" get the "DLC scaling zone" treatment (which would mean a non-trivial redesign). After all, cross-alliance grouping for the smaller kind of instanced content (i.e. the group delves and trials) will become possible as well. The non-Cadwell, non-DLC zones would have to stay as they are, however, because they provide the basic leveling experience.

I find the channel concept intriguing, and I don't remember reading about it before. The old battle.net chat rooms come to mind: if one chat room filled up to its cap (100 per channel in the days of D2, iirc), another one was spawned and joining players were placed in it. The reason for handling things this way is simple mathematics: each message from any member to the chat room has to be sent back to all participants of said chat room; the number of messages to be handled by the chat room thread grows linearly to the number of participants (complexity of O(n)). With a graphical MMO client, there's another catch: player characters are usually the objects with the highest polycount and the most diverse armor textures in a scene (I'm not even speaking about particle effects caused by those players). If there were 600 concurrent players in same place, and the client had to display all of them, performance would suffer for everyone. Split them up into neat slices of, say, 300, and you spread the load on two threads.

It would be interesting to know how channels are implemented: are they light-weight instances, heavy-weight phases, or something in-between? (I don't expect them to talk shop, as these things are trade secrets)

lordrichter wrote: »

It is the use of channels to enforce the separation of players that are in the same location that may contribute to people periodically making population-based claims that the game is dead, dying, or going to be. They destroy our perception on how busy the server is, to the point where we cannot tell the difference between low server population and high server population. Channels might be only a couple hundred players in size, and we will not be seeing all of them during the course of play. We don't know if there is one channel or 50 channels, and we have no idea how balanced the channel populations might be.

You say this as if it was a disadvantage. As an old MMO player, I like bustling cities; but as an old TES player, I prefer lonesome landscapes. ESO's dichotomy suits me just fine. As for the doom-sayers, they will do that regardless of any evidence, visual or not.

Take WoW as an example of how to approach this from the other side: in its golden days, each realm had their own zone threads, exclusive to that server. As server populations aged and concurrency numbers dwindled (again, a perfectly normal process for all online worlds), the zones -- especially the leveling areas -- naturally became ghost towns. Enter cross-server zones: one shared zone thread for all logical servers in the same data center. Or two, as there are PvE and PvP rulesets. Players can still chat, group, or cuss each other for stealing resources that "belonged" to them. It's just that they all have their server names attached to their character tag, and that evokes a feeling of "not being home". But who knows, someday even Blizzard might educate their players about "Servers" or Realms being an outdated concept, which only existed virtually in the past few years anyway, ditch them, and introduce regional megaservers. Would make a lot of things easier to handle.