First off, let me say this: I am not strictly against phasing, and understand that having everyone on the same map all the time would be absolutely atrocious for performance and playability. That's not what this post is about. Also, I apologize if this is not the proper forum for this... the lack of a feedback/suggestion, or even general discussion forum is perhaps quite telling, but I hope someone from ZeniMax reads it, and maybe others think as I do and wish to add their perspectives.

As a casual PvE-RP (roleplaying) player who enjoys in-character (IC) questing and adventuring, I see such massive promise in this game... beautiful environments, small events and details in the world, dungeons and caves and things to discover and do with others... all the public dungeons seem like amazing opportunities for my character to amble into town, go to wherever adventurers gather, and try to put a ragtag party together to get some good old adventuring done in places she couldn't realistically clear out on her own.

...except I've yet to run into a single roleplayer out in the world, because the population centers are so heavily phased that it's a lottery at the best of times. And the dungeons themselves, which -should- have heavy phasing (or outright private instancing and party-size scaling so they feel adequately challenging and populated by enemies), do not and have 5-6 people camping a boss to get a hit in for completion credit. I've run entire public dungeons where I don't see a single NPC until one spawns on my face on the way out.

On top of that, large questing areas are so heavily phased that even if I manage to get a roleplayer to rope along, I can't even see them unless I RP in secluded, in-transit areas of the map, or stick to cities where they can travel to my instance or I to theirs. I've all but given up on public RP, which is how those of us not lucky enough to come into a game with a group of friends to play with make connections in a new community.

Maybe this would not affect me if I was not a roleplayer, or did not enjoy meeting new people to RP/adventure with while questing, but such drastic segregation of the playerbase makes this feel like a lobby game with all the downsides, but none of the upsides. Honestly, I can't see a roleplaying community thriving in a game like this, simply because someone who doesn't go out of their way to search for community websites out-of-game won't even realize these people are there and active (and they are, at least one roleplayer lobby guild is capped and has a waiting list for new members in NA, with lots of others popping up to pick up the overflow).

In the spirit of not complaining without offering a suggestion that might address my concerns, here is a summary of what I'd like to see:

• Instancing in cities needs to be less invasive, and allow more people to be in the same city. Maybe there could be a way to opt-out of highly-crowded phases? TERA did this as elegantly as one could hope, by letting users pick a "channel" of the zone they were in. This way, people who wanted emptier areas could migrate to a different phase, but folks who wanted to be with the "crowd" could travel to the most populated phase to play with others.
• Questing areas need to be less aggressive about phasing, or should allow party members to see one another regardless of quest status (maybe by picking the phase that's least progressed so players who have completed a quest can help their friends without inconvenience). Like before, maybe the solution is letting players pick which phase to use.
• Public dungeons should probably be less public, or at least more heavily phased to ensure they're experienced as intended. The presence of such neat locales is a great opportunity for immersion in the game world, but any satisfaction from discovering it is absolutely shattered when 20 people are in there and everything is getting slaughtered as soon as it spawns. As above, the best way to please everyone might be to let people choose to play through a private/party-only version of the dungeon if they'd rather not zerg.

Hopefully I'm not the only one with these concerns.

Thanks for reading.