Group Instancing is the only solution.

Instancing group content??? So you want to play by yourself? Or just with your friends? There are games that offer that experience. But further segmenting the world only takes away from immersion. You are no longer in a world with others. You are playing on a Lan. This idea is so short sighted it's unbelievable.

I would personally be fine seeing instanced group content with a request lockout designed to reflect the respawn of the content at issue, which is in fact how raid lockouts were also implemented!

Though I think it's rather unnecessary, unless your logic is just that people should be hazed in order to engage with this game's actual content in a meaningful way. Or if it's more like Lortl's logic, who seems to be arguing that the only people that are entitled to play "just with [their] friends" are raiders.

It seems the logic is basically that raiders are entitled to both the best gear in era and the chance to play the game without being harassed by other players, because I don't see any of these arguments addressed towards the instancing of raid content.

They need to do a root cause analysis on why some people want instances and try to eliminate the issues not isolate them .

For example training people with mobs ... could be fixed quite easy . Leash mobs so they don’t follow to zone , make them not jump to other players so easily when pulled from spawn point.

Charm gating , easiest fix yet .

The hardest thing to fix is camp disputes

One of the most significantly noticeable results of aocs was that mediocre raid content was shelved. An aspect of eq in which lower tiered guilds would scoop up some of the lower tier or prior xpac raids went away. This was in most ways good - plebs should not be left with only scraps. It did have a slightly unintended negative though in that guilds would only massively and in spits raid a few places and it was repetitive causing boredom. Top guilds on phinny and since raid less variety of raid mobs than guilds did on past servers (pre instancing).

If you instance the group game you should expect the same thing to happen there too: groups will gravitate to the best spots and not waste time on inferior locations. This seems good at first, but I wholeheartedly reject the notion that this is good as a bulk or all of group play. Having crowding that drives people to obscure spots, adhoc camp setups, this is actually healthy. People will get EXTREMELY bored of only ever doing the same crap.

On top of this, as I said, you cripple the "world" community aspect this way. When two raids bump into each others its usually toxic. When two groups share a zone it is not necessarily. Plenty of good times result from the neighborhood type of feel of a hub.

Instead, I argue that you should have some group level content that is relevant always available but not necessarily the best stuff and certainly not all of it. I'd actually be a fan of ldon in prior to pop amd at launch eg on a selo style start, but this works because ldons are balanced around instanced group grinding while velks for example is not.

This is even before some of the unforseen potential exploits that might happen. For example, 0 competition ever for seb or the deep can mean unlimited aoe groups, which quickly leads every competitive player to dragging box encs around.

Hey, thanks for this well written post. If you don't mind, I would like to address just a few of your points with specificity but, first, let me ask you why you seem to resolve these points in a very black and white fashion? I'll circle back to that, but I ask it because I don't think we're actually too far away from each other in concept. Definitely some fundamental differences but I'm sure that you realize that limited instancing doesn't negate a lot of what you've said here.

For example, your quote that I started with. I agree that players should not be left with only scraps, which is what is happening now with the most highly contested group camps. Without instances, groups gravitate to the best spots anyway, it's super rare for anyone to waste time on inferior locations - often, they'll just log off or do something non-exp/loot related. I'm sure you see this all the time.

With the kind of limited instances that I suggested earlier, you're only giving players 1 or 2 camps in each level bracket. You'd still see plenty of players in other open world areas that drop the other items of value in those bracket ranges. I also did not suggest any major platinum camps, which would be difficult to instance if we have to assume non-respawning instances anyway.

Yes, people could gravitate to their instances and stay there, but it doesn't really impact you for them to do that. Sure, sometimes you'll meet some fine new people in open world but let's face it - the majority of good interactions in open world content comes from other players in your own group, or from players in another group that are far enough from yours that neither of you are challenging each other for spawns. At that point, honestly, how much does it really matter?

I must respectfully and fundamentally disagree with your notion that driving players to more obscure camps is healthy for this game, or that the opposite would be boredom inducing. You're talking about a group of people playing on a TLP server for...some of them...their 8th? if they were around for Combine? This is literally a server for people that enjoy doing the same thing that they've done before.

I will definitely acknowledge the burnout that comes from farming any content, but that happens regardless of whether it's instanced or not. Burnout and attrition have always been a thing. There's no data to suggest that instances increase that rate of burnout, especially again when you look at Phinigel and it's historic era-to-era raider population.

I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand if you meant open world or instanced for the aoe groups. I suppose it doesn't matter? But competitive players always play towards the fotm, and many of them are (surprise) already dragging box enchanters around. What's important is this - with instances, their potential to grief other people drops down exponentially. I suggest to you that instances would solve a lot more unforeseen problems than they would cause.

So let me circle back to the top, I'm not trying to try your patience here. Do you truly believe that instancing the 2 most popular camps in each level bracket would literally destroy a server's community? Do you think that people getting group gear would actually stop them from then going on to try to progress through raid content? How do you juxtapose that with the incredible growth that instances caused for the raider population on Phinigel that seems to have plateaued through expansions long after the usual population drops? Or do you think that maybe there is room for a middle way between complete open world harassment and complete full instancing?