The problem is that the conceptual boundary one-reality (public instances) has been conflated with the private instancing of Yeesha. Relto is Yeesha's creation and so instancing makes sense through there. Yet the invite system in Nexus understands instancing, while Nexus should have no connection to Yeesha Magic(TM).
But really, this is a conceptual issue and not a technical one. Really, you can have any link point to any age with any instance scheme from a technical perspective. The messiness of instancing is really two issues: a user experience issue and a story issue. With the data we get from Cyan for the classic MOUL setup, we can't affect this - it'll be as Cyan made it. And for the shard admins and age builders, they'll implement this however they feel is right.
So what you are suggesting is developing an 'instancing standard' - a suggested way of setting up instancing to give to developers and shard admins. Now, I don't think this is a bad idea by any stretch. But one has to realize that is what we are doing.
An idea situation in my mind would be to make the boundary between the two pretty firm. You get to public instances through Nexus. You get to private instances through Relto. If you are in a private instance, any books/symbols/stones take you to private versions. If you are in a public one, they take you to public ones. If a book/stone or such has a Yeesha symbol on it, it gets added to your Relto shelf or books like in MOUL.
For a pure division, you'd have to move the invite system into Relto somehow. Maybe a book on the other shelf that functions like the invite system in the KI. But in a pinch, you could just handwave the fact that private invites go through Nexus and change the subject when someone asks why.
Neighborhood instancing is problematic, since it is neither Yeesha instanced nor is is D'ni tech. The MOUL explanation just punts on the issue (we found a bunch of books that Yeesha must have worked her magic on). But I have to admit, neighborhood instanced Ages are really nice to have. So one may want to keep them. If you choose that, then simply say that books in a hood are hood instanced (except the Nexus book itself). One could even provide a mechanism where a hood owner could
So, in that scheme, the Great Zero Observation could be public, but accessible only through Nexus.
Cleaning Up Instancing
Moderator: OpenUru.org Moderators
Re: Cleaning Up Instancing
Speaking from a user perspective, instancing has never been logical. It should be made more obvious in the interface.
Books in Relto bookshelf are private, so they should link to private instances.
Books in public bookshelves are public, so they should link to public instances.
For example, there should be public bookshelves in the City Library and in the neighborhoods, with linking books to all Ages. They should all link to the same public instance of the Ages. Remember when the Minkata book was released in the library? You queued up with 10 people, linked in, and found yourself alone. Illogical and confusing.
So there would be private and public instances and no more neighborhood instances. So when someone would say "let's go see Shroomie", there would be no more sharing nonsense.
Books in Relto bookshelf are private, so they should link to private instances.
Books in public bookshelves are public, so they should link to public instances.
For example, there should be public bookshelves in the City Library and in the neighborhoods, with linking books to all Ages. They should all link to the same public instance of the Ages. Remember when the Minkata book was released in the library? You queued up with 10 people, linked in, and found yourself alone. Illogical and confusing.
So there would be private and public instances and no more neighborhood instances. So when someone would say "let's go see Shroomie", there would be no more sharing nonsense.
Re: Cleaning Up Instancing
Where do you put new books that are designed to work as private instances ? You can't add them directly on Relto (you are not Yeesha) and as you said, book in public ages should lead to public ages so forget the city or neighborhoods. That means that the only remaining place is in existing ages. In MOUL, private ages usually had the yeesha symbols on them and were added to the relto's bookshelf. Not very comfusing. What was illogical and confusing was with link between two private ages.
And please keep the neighborhood instances.
And please keep the neighborhood instances.
Re: Cleaning Up Instancing
Chacal wrote:So there would be private and public instances and no more neighborhood instances.
What makes the most sense to the game and the mythos?realXCV wrote:And please keep the neighborhood instances.
People like Alahmnat seem very able to keep track of all the consistency issues. Better than I can, anyway, so I'd like to give my input and see how it fits into the scheme of things being discussed here.
I'd like to see neighborhood books to go neighborhood instances. It's a nice feature.
Someone, and I'm sorry to not remember exactly where, suggested making a private abode (e.g. The Lodge?) available on the surface as an alternative to Yeesha's Relto and her path. Private books could be stored there at least.
Vidkid7 did a lot of empirical research into instancing. It might be nice to get him in on this. He posted a DRC thread entitled "Ae'gura 'Instances' and You!" about it: http://forums.drcsite.org/viewtopic.php?t=1485
Vortmax started an IC DRC thread entitled, "Speculation - The Unified Theory of Linking?" here: http://forums.drcsite.org/viewtopic.php?t=1892
I too started a DRC thread I called "Instancing Overhaul: Scope Inheritance" which I like to share. Find it here: http://forums.drcsite.org/viewtopic.php?t=1494
I posted a duplicate thread on MOUL here, with some more interesting responses: http://www.mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4617
It would be nice to include the text from all those threads here, but it's already available on other forums, and probably better assembled into a more permanent form of reference documentation. A wiki, which I want to install asap, might be a nice place for that.
Perfect speed is being there.
Re: Cleaning Up Instancing
So perhaps instead of my argument of having the Ae'Gura link from the Hood being private instanced, it should also take you to the Public instance of Ae'Gura?
Re: Cleaning Up Instancing
(Quick prefacing note: in the examples herein, I'm using the stamps and symbols and their meanings that I suggested in my first post, strictly for illustrative purposes)
First, I'm honestly curious how so many people know the whole "Yeesha's symbol means it shows up on your bookshelf" rule. I know it because I worked at Cyan and it was referenced numerous times in the internal bug tracker, but I don't recall there ever being a piece of documentation on the website itself that explained this rule. Did other folks just figure it out, or did it come from a ResEng and spread from there?
On that note though, I don't think it's anywhere near as vital to inform players when they'll get a link on their Relto Bookshelf as it is to inform them where a link will that them. The former can be discerned through looking at one's bookshelf in Relto at one's leisure. The latter often requires a fair degree of work to recover from if you do it wrong. Also, since Books only appear on your Relto bookshelf if you use them yourself, I think trying to visually indicate when a Book will show up on your shelf is more complex than just laying out a guideline for when players should expect a Book, and leave the visual indicators for where they're actually going. The bookshelf is incidental to the act of linking from anywhere other than the bookshelf itself anyway.
Second, I'd like to propose a modification to the Bahro Stone rule I suggested; I think we're going to need a "public" class of Bahro Stone links for things like Neighborhoods and the Tokotah Rooftop (possibly all of the D'ni stones). I also think, upon reflection, that Neighborhood-instanced Books don't really need a separate stamp. They can use the DRC stamp, and it should be understood/explained that linking from a Neighborhood to another Age will let you explore that Age only with other players who use the same Book. Good grief, this is so complicated, it's easy to see why Cyan didn't go in much for consistency here... this is my third re-write; thank goodness all of my work is done for today!
I think the most important part of any instancing scheme we come up with is communicating that to the player. I think most people here would agree that this is our opportunity to bring a lot of new players into the fold who may not know anything about Uru, or even anything about Myst. Just throwing them into a game as complex as this one is going to turn a lot of them off, so some assistance going in would be extremely useful.
To that end, whatever site ends up being the "go-to" site for prospective OpenURU players (be it mystonline.com or not), there needs to be a fairly obvious page with information on Linking Books, Bahro Stones, an how they play into instancing. Something like this (only with pictures, and more newbie-friendly):
.
I think that better standards of link-to-link behavior would be to appeal to common sense rather than an unyielding requirement. To a certain degree, the stuff in MOUL does this already, but there are exceptions, and it's the exceptions to common sense that really make the common sense stuff itself less predictable and more unexpected. For example:
The Teledahn/Baron City Office link is Private-to-Private, but requires re-sharing the Books used to travel between these areas. I know Cyan's reasoning for this and other similar cases is that you've shared one, and not necessarily the other, but it strikes me as a somewhat flimsy argument when the bulk of the sharing being done is for exploration, and having to re-share to stay together is a lot more tedious, especially when there's no real lasting damage that can be done by a visitor beyond possibly resetting a puzzle or two (oh noes!). Ideally, no additional sharing would be required once you're in either Teledahn or the Baron City Office with someone and want to explore the other area.
As above, the Gira/Kemo link is Private-to-Private, but requires re-sharing. No re-sharing should be required.
The Gira/Tokotah Rooftop link is a Bahro Stone, and under the guidelines I originally suggested, would take you to a Private instance, in which case the same rules should apply as with the Gira/Kemo link. Given the popularity of Tokotah Rooftop for parties, however, I'd say that the Bahro Stone here should be a Public one, and they should all point to the same instance. Whether that instance is the same as the Nexus-accessible Public instance is another question that I'll leave for the "OMG population caps!" threads to sort out.
I forget exactly what the behavior of the Kadish/Gallery link was in MOUL, but it can be Private-to-Private as well, by the same logic as the Teledahn/Baron City Office link. The Private link should have the doors broken and/or barricaded, though, as we've already got enough explorable instances of Ae'Gura oozing out of our ears at this point, we don't need a Private one too.
The Gallery/Kadish link from the Public Ae'Gura is Public-to-Private, and as long as it has the Share Book symbol on it in addition to the Yeesha stamp, I don't think we'll have too many people getting lost in transit (and if we do, meeting back up is at least a lot easier than trying to re-group in Kemo/Gira).
Confusingly, Ahnonay/Cathedral and Er'Cana/Silo actually do this instance-matching right in the first place. Better late than never I guess.
The Great Zero link goes to the only location in D'ni that is exclusively Neighbors-instanced; sharing the Book never works (I forget if it's even possible) and obviously following someone like a Greeter to the GZ is going to be problematic for newcomers, because they're not going to end up in the same place. Leaving aside the massive Canon violation that the Linking Book itself creates (Yeesha Magic is being used to hand-wave too many sloppy decisions), I think there's a certain degree of expectation that linking to D'ni via a Linking Book will take you to a Public instance, because it's the standard behavior and the Cavern still enjoys at least a marginal degree of "wholeness" in spite of the mess that making all instances IC created. I know a couple of people have brought up the potential issue of there being lines or sleepers at the GZ machines, but I think a combination of activity timeouts - as TSK suggested - and usage timeouts (wherein you have X minutes to make a decision; if you don't, you get moved out of the UI) should help alleviate this. The fact that Uru players on the whole are pretty courteous (it remains to this day the only place I've seen amusement park-sized lines of similar orderliness in a video game), coupled with there being four machines (instead of one) should also help. Even if we get 10x the number of concurrent users, though, I don't think the GZ is going to be a huge enough draw to cause any sort of major problems.
Bahro Stones go all over the place, and they're sort of the biggest motivation behind me wanting some sort of reasonable indication of where a link will send you. Some go to Private instances, others to Neighborhood instances, and still others to Neighbors instances (Neighbors instances themselves are of the devil and should be killed with fire). For the D'ni balcony links (including Tokotah Rooftop), I'd say send those to a single Public instance that may or may not be separate from the Nexus-accessible Public instance (in either case, it needs to be done consistently... we can't have half send you to one Public instance and the other half send you to another). Since these are Public, there's no need for a Share Stone icon on them. For the Tokotah Courtyard stone in the Neighborhoods, it can be Neighborhood-instanced (not Neighbors... if a ResEng and a Greeter use the stone in the UruObsession's 'hood, both should end up in UruObsession's Ae'Gura) for the purposes of simplified link sharing. Bahro Stones leading to the Neighborhood should also, obviously, be Neighborhood-instanced. These would, as noted above, have a Share Stone icon on them to enable players to bring non-'hood-members to their 'hood. Finally, Bahro Stones leading to other Ages (Kadish, Teledahn, etc.) will be Private, and also have a Share Stone icon on them, as well as Yeesha's stamp.
As far as the 'hood-instanced Garden Ages go, I think it's at least somewhat reasonable to assume that the D'ni had a somewhat substantial stockpiles of Garden Age Books that described largely identical Ages, so that Neighborhood inhabitants could be reasonably assured that only people they wanted to have access to their Garden Age could get there. It's far less of a hand-wave to do this for Garden Age Books than it is to do it for something like the Great Zero (or Gahreesen). To that end, I'd like to see the current Neighborhood-instanced Gahreesen be a Public instance, so that Greeters could staff the entryway and guide players to their KIs (lacking the "multiplayer Cleft with Descent" porposal, at least to start, this is probably the best bet for helping players earlier in their experience with the game). Obviously, the Great Zero Linking Book should ideally, eventually be replaced with something far less grating to the nerves of Canon wonks like myself, but in the interim, just pointing the GZ link at a Public instance will do.
When it comes to mixing D'ni and Yeesha stuff, like we do with sharing and inviting people to Private instances, I think that's going to require something of a hand-wave in general (and worse things have been hand-waved already). The KI is the most logical place to do this sort of stuff given that it already handles everything else buddy- and Age-related. Asking it to assume one more piece of responsibility that's technically beyond its reach is better for gameplay than fabricating a whole new construct around Relto just to enable sharing (and what if we end up with a situation in the future where players can go through Uru without Relto, as has been suggested in the Great Shaft thread?). The UI for sharing itself could obviously stand to get a MASSIVE face-lift along with the rest of the KI, but I think instance sharing is the least of the Yeesha/D'ni sins we should worry about. (Neighborhood joining, on the other hand... 
)
I'm going to try and make a chart of all the links in Uru and what sort of instances they should be pointing to. Ideally with graphics and other shiny things to make it look all official. But probably not.
First, I'm honestly curious how so many people know the whole "Yeesha's symbol means it shows up on your bookshelf" rule. I know it because I worked at Cyan and it was referenced numerous times in the internal bug tracker, but I don't recall there ever being a piece of documentation on the website itself that explained this rule. Did other folks just figure it out, or did it come from a ResEng and spread from there?
On that note though, I don't think it's anywhere near as vital to inform players when they'll get a link on their Relto Bookshelf as it is to inform them where a link will that them. The former can be discerned through looking at one's bookshelf in Relto at one's leisure. The latter often requires a fair degree of work to recover from if you do it wrong. Also, since Books only appear on your Relto bookshelf if you use them yourself, I think trying to visually indicate when a Book will show up on your shelf is more complex than just laying out a guideline for when players should expect a Book, and leave the visual indicators for where they're actually going. The bookshelf is incidental to the act of linking from anywhere other than the bookshelf itself anyway.
Second, I'd like to propose a modification to the Bahro Stone rule I suggested; I think we're going to need a "public" class of Bahro Stone links for things like Neighborhoods and the Tokotah Rooftop (possibly all of the D'ni stones). I also think, upon reflection, that Neighborhood-instanced Books don't really need a separate stamp. They can use the DRC stamp, and it should be understood/explained that linking from a Neighborhood to another Age will let you explore that Age only with other players who use the same Book. Good grief, this is so complicated, it's easy to see why Cyan didn't go in much for consistency here... this is my third re-write; thank goodness all of my work is done for today!
I think the most important part of any instancing scheme we come up with is communicating that to the player. I think most people here would agree that this is our opportunity to bring a lot of new players into the fold who may not know anything about Uru, or even anything about Myst. Just throwing them into a game as complex as this one is going to turn a lot of them off, so some assistance going in would be extremely useful.
To that end, whatever site ends up being the "go-to" site for prospective OpenURU players (be it mystonline.com or not), there needs to be a fairly obvious page with information on Linking Books, Bahro Stones, an how they play into instancing. Something like this (only with pictures, and more newbie-friendly):
When it comes to link-to-link behavior, I think it's asking too much to require any sort of absolute standard of behavior there... there's simply too many different kinds of links to different kinds of areas to really nail down a consistent standard that works both ways all the time. I'm especially not very fond of the "public instance of everything" idea; if gatherings in other Ages are difficult to manage, I'd suggest focusing more on the invite mechanism itself rather than the instancing as an area for improvement. As has been noted by others in this thread, I think a public instance of intentionally private puzzle-focused Ages is going to create a few more problems than it solves. Again, as long as we accurately and consistently explain and use specific iconography and symbols to distinguish the various types of instances, I don't think queuing up 10 deep to link to Minkata and ending up alone will be quite as confusing, because it says right on the package (so to speak) where you'll be going. WoW already does this with their glowing blue gateways into instanced dungeons... we just have a few more contingencies to cover than they doTravel in Uru is achieved through Linking Books and Bahro Stones. These devices will take you to a specific world, or Age, in the game. Whether they take you to a public or private Age is indicated on the device itself.
[Image of Public Book - DRC stamp, no Share Book icon] These Books are "Public" - they take you to an Age where you can encounter other players. These Books do not need to be shared with other players to allow them to travel with you to this Age. If you are linking to a Public Age from a Neighborhood, you will only see other players who linked there from the same Neighborhood.
[Image of Private Book - Yeesha stamp, Share Book icon] These Books are "Private" - they will take you to your own copy, or "instance" of an Age. This is made possible by Yeesha, a descendant of D'ni with the ability to "target" a specific copy of an Age for each person who uses one of her Books. Often, these Books will appear on your Relto Bookshelf when you use them. To travel to a Private Age with another player, you will need to share the Book with them using the "Share Book" symbol on the left-hand page.
[Image of Private Book - Yeesha stamp, no Share Book icon] If you are already in a Private Age and the Book you are about to use is also Private, you do not need to share the Book with other players in the Age with you in order for them to travel with you, so these Books have no "Share Book" symbol.
[Image of "Fake Public" Book, no stamp, no Share Book icon] There are certain areas of the game which, according to the story, are "Public" and shared by all players, but for gameplay and/or technical reasons, need to be made Private. Because Yeesha is not actually involved in making these Ages Private, her stamp is not found on these Books, and as they are supposed to be "Public", there is no sharing of these Books either. When exploring with others, you will all link to the same instance while using one of these Books, but will not see any other players. Exception: The Nexus is designed to put each person in a separate Nexus chamber. When visiting the Nexus, you will never encounter other players.
[Image of Public Bahro Stone, no Share Stone icon] This is a Bahro Stone. It works much like a Linking Book, but was created by the Bahro rather than the D'ni. These Stones are Public, and will take you to an instance of an Age where other players can be found. There is no way to share these stones, as they lead everyone to the same instance.
[Image of Neighborhood Bahro Stone, Share Stone icon] These Bahro Stones have a "Share Stone" symbol on them to indicate that they need to be shared with other players to ensure that they always lead all of you to the same instance. When linking to a Neighborhood using a Bahro Stone, the Stone will send each player to their own Neighborhood. If you and a friend are in different Neighborhoods, you will need to share the Bahro Stone with them before using it, or you will end up in your individual Neighborhoods.
[Image of Private Bahro Stone, Yeesha stamp, Share Stone icon] Finally, these Stones are Private, as indicated by the Yeesha stamp on them in addition to the Share Stone symbol. Like Private Linking Books, these Stones must be shared in order for other players to end up in the same instance as you.
.I think that better standards of link-to-link behavior would be to appeal to common sense rather than an unyielding requirement. To a certain degree, the stuff in MOUL does this already, but there are exceptions, and it's the exceptions to common sense that really make the common sense stuff itself less predictable and more unexpected. For example:
The Teledahn/Baron City Office link is Private-to-Private, but requires re-sharing the Books used to travel between these areas. I know Cyan's reasoning for this and other similar cases is that you've shared one, and not necessarily the other, but it strikes me as a somewhat flimsy argument when the bulk of the sharing being done is for exploration, and having to re-share to stay together is a lot more tedious, especially when there's no real lasting damage that can be done by a visitor beyond possibly resetting a puzzle or two (oh noes!). Ideally, no additional sharing would be required once you're in either Teledahn or the Baron City Office with someone and want to explore the other area.
As above, the Gira/Kemo link is Private-to-Private, but requires re-sharing. No re-sharing should be required.
The Gira/Tokotah Rooftop link is a Bahro Stone, and under the guidelines I originally suggested, would take you to a Private instance, in which case the same rules should apply as with the Gira/Kemo link. Given the popularity of Tokotah Rooftop for parties, however, I'd say that the Bahro Stone here should be a Public one, and they should all point to the same instance. Whether that instance is the same as the Nexus-accessible Public instance is another question that I'll leave for the "OMG population caps!" threads to sort out
.I forget exactly what the behavior of the Kadish/Gallery link was in MOUL, but it can be Private-to-Private as well, by the same logic as the Teledahn/Baron City Office link. The Private link should have the doors broken and/or barricaded, though, as we've already got enough explorable instances of Ae'Gura oozing out of our ears at this point, we don't need a Private one too.
The Gallery/Kadish link from the Public Ae'Gura is Public-to-Private, and as long as it has the Share Book symbol on it in addition to the Yeesha stamp, I don't think we'll have too many people getting lost in transit (and if we do, meeting back up is at least a lot easier than trying to re-group in Kemo/Gira).
Confusingly, Ahnonay/Cathedral and Er'Cana/Silo actually do this instance-matching right in the first place. Better late than never I guess.
The Great Zero link goes to the only location in D'ni that is exclusively Neighbors-instanced; sharing the Book never works (I forget if it's even possible) and obviously following someone like a Greeter to the GZ is going to be problematic for newcomers, because they're not going to end up in the same place. Leaving aside the massive Canon violation that the Linking Book itself creates (Yeesha Magic is being used to hand-wave too many sloppy decisions), I think there's a certain degree of expectation that linking to D'ni via a Linking Book will take you to a Public instance, because it's the standard behavior and the Cavern still enjoys at least a marginal degree of "wholeness" in spite of the mess that making all instances IC created. I know a couple of people have brought up the potential issue of there being lines or sleepers at the GZ machines, but I think a combination of activity timeouts - as TSK suggested - and usage timeouts (wherein you have X minutes to make a decision; if you don't, you get moved out of the UI) should help alleviate this. The fact that Uru players on the whole are pretty courteous (it remains to this day the only place I've seen amusement park-sized lines of similar orderliness in a video game), coupled with there being four machines (instead of one) should also help. Even if we get 10x the number of concurrent users, though, I don't think the GZ is going to be a huge enough draw to cause any sort of major problems.
Bahro Stones go all over the place, and they're sort of the biggest motivation behind me wanting some sort of reasonable indication of where a link will send you. Some go to Private instances, others to Neighborhood instances, and still others to Neighbors instances (Neighbors instances themselves are of the devil and should be killed with fire). For the D'ni balcony links (including Tokotah Rooftop), I'd say send those to a single Public instance that may or may not be separate from the Nexus-accessible Public instance (in either case, it needs to be done consistently... we can't have half send you to one Public instance and the other half send you to another). Since these are Public, there's no need for a Share Stone icon on them. For the Tokotah Courtyard stone in the Neighborhoods, it can be Neighborhood-instanced (not Neighbors... if a ResEng and a Greeter use the stone in the UruObsession's 'hood, both should end up in UruObsession's Ae'Gura) for the purposes of simplified link sharing. Bahro Stones leading to the Neighborhood should also, obviously, be Neighborhood-instanced. These would, as noted above, have a Share Stone icon on them to enable players to bring non-'hood-members to their 'hood. Finally, Bahro Stones leading to other Ages (Kadish, Teledahn, etc.) will be Private, and also have a Share Stone icon on them, as well as Yeesha's stamp.
As far as the 'hood-instanced Garden Ages go, I think it's at least somewhat reasonable to assume that the D'ni had a somewhat substantial stockpiles of Garden Age Books that described largely identical Ages, so that Neighborhood inhabitants could be reasonably assured that only people they wanted to have access to their Garden Age could get there. It's far less of a hand-wave to do this for Garden Age Books than it is to do it for something like the Great Zero (or Gahreesen). To that end, I'd like to see the current Neighborhood-instanced Gahreesen be a Public instance, so that Greeters could staff the entryway and guide players to their KIs (lacking the "multiplayer Cleft with Descent" porposal, at least to start, this is probably the best bet for helping players earlier in their experience with the game). Obviously, the Great Zero Linking Book should ideally, eventually be replaced with something far less grating to the nerves of Canon wonks like myself, but in the interim, just pointing the GZ link at a Public instance will do.
When it comes to mixing D'ni and Yeesha stuff, like we do with sharing and inviting people to Private instances, I think that's going to require something of a hand-wave in general (and worse things have been hand-waved already). The KI is the most logical place to do this sort of stuff given that it already handles everything else buddy- and Age-related. Asking it to assume one more piece of responsibility that's technically beyond its reach is better for gameplay than fabricating a whole new construct around Relto just to enable sharing (and what if we end up with a situation in the future where players can go through Uru without Relto, as has been suggested in the Great Shaft thread?). The UI for sharing itself could obviously stand to get a MASSIVE face-lift along with the rest of the KI, but I think instance sharing is the least of the Yeesha/D'ni sins we should worry about
. (Neighborhood joining, on the other hand... )I'm going to try and make a chart of all the links in Uru and what sort of instances they should be pointing to. Ideally with graphics and other shiny things to make it look all official. But probably not
.Re: Cleaning Up Instancing
You forgot:
Bahro stone - no share symbol, no yeesha symbol -> private (owner instanced)
Very useful to finish Ahnonay/Ercana
Bahro stone - no share symbol, no yeesha symbol -> private (owner instanced)
Very useful to finish Ahnonay/Ercana
-
75th Trombone
- Member
- Posts: 47
- Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2008 10:45 pm
Re: Cleaning Up Instancing
I think more than adhering to canon D'ni rules, we need to make this as dead simple as possible. I mean REAL, Apple-like simple. One of the many, many reasons Uru never took off is that you need seventeen manuals (which the game doesn't provide in a good way) to understand what's going on. We need to seriously strip down the fustercluck of MO:UL.
So here's my proposal:
Rules about how linking books look and are stamped should be maintained.
Now. Everyone pitch in with your reasons why that can't work, and let's talk them out and modify them until they can work, or at least until we come up with another system that can be explained in four bullet points.
So here's my proposal:
- Any open area on Ae'gura is public.
- 'Hoods are 'Hood-instanced, except
- One neighborhood (Bevin?) exists for neighborhood story events and is public.
- EVERYWHERE else, including indoors Ae'gura locations, is private.
Rules about how linking books look and are stamped should be maintained.
Now. Everyone pitch in with your reasons why that can't work, and let's talk them out and modify them until they can work, or at least until we come up with another system that can be explained in four bullet points.
Re: Cleaning Up Instancing
My reason: I agree that a public "anywhere on ae'gura" should exist but until you can have 500 avatar in that place with no or almost no lag, a less public ae'gura should be kept.
Re: Cleaning Up Instancing
Quoted because I feel the above statement needs to be emphasized (indeed, although this was written before I said it, I just voiced the same thought independently in another thread.)BladeLakem wrote:The invite system in Nexus understands instancing, while Nexus should have no connection to Yeesha Magic(TM).
The Invitation system should not be tied to either the Nexus or the KI. It needs to be book-based. There was a pretty well thought-out description of how to move the invitation system into Relto's bookshelf and the Relto book at one point, although I don't remember where it was or who wrote it. Perhaps someone can find that, and we can incorporate ideas from that as well?
If we are truly to clean up instancing, we must separate technology from magic.
The music is reversible, but time is not.