TitansCity wrote:

Hum, i'm sorry but what is the difference between Zone instancing and Full phasing ?
I understand what a zone instancing is, like for the PVP zones in CoT, isn't it ?
But, the full phasing ? is that like all the world can change but only for you ? if so... what's happen to other people ? :/... oh, ok, maybe you make them invisible...(so the speech bubbles as well ? That's an interesting subject ^^ How does that work ??)

In short, instancing gives every player or group a copy of the zone (or world) that is only accessible to them.
Phasing gives every player or group a different view of the same world. Players can stand next to each other but see different things, or different NPCs on their screen depending on their quest status and or paths.

In a game that is heavily fragmented into zones there is no real advantage to use phasing over instancing. For the players the net effect is almost the same.
But the larger the world is, and especially if you have single server continuous worlds, then you have to rely on phasing to create the illusion of a dynamic world.

If you take a mission to drive the Skulls out of Perez Park and you succeed then in your reality whenever you enter Perez Park there should be no Skulls there, but other players who didn't take that mission or have yet to succeed at it must see plenty of Skulls in the same zone.
If the zone is instanced that is easy enough whenever you enter Perez Park a copy of the zone is created for you and the server will not add Skulls. But if it is an open world zone that won't do. Instead the Skulls in Perez Park have to become 'phased content' that is only exposed by the server to the players who have no driven the Skulls out of the zone.

Of course phasing an entire villain group from a zone is not something that the designers of any game will want the hassle of writing, but it shows the power of the mechanism.
Less extreme examples are buildings that are created, changed or destroyed depending on a story stage. Or specific enemies that only appear to the group working on a story where a specific group of enemies needs to be found and defeated. Or player specific resource nodes (so high level players can't monopolise them. Or phased rare enemies to make it much harder to create and run farming bots for rare armour and weapons (in games where powerful monsters drop rare and powerful gear). Or using it to shun players, causing them to effectively ceasing to exist for players in a different phase. It can even be used for creative powers (like phasing enemies or player groups to a 'different plane of existence' with different dangers and different laws of physics. Several games use phasing as a death mechanic, moving the player in a phase where no enemies exist, though it is easy enough to create a phase where /different/ enemies exist. TSW has a number of missions that require the player to enter a different phase in order to pass obstacles and interact with NPCs that only exist in that phase. The developers could phase high level enemies in a low level zone, that remain hidden unless a high level player engages such an enemy and moves it in the general phase. They could phase out low level enemies for a high level player so they can run through a starter zone without seeing a street robbery in progess at every other corner and low level enemies being a suicidal nuisance. A terrible idea, but easily possible, is to phase store bought outfits to only those who bought the perk.

Most of these things are not possible, or at least not practical, using instancing mechanisms, but are feasible (if not necessarily easy) with phasing. And of course by relying heavily on phasing mechanisms you don't fragment your players in thousands of solipsistic instances. Everybody is part of the same world, sees each other in the same zone even if they don't always interact with the exact same reality of it.

Okay, that was not exactly short :)

Another example: When Going Rogue came out one of my characters had a mission where the Contact came with. He died. That one character could never see that contact ever again, but Everyone Else Could. World Phasing at work.