Thinking back to WAR, fortress and city assaults did have a sense of scale to them, but could also be the most frustrating combinations of lag and being part of such a large group that you’d barely get a shot off during encounters.

100 vs. 100 on a field of battle that isn’t a slide show, starts to nip at the heals of feeling massive but that’s closer to heroic. Examples… Old AV locked in a death grip near one faction’s final boss felt epic. AC2 Master vaults with 60+ players bumming rushing the final encounter was epic – larger than life, but still not massive. Masses of players crowded around Cragstone, trying to get the hook-up for a vault felt large. WOW 40-man raid days on a PVP server with 2 or more 40-man groups trying to make it into Molten Core felt massive.

I think a big part of Eve is it never stops you. It doesn’t tell you that you cannot go to the next universe except through changing instances, but rather through application. IE: You can fly in one direction forever, without stopping. I really believe this has a large affect on the game.

It’s ok to have to go to a jump gate zone, but if going through a gate makes you change zones, then it really hurts the believability of the game in my opinion.

I am craving(and I may have to wait 20 years) for a single server, non instanced, fantasy game. I miss seamless worlds. It seems the industry is really getting away from them, and I really feel like you cannot quantify the benefits players get from playing in, massive, believable worlds. They may not consciously recognize that they love the ability to be able to run from one end of the continent to the other without changing instances, but I firmly believe it is there and subconsciously affects there feelings towards the game.

@Rohan Though more obvious, I’m not sure EVE portals are so radically different at heart to, say, a cunningly concealed WoW zone transition like Dun Morogh to Loch Modan, but then with the jumpgate/portal mechanism being an established (in fiction, at least) structure for space travel, EVE is fortunate in that the “world” naturally maps onto a way the “game” structure can be more easily supported (so long as you accept the jumpgates as part of a world).

Rohan gets it right too, EVE is no less instanced than Champions, they just don’t have multiple copies of each system. The big thing to avoid in instancing is private instances like in Guild Wars. Open instances like in CoH’s city zones and in Champions are much more fun.

Each star system in Eve is a separate instance, and the jumpgates are the portals between instances.

What Eve doesn’t do is create copies of instances, but its structure is very different from the wide-openess of something like a continent in WoW.

Ultimately, I think for a lot of players it’s not about open vs. instanced worlds; it’s about where the most pellet dispensers are.