The problem with BRD was that there were approximately 10 different reasons someone could be going to the instance, and would likely not tolerate doing much else. Especially for Alliance, with 1 or 2 people wanting to do Jailbreak and the rest wanting to not have to go through it again. It's that kind of modularity that people are not interested in instances and why they've been split up so much. Except for retreiving a quest item in Mechanar for the anti-demon weapon (I think) I can't think of any reason that doesn't include killing the bosses that someone would want to do an instance. That quest item is the only one I can think of that required doing more trash than necessary. Perhaps for Shattered Halls there would be those who were interested in the timed event and those who were not really prepared for it, but I'm sure most people would want a pre-organized group for the timed event.

On the linearity issue, would you prefer to continuously back-track like in Steam Vaults in order to make the dungeon "non-linear"? The only other way to make it non-linear would be to offer multiple things to do, or multiple paths. The former would lead to the problems associated with BRD or if Strat-like might as well be two dungeons. If there is more than one way to do a dungeon for the same result, usually one way will be found to be superior and the rest ignored. It's very difficult to engineer two different ways to take on an instance such that one isn't preferred over the other. The only BC instance that seemed designed with this in mind was Mechanar, and I actually have experienced two different "standard" ways to clear it. One's more efficient and one is less risky. There's a similar pull of "way too many" Bogstroks that allows one to skip lots of other trash in Slave Pens that conforms to the idea as well - along with lots of skippable trash on the catwalks as long as people pay attention. There's also the packs of mobs fighting each other in SH you could skip completely - as long as no one ever backed into them. Thus, there's plenty of places dungeons can be done in slightly different ways - just not in most dungeons, and not in ways that most peopel care about.

I'm not too worried about the whole organization time to instance time ratio since most people don't stand around waiting for instances to form. While I do admit that at max level you might run out of things to do, there are less max-level instances in LK from what I recall so the average wait time shoudl be less, especially at release. I don't know if you'll always have lots of dailies to do, but from reports it sounds like there will be plenty available to keep you busy. There's also Battlegrounds, something that I'll do only when I'm extremely bored, but I'm sure a very large section of people will spend their time there if they have nothing else to do while waiting for an instance run.

The main positive thing about BC dungeons, something that was spread to most dungeons in 2.3, was the relative uniformity of difficulty throughout them. Every instance had a very narrow range of mob levels, even if some of the bosses were more annoying and/or difficult than others. The longer pre-BC instances had mobs that were hardly challenging at all to a group that would actually be able to finish the instance.

Lastly, the absolute worst thing about any BC dungeon was that the "Shadow Labyrinth" was a basically linear dungeon. At least the dungeons called "Halls" one expects to be hallway-like.

I did particularly enjoy the changes to 5-man dungeons, with the shortened SM-wing style, and Heroic mode. As well as the introduction of the daily system for quests. Those two things were what really stuck out to me as being the best features of Burning Crusade.

This is very much the same way I feel. It doesn't really matter as much the linearity vs. non-linearity of the instance in so long as there is a compelling purpose or reason for the dungeon to look and feel as it does. Strat and Scholo are relatively linear instances, but they're very coherent dungeons, and have a lore reason and rhyme for being layed out the way they are.

Though there are some cases where the aesthetic can come at the expense of gameplay, which I think BRD is an example of. It's designed to be a dwarf city, and has some rather nice aesthetics, however they filled it up with way too many trash mobs. In their effort to create a "city" atmosphere, they made clearing the trash mobs a rather tedious experience.

So there are times when the aesthetic has to be changed in order to keep the experience enjoyable for the players.

I think that's an important distinction with longevity of content in BC, but given the large difficulty gaps compared to classic it would've been murder on raiding schedules. I suspect many guilds that were just killing Vashj/KT were easily able to spend 2 nights per zone due to still having silly wipes and such, and if you were still farming them and trying to progress into BT/MH you'd be completely overloaded. I think the whole 'concurrent tiers' thing is a mistake in that regard.

Look back at classic wow raids, and even when we were working on Rag in say may or june of '05 the rest of the zone didn't have a learning curve that steep, so by the time you were that progressed you could still get the rest done in a single night, leaving you a few nights to progress into the next tier zone. I mean we've all seen Fusion's insanely fast clear videos, but I think it's fair to call sub-2 hour clears of BT the exception pre-3.0, whereas I suspect most guilds were fully capable of clearing MC, BWL, and AQ in a single night by the time they'd farmed it for just a week or two.

Summation: I'd like to see the end boss loot still be relevant, as it was in Classic, into the next zone, but it needs to be realistically paced for you to be able to farm that boss and still have plenty of time to progress too on a 3-4 day schedule for most people. The pacing should be more like classic, where even the lower tier guilds could manage to be near or at the end of an instance before the next was released, and the upper tier had only been farming for a few months, instead of the slew of content out of the gate and then a massive game of catchup for everyone else, and extreme boredom for the elite.

Don't forget running heroic Slave Pens just to pick up the SSC attunement (and then running it again just to turn it in.) Thankfully SP is short enough that once you reach the quest giver, there's only about 10 minutes until the end of the instance. It's still a valid concern though, and I hope there aren't too many quests in Wrath where the objective can be found halfway through a dungeon.

I don't know how WoW works in this, but I do remember the days of yonder in Ultima Online. Each "server" is not in fact one single server but several, with load balancing done by region. There is some evidence that this is how WoW works too, in that at the very least the world server, the dungeon server, the Battlegrounds and each separate continent do seem to be separate entities that crash or over-populate separately. In this context, a "small" area is not so much one that is geographically small, as it is one that is assigned to a "small" server (or one that shares a server with loads of other "small" areas, versus big areas with a server all to themselves). Thunder Bluff is a low population area, so it makes sense to assign it to a "small region" server. When you get people raiding the place, it comes tumbling down. I can't see Blizzard assigning Dalaran such a slot though.

Here's the way I come down on the instance problem, having recently re-run all the vanilla instances of note while leveling my paladin tank and also power-leveling some other miscellaneous alts.

BRD is too big, yes. It had too many objectives, yes. It's also freaking fantastic. It's epic. It's got a plethora of bosses. You can go kill a few of them on a run, rather than all of them. You can bypass content on purpose to farm a specific boss.

There is not a single instance in TBC that was fantastic. Probably the closest was Old Hillsbrad for me, which was a great concept, almost realized. The original heroic version was stupid in that you couldn't really use melee dps on the first two bosses and, well, the dog patrols, yeah... Black Morass was also good, challenging (again the original heroic was the bar that few could cross, although I guess in that case I'd argue in a good way).

There is simply nothing to recommend in Hellfire Citadel, Coilfang Reservoir, Auchindoun or Tempest Keep. Before we all outgeared the instances, many were ridiculously out of proportion difficulty-wise. But ignoring the overriding flaw, they were completely and totally uninteresting from the first to the last. The boss fights weren't marginally memorable. Nothing approached the feel of killing the Emperor, Drakkisath, Baron, Gandling.... In fact, in many ways they reminded me a lot of Dire Maul. A sense of "why the hell is this here?"

The endless piles of trash after boss #1 in Underbog and Sethekk, the utter uselessness that was Auchenai Crypts (which, in fairness, had one of the few good end boss battles)... The over-tuned bosses (fire boss in heroic Mech post-exploit, pre-out-gear/nerfs, hydra boss in heroic SV without warlock)... The you-must-bring-this-class-and-if-you-do-congrats-you've-trivialized-this business (warlock in heroic BF, SV; mage in way too many places).

They're never going to bring back BRD. I get it. It's a tragedy. It's probably about the same size as the incredibly bad and non-navigable Maraudon, which, 3-years later I still find the instance portal an adventure to locate in and of itself. But a BRD with multiple portals, some ridiculous elevator, a permanent version of the mole machine to get to the bar after completing some kind of quest, skilled lava jumpers, etc. would be farmable and also bite-sized.

What recommends Mechanar or Ramparts by contrast? They were quick and they were easy. And yet people still whine for a warlock in Mech. I won't miss a single instance in TBC. I doubt I'll be able to name most of the end bosses in a few months. Van Cleef? A name I'll never forget.

I would argue that the biggest problem with BRD wasn't its size, or its layout, or how long it took to do all the quests there.

It was the fact the vast majority of it was a level 50-55 instance with a level cap of 60. Everyone want's lvl60 loot once they hit level cap, therefore besides lore / quest concerns there was almost no incentive to run BRD.

I'm sure anyone that farmed a hand of justice can tell you what a nightmare making groups for it was, not because people hated the sprawl (because you were just going in for the one or two bosses), but because there was literally nothing else anyone needed from it. If it'd had strat/scholo/ubrs level of loot in it, you could have guarenteed people would have been making parties for it left right and center.

I think BRD was a great instance, but Blizzard really dropped the ball on making it non-level 60 for the most part.

This is where it gets hairy, IMO. It can't be as simple as "Kalimdor is a server, Eastern Kingdoms is another", while still being true that TB caused problems because it's a small region . What you're arguing is essentially that all the GM said was "there's a high player density because it's a small place and there's loads of players". Yet if continents were the server divisions, very high player density problems in one area would cause lag for that whole server and, therefore, the whole continent. The division must be finer-grained than that.

Well, part of the reason (or the main reason) for the Belf and Draenei starting zones being 'part of' Outland was that those loading screens also perform the "Do you have a TBC account?" check. That is, people without TBC cannot enter those parts of Kalimdor and Outland.

It looks to me like the DK starting zone is basically located in EPL. The difference is that now, people without WotLK can still enter the new area, although they aren't able to be 'beamed up' to the Archerus necropolis, I would reckon. This means that DKs will put load on the Eastern Kingdoms server, which is probably not a real problem (but still, many people close together translates into more updates and more work for your client, so lag of some kind is still a factor).

Going back to the wider topic. First, apologies for jumping the gun and replying to that list This is an interesting topic, so I'll make it up by posting something proper.

Regarding art direction, I've never been terribly opposed to the 'space age' seen in TBC. The fact is that overall, the quality of art went up. But there were a few problems:

- The "Clown Effect" of re-using pre-40 armor models on levelling gear. It was a clear attempt to make us, in some way, look like 'noobs' below the level cap, and a way to stand out with armor sets at the end-game. In many ways, lore and appearance wise, our characters went from Ragnaros-killers back to 'ordinary' mercenaries. From WotLK previews, it seems this issue gets addressed in the form of a new Nordic/Viking style of armor exclusive to Northrend, and hopefully very little obvious re-use of armor models.

- Netherstorm. Don't get me wrong: it's not ugly. But it's not Warcraft. Habitat domes, energy converters, dimensional spacecraft. It's fun for a while, but in the end, it doesn't feel right. Hellfire Peninsula, in contrast, was somehow a quintessential piece of Warcraft. It echoed the Warcraft 2 expansion, it had you fighting Orcs in a red wasteland.

Mideci: I think part of the problem of many bosses being 'random' and generally not very interesting is that in TBC, instances generally were not really explored via quests. Or at least not via more than 1 quest. I suppose the TK instances are the worst offenders: I cannot think of a single quest really explaining what it going on, and what our objectives could be. But this is a widely supported criticism I think: TBC improved levelling and questing in general, but storytelling was hit and miss.

Zones and quests in TBC were just bland and boring. They apeared on the surface to be seperate totally, but it all felt merged into one. Like someone said previously, the story and lore of TBC general day to day game play basically wasn't there. Wrath has lore and story stamped into it - as much as vanilla wow did.

Infraction incoming I'm sure. Can the OP change the first post so this stops happening? Or is this some clever way to get people infractions and weed out the dumb?

I think a lot of the problems people have with the lack of storytelling that went on in TBC have to do with a general lack of storyline. Kara is nearly completely removed from anything to do with T5 and T6. T5/T6 were a little better together but there were still problems with the Lore behind it (ie. Kael becoming a maniacal loon). I think this will be fixed at least to some degree come WotLK due to at least T7 will be linked to T9 via the Kel'Thuzad/Lich King connection.