In my pre-BC WoW slump I tested two other MMOGs: Dungeons & Dragons Online and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. And what is interesting about that is that these two are on the opposite extremes of the scale for how many instances a MMORPG should have: In DDO every mob encounter is instanced, while in Vanguard there are no instances at all. So lets have a look at the advantages and disadvantages of instances.
The big advantage of instances is that it avoids food fights. If you want to have big boss mobs in your game, which need a raid effort to kill, but also drop the best loot, there is a good chance that several guilds want to kill that boss mob at the same time. Imagine Onyxia in World of Warcraft was not an instanced encounter, but a mob that respawned every 2 hours. What guild gets to raid Onyxia on Friday night or Sunday afternoon? And how do you get a raid together for Tuesday morning? Without instances either there is lot of shouting about "kill-stealing", or guilds start organizing some sort of raid calendar, which also involves a lot of fighting and is necessarily imperfect. The bigger the game, the less likely is it that people can organize some sort of fair distribution of who gets to raid the boss mob when. I never got to kill the world boss mobs in WoW. Not that my guild wouldn't be able to kill one, but with some uber guilds systematically hunting the world bosses down, the second tier of guilds never even gets a chance to try.
Instances allow for scripted adventures, for single players or groups. DDO is full of these, dungeons where you have to pull levers at one place to open a door at another place. Obviously that is impossible if strangers are in the same dungeon with you. If you have to set several levers into a certain position, by the time you reach the door, somebody else touched the lever and spoiled your effort. Again a World of Warcraft example: Imagine your guild erased all the runes and just killed Majordomo in Molten Core, which makes Ragnaros appear in a different location, and some other guild is camping that location and kills Ragnaros, getting the best loot while avoiding most of the work. Triggers don't work well in non-instanced dungeons and encounters.
But instances also have disadvantages: You never meet anyone in them. Other players are both the best and the worst feature of MMOGs. Yesterday I played Vanguard, where there are no instances, and my level 8 gnome cleric went into a dungeon called the library for doing a second round of quests there. On the way I met another player advancing through the caves towards the library, and he invited me. We met more players in the library, and invited them too, until we had a full group. That allowed us to even kill the level 10 library boss mob, and finish all the quests for all group members. Meeting other players in situations like these can be lots of fun, and you are likely to make new friends, which is one of the key attractions of a MMOG.
Meeting another player in the same non-instanced dungeon is probably the best looking-for-group system you can think of. In an instance there is always a problem if some players have to leave half-way through the dungeon. If there are no instances, you can still look around and pick up some other players, making groups more dynamic. You can play together without being forced to stick together for a certain time.
If I had to choose between Vanguard and DDO, just on the base of the use of instances, I'd chose the non-instanced Vanguard. DDO just feels too lonely, too much like a single-player game. But extremes are rarely the best solution, so if you throw WoW into the equation, with its limited use of instances, you get a lot closer to the optimum. Non-instanced dungeons work perfectly as long as the boss mobs only need to be killed for a quest, not for loot, and repeatedly killing them makes no sense. If a specific mob spawning deep down in a dungeon drops some good loot, you automatically get people camping it. You just don't want a group fighting all the way through a hard dungeon like Lower Guk and finding that the Frenzied Ghoul end boss with the good loot (Flowing Black Silk Sash) is perma-camped by some higher level other player, or worse, a gold farmer bot.
I'm not yet quite sure how Vanguard handles this, but the quest boss end mob of the library didn't drop anything, he is just there for the quest, which is good. I did encounter a "named" flying book mob in the library, which dropped a magical necklace. But I have no idea how "campable" these Vanguard named mobs with the phat loot are. I only just hit level 9, so I can't possibly say how this continues. I'm okay with non-instanced dungeons where most of your reward comes in the form of quest rewards. But dungeons like in WoW, where the dungeon mobs drop significantly better loot than the overland mobs, and especially raid dungeons, I can't imagine working without them being instanced. Working with other players towards a common goal is great. Having to compete with other players about who gets to kill what phat loot mob is a lot less pleasant, and can lead to some seriously bad situations, like intentional trains to wipe out the competition. A limited use of instances is probably the best solution.
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