They can lol all they want, that doesn’t make them right in this instance unless they happen to be CCP engineers, i am aware of how “other” games do what they do, but you’re assuming that everyone on the planet does everything in one way, you also need to remember that unlike other games, EVE runs on a single cluster rather than in a sharded environment, so, you’re free to think what you like, but unless you work for CCP all you’re doing is guessing 
This continues to tell me you don’t know what you are talking about. Instancing is a code technique, hardware independent.
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This is a good analogy.
Lol I like how this devolved into a debate about if abyss is defined as an instance or not. You go in and no one can follow you in or come to your location. Everything else is just semantics.
There is little difference between running an abyss site and running anomalies in either extremely secured space or an armpit of the universe. The chances of you getting killed via PvP is extremely slim. I’d dare argue that losing your ship in abyss is more commonplace due to server disconnects or bad spawns.
Null anomolies:
- watch local and you’re rather safe
- if things go south you can warp out
- doesn’t require much attention
- potentially low investment cost
- raw isk bounties
Abyss:
- You can’t be PvPed outside of when you exit the filament
- If things go south… you just watch yourself die
- requires heavy attention to detail
- Very high investment cost
- NPC loot does provide isk generation, vast majoity of profit is community driven
The vast majority of isk generating content is solo or partially afk. Anyone that says otherwise is kidding themselves. At least Abyss is engaging and fun.
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I am aware, the cluster point was made because you’re thinking about it from the perspective of games which run as a single shard, in this case the game already has a system to keep players apart and handle moving players to specific locations within a system
As an engineer i’m sure you’re more than familiar with the phrase “You don’t need to reinvent the wheel”, in this instance EVE already has a robust system of handling people spaced out in a single solar system, sure CCP “could” spin up unique instances of a single abyssal system, but that is unlikely considering how reliant EVE is on every single location in the game having its own unique ID
So, do you honestly think its more likely that they reqrote portions of the game to handle spinning up unique instances of entire solar systems, or, do you think its more likely that they re-used the tech they already had, that already had a tested proven track record of working as required and just modified it slightly
Like i said, you don’t reinvent the wheel
I agree with others that this is a good explanation when it comes to coding. An object is most often dynamically allocated memory during run-time using the class and its procedures as a template to instantiate and populate any of its data, and to make the object usable, as an example. So if everything in a game is an object, then they are all instances of its associated class.
The problem here may be that the term instance may have picked up a new definition over the many years of MMO gaming. Gamers may have watered down the original definition which came from developers, and started associating it with restricted access.
Most often in MMO’s, instances were created to restrict access to a room/dungeon for a group of players that have some sort of claim to it, and in particular most often restricting access against PvP. But an instance doesn’t have to restrict access at all, it can be open access if the devs desired. So in this case, many gamers may be using the more colloquial definition of instance and really referring to instance dungeon.
To get back on topic, I agree here. And one problem with these kinds of threads is that often the OP seems to assume that people who run a certain content is supposedly all that those people do in the game. But they forget the average gamer are not robots, we all need variety, and personally I might do certain content during the work week like Abyss, since many people have limited time, and then after the workweek is over the weekend warriors in them may come out, and they try all kinds of EVE activities as they have more time then.
So why is it a problem for people to do some instanced content, especially since a person knows exactly where they are going to exit, if they really wanted to find them.
The whole point of EVE is one server with everyone in it, when someone enters an instance they leave EVE. Then worse yet they return with wealth earned outside the one server.
Knowing where they exit is a joke, originally it came with a suspect flag but that turned out to be ■■■■■■■■ on the part of CCP.
I found what appears to be a pretty cool gank of an abyss runner that happened fairly recently. I can’t say how often it happens, I haven’t kept up with minerbumping in awhile, but it does seem to happen.
Abyss content exists and it doesn’t seem that it’ll go away, so I for one will take advantage of it as one of the activities that I do in EVE. But I think I see where you’re coming from, and if you’re saying that no more instanced content should be created, then I can agree with that, I’m not asking for more.
M Cincinnatus
The way “instance” is used in MMO coding is actually consistent with the way it’s used in coding. It would have been better if we didn’t get into the technical details.
The partly restricted access is natural BTW: there can be many instances of the same thing, so only the “constructor” of each one knows which one is which, and in a game, who’s inside each one. Someone outside could go to the “entrance”, but it would be the entrance to all the instances so the player can’t choose which one to enter …
… but there’s no reason to block communication between those inside and those outside. In a “teleport friendly” game, someone inside an instance can contact someone in the main game and teleport them in.
EVE may not have this, but it could. “Teleporting” is very easy in games.
BTW: in coding, a “reference” is a “hook” to a specific instance. Two instances can’t find each other without help, but it’s done all the time by “higher-level” components moving references around. So there’s a similar kind of “restricted access” there too, and also (very) wide use of the context-appropriate version of teleporting 
We may have a language/semantics issue as evidenced by your term “hook”, I have not heard this before in programming. In that regard, programmers deal with references and pointers where I’m from. What I was trying to do was show the distinction between instance and instance dungeon. Yes they are programmatically the same, but if you were to ask a programmer about ‘the instance’ they’d be asking which instance? The asteroid? The ship? The dungeon? The entire world? Whereas if you asked a gamer, likely they’d go straight to the dungeon. A programmer’s and gamer’s definition of instance are currently slightly different.
The only reason gamers tend to think instance dungeons have restricted access is because traditionally in MMO’s they were mostly used to restrict access against PvP. Programmatically there really isn’t a reason for any restriction. EVE actually has a few good examples of different types of instance dungeons.
A regular mission pocket is an instance dungeon that actually spawns within the world boundary. It initially grants access to one player, but the player can invite many other players, and other players can scan down the player and enter at will, essentially having open access. No teleportation necessary. Then there’s the mission pocket that is ‘keyed’, and the key is sometimes even consumed, which allows the owner access, but denies access to everyone else. (This one upsets people too, the same people that don’t like abyss restriction.)
And as a final example, there’s the Abyss which is likely placed outside the world boundaries, probably even onto its own node, with access given only to the owner of the filament used. But restrictions are only limited by the will of the devs. Programmatically it would be easy, depending on the engine’s architecture, to just turn the abyssal entrance into a jump gate with access to all. Devs are the gods of their world, pretty much anything is possible, only creativity is their limitation.
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