How many shards? Features of the various shards?

[D'Lanor]

You are right that all the content from DI is also available offline, there's just one thing missing - others exploring the ages with you

That can be a disadvantage too. Fan ages on DI are not instanced. Most Uru players I know want to slowly explore an age and solve puzzles by themselves. Although it shouldn't be too hard to get a quiet moment alone on DI there is still a problem which for me personally has always been THE big Alcugs showstopper: Chances are that you arrive in a partially solved age, or worse, someone else has continued where you left off the last time. Sure, ages on DI can be reset by players (I believe you have to be the only player in the age to do that) but that will force you to redo stuff you already did before you can continue with your current puzzle.

[diafero]

Sure, everything has its advantages and disadvantages. That's why it is good to have choice
In a better world, we had a system where you could click some button in your Nexus to create a new instance of the fan-age, and then go there. A bit like neighbourhoods. I don't really like the idea of everyone having its own instance, all the ages that do not have any puzzles would suffer from this. For example, instancing kaelis' pub would be a bad idea.

[D'Lanor]

True, some ages should be public. It would be nice if this choice was left to the writer though. I know there was a technical reason for this, the inability to share Relto on Alcugs shards, but wasn't that solved?

[diafero]

No, Relto sharing still does not work. One issue was solved by Sirius (you no longer crash doing so), but when you arrive in the foreign Relto, you get some really weird nasty physics bugs. I have no idea what's happening. See viewtopic.php?f=111&t=5401 .

Leaving the choice to the author would not be a problem (xLinkMgr can do all that fine). I could change a single line in the linking descriptor to make an age instanced, and it should even automatically show up in the interface to share ages (which is quite uncomfortable though). There's another reason though: I personally would find it quite confusing if some ages I click on in Relto/Nexus are instanced, and others not. IMHO all ages should have a public instance you go to per default, and some way to get a private instance you can share, too.