Building Scaleable Middleware for MMORPGs

CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an article exploring the challenges of developing a reliable platform for an MMORPG, specifically looking at Wish by Mutable Realms. From the article: 'A common scalability problem for distributed multiplayer games relates to managing distributed sets of objects... A player may not be a member of more than one guild, or a guild may have at most one level-5 mage (magician). In computing terms, implementing such behavior boils down to performing membership tests on sets of distributed objects.'"