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Scripts and Scaling In Online Games
CowboyRobot writes "Jim Waldo of Sun Microsystems has written an article titled Scaling In Games & Virtual Worlds, saying that they 'should be perfect vehicles to show the performance gains possible with multicore chips and groups of cooperating servers. Games and virtual worlds are embarrassingly parallel, in that most of what goes on in them is independent of the other things that are happening. Of the hundreds of thousands of players who are active in World of Warcraft at any one time, only a very small number will be interacting with any particular player.' A group of researchers at Cornell wrote a related piece about improving game development and performance through better scripting."
That would quickly become a not-at-all-cool MMO. The problem it has is that it's vulnerable to griefers. All it takes is one person who decides to defoliate the world for fun and soon you wouldn't have any plants around. One group could decide to exterminate stuff and there'd be nothing left to kill. To give you an example of this "I have fun by taking away other player's fun" mentality, there was recently an event in World of Warcraft where there was a big tree set up in a city, and players could get gifts from under the tree. Several players put themselves on their very sizeable mounts (big bears and mammoths) and stood on the presents for hours, to the net effect that most players couldn't get their presents because they couldn't click on the polygons. This served absolutely no purpose except to cause anguish for others just because they could, and they jeered and taunted the people asking them to move until they were forcibly logged out by a gamemaster. If someone will do this for fun, you can imagine the damage they could do to a world where their actions had permanent consequences. You could conceivably build in some method of enforcement to allow players to establish "laws" against this sort of behavior, but then you'd face the other side of that coin in that a group or guild could functionally take over a server and disallow anyone else from doing anything, to the point of repeatedly killing off any character that wasn't in their power structure.
It's a reasonable idea on the surface, but MMOs can't really let the players have a gross effect on the world because there are so many of them and not everyone will play nice.
Virg