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On the Feasibility of Single-Server MMOs
GameSetWatch takes a look at the issues involved in creating an MMO that does not split its users among many different servers. They suggest that running a single "shard" is the next step in the evolution of MMOs, since it better allows player choices to have a meaningful impact on the game world; supporting different outcomes across multiple shards is a technical nightmare. They estimate, from the hip, that the cost to develop the technology required to support a massive amount of players (i.e. far more than EVE Online) on a single server to be roughly $100 million. Another recommendation is the strong reliance on procedural and user-generated content creation to fill a necessarily enormous game world.
TFA misses out one very important point.
Lag.
Lag is the primary concern amongst many EVE Online players. Certain areas of MMOs are more popular than others. Major Cities, battlegrounds, etc are places where large numbers of players congregate. Until we find a way to elminate the lag caused by sheer population density, single server MMOs are going to be strangled in what they can offer in terms of 'multiplayer'.
Hand the problem over to the DBA...
Deleted
Think of how much fun it would be to crash one of those Eve Online ships into the shire!
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
the runuo team does a great job handling over 1000 players simultaneous on a single server.
i remember when they first migrated to 64-bit, holy crap the server-saves were so much faster...
havn't played on their servers in awhile tho, i'd be surprised if they were still as well populated.
(if you don't know what i'm talking about: Ultima Online private servers, which ironically have always been called "shards")
"since it better allows player choices to have a meaningful impact on the game world"
Am I the only one here who doesn't want the collective impulses of 1 million 15 year olds impacting my game experience? Instead of theorizing about how awesome it would be to have a server with 5 million people on it at the same time, why don't they try to design a game that would actually be fun to play with 5 million other people on your server. I can't think of any, but if they can, I'd at least be willing to listen to their ideas.
Since the authors of this worthless article don't have any new ideas other than "WoW with tons of people on the same server!!!", I don't know how this thing got out of the firehose.
Currently, this is impossible because of the nature of âoeshardsâ, âoemirrored worldsâ, or, as they are best known, âoeserversâ (though this last term is somewhat inaccurate).
It's true that the term "Servers" is most inaccurate, because a single virtual world could be composed of by multiple servers.
"Mirrored worlds" is also not quite right. In MMO we always refer a world as a virtual environment where activities within are synchronized and persistent. Mirrored worlds recurrsively take reference to the same term but describing different things.
I buy on using "Shards".
how long until we see a MMO that is run _entirely_ server-side - that is, a game that does all graphics and game logic calculations server-side, OnLive style, and simply streams HD-video to each client. If this considerable hurdle could be jumped, we might be able to see a lot more in the way of a dynamic MMO world, with actual physics, terrain deformation, collision detection, and a bunch of other features that are tough to do with the current client-server system.
It's a neat problem. Some years back I was almost sucked into There, Inc. to work on that specific problem.
There are two issues; implementation scaling and game mechanics.
Second Life is one big world, but there are severe limits on how many people can be in the same area at a time. They really haven't solved their scaling problem. This is a tough design problem. But it's not unsolveable. I was at one time looking at an architecture where the world is divided into hexagons, with a moderate overlap between adjacent hexagons. Within the overlap area, servers negotiate with the server for the neighboring hexes (never more than two; that's the advantage of going hexagonal) over who's in charge of characters and items in the overlap area. Overloaded hexagons are subdivided, so more servers can be brought to bear on heavily loaded hexagons. Flying over the world creates problems, but by careful use of level of detail problem, and interposing fog and clouds in difficult situations, that could be handled. I think this is solveable today. There's going to be a lot of gigabit Ethernet cable in the server farm.
The gameplay problem is that everyone may want to go to the hot spots. Some games have more problems with this than others. Star Wars, big problem. GTA, not so much.
The problem with single realm servers is that you can't have to many players in the same place or using the same resources. The bandwidth required for the clients to display the information increases exponentially.
But you can have a single realm with views, where users are automatically distributed on different views. The players of the same guild/party will be on the same view, and players that interact (trade, tell etc) can see each other even if they are on a different view.
By your servers combined, I am CAPTAIN PLANET!
But will the action house lag?
Why not split the world among multiple servers?
That keeps the world consistent.
Just make sure you have a good network so that players can migrate from server to server as they move about the world, and have a kick-ass Out Of Character infrastructure, also well networked, so that players can chat amongst themselves.
IRC might be a good model for how to structure your login servers, perhaps using a BGQ-esque way of letting everyone else know which servers have which players.
Heck, use a hash table to decide which player logs into which server.
I meant this technology. Apparently I'm bad at using the preview function.
CCP are already aiming for an upper limit in the ballpark of 1 million players with their WoD MMORPG on a single shard server.
strong reliance on procedural and user-generated content
This is not YouTube. By allowing people to generate content to your game will certainly ruin it. Nothing worse the if the new user is greeted by a poorly designed level graphics created by "fans". Many games were ruined by doing just that.
Actually, I see another even bigger problem, at least for more traditional (WoW-type) MMOs. How big should your world be?
Too little player density => people start complaining that it's pretty much a single-player game like Oblivion, except you occasionally see another player. Many games ended merging up shards more for that sensation of empty space than because of costs. (It's equally easy to just merge the physical servers inside a shard, to support a lower population per shard, if you're only concerned about hardware costs.)
Too many players on too little surface => lag (think: landing in Ironforge, back when it had the only auction house for Alliance), routinely having 5 players camping the same mob, and generally it just starts feeling cramped. Again, you have players starting to complain.
Basically if you want to be single-shard, you have to essentially guess how much population you'll get. Maybe just within the right order of magnitude, but guess nevertheless. It's not that trivial. On one side of the guessed-wrong spectrum you have WoW which got launched with only a handful of servers and had massive queues, on the other end of the spectrum you have more than one game who thought they'll be teh WoW-killer and then had to merge 4 servers in 1.
Merging or splitting shards is an easier way to deal with that problem than having to physically add or remove new areas, to fit the population.
Additionally, world size influences other things, like travel times, exploration, etc. There is an ideal apparent size where people don't feel like they're being packed like sardines and running around a back yard, but don't go "fuck it, I'm not spending another hour just running back to the quest giver" all the time either. It's easier to fine tune that if it's its own problem, orthogonal to everything else, than when it also has to fit the population numbers.
Basically if EVE's game type was well suited for that kind of one-shard world, more power to them, but for other types of MMOs it might actually be a bad idea.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If there are millions of people playing on the same server, this would have the OPPOSITE effect. Your actions would be so diluted as to be meaningless. Bosses might take hundreds or thousands of players working together to kill - which means that if you decide to call it a night or watch sports and log out early, your team would barely notice your absence.
Nearly all MMORPGs are the same game. The point of the game is to make you, a single human being among millions in a society you can't change, FEEL POWERFUL. When humans were cave men, living in small groups of under 100 people, a single person WAS powerful. Your actions actually would affect whether the tribe got enough to eat, or who got to reproduce.
Now, unless you're that rare 1 in 300 million who is the President, you have very little power.
So, I thought of the opposite game : the MMORPG world would be broken up into shards with less than 50 people on each. There would be thousands of NPC characters. Each shard would start a new "round" every month or two, and when you are playing, your single character's actions would have PROFOUND effects on the landscape. You could lead a huge army of thousands of characters. Every corpse would stay on the battlefield. If you burn a tree or strucuture or a whole forest down, it stays burnt down. And so on.
You'd start each round as a "level 1" and over the course of a month could rapidly level up to godlike powers - but you've got to compete against the other 30 players who started at the same time at the beginning of the month at the same level as you. You'd be organized into factions, and of course the goal would be conquest of the entire world of the shard. If you solved a quest and got the phat loot, no one else could solve that quest - the uber weapon would be yours and the boss would be dead.
In such a world, permanent death could be semi-practical. The way it would work, only an extremely high level character would be able to permanently kill another character, and it would take a few weeks to get to that high of a level.
They estimate, from the hip, that the cost to develop the technology required to support a massive amount of players (i.e. far more than EVE Online) on a single server to be roughly $100 million.
Wow. So no matter what even the rough amount of players is, it always going to cost $100 million? :P
Let's see. With EvE Online's record of 53,850 concurrent players in the same realm, the number of active Internet users (1.23 million), and the amount of humans on the planet (6708 million), this would give a price range between ~$1857 to ~$0,0813 and ~$0.0149 per person. Veeery useful.
Protip: If your business model includes words like "massive" and "far", instead of actual numbers (even with a standard deviation), then failure is pretty much guaranteed.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Let me know when this guy actually is credited on a shipped game. Until then, he's just making up babble about problems he hasn't had to actually yet solve.
Waay too in love with user generated content. There is only 1 golden rule in online play... If players are given the power to be jerks to each other, they will be jerks. (I can't wait for the "build a city" game to come out so I can construct my pnis heaven park.)
reading the rest of his drivel is just making me mad. bedtime!
How exactly is this news? Many text-only MUSHes and MUDs have been running on one server since, well..., EVER. Perhaps that the companies who want to use only one server could have a look at how the admin of some of the larger MUDs have solved issues with lag...
This is from two years ago, there has since been a new family of mainframes, and new cell processors, but you get the idea.
Hoplon entertainment. http://www.itjungle.com/big/big050207-story01.html
How exactly do you define a "single server"? Computers are moving towards multiple cores, multiple memory subsystems, and high speed serial interconnects. Those are essentially already "multiple servers", they just happen to be tightly coupled. But you still can't write simple, sequential code on them if you want your code to run reasonably fast.
Actually, while I'll agree with your main idea that it's undesirable, I just have to wonder about the 15 year olds quip.
From my limited experience -- and fully aware that the plural of anecdotes isn't data, but I have to start somewhere -- the vast majority of children I ended up grouped with were actually nice people and played the game well. Conversely, most of the more annoying trolls I've known, were middle-aged men. I guess mid-life crisis goes "I can still gank newbies" instead of "I can still get a car with a wing, and teenage hookers" in some people.
The thing that got me to start thinking about it all -- and bear in mind, I'm not saying it's the worst, just that it was a shock at the time -- was discovering that a (now ex) boss, a respected middle-aged, mid-level manager, was talking l33t in an MMO. I get a tell that, really, makes me wish I had a Rosetta stone to decrypt that garbled nonsense, and wonder who the fuck is that retarded kid? Lo and behold, it's the boss. I _know_ he can type very fast, so he doesn't even have the excuse of not having the time to type the "y" and "o" in "you."
Another midle-aged guy I know gets his jollies ganking newbies. That's his idea of showing how great he is, apparently.
One was literally the most retarded player I've ever grouped with. He managed to reach level 70 (at that time, the max) while still believing stuff like that if he takes a step back when an enemy slashes at him, the enemy will miss. 'Cause that sword doesn't reach to his new position, see. Geesh. Or he still thought that it's a good idea as a hunter to run backwards when he gets aggro, 'cause, see, he manages to squeeze in another ranged shot now and then that way. And generally, I mean, not just as in "hadn't figured out the game yet", but as in, "had the most ridiculous ideas and insisted that that's how the game works." He actually was proud of his "footwork", lemme tell you.
After a wipe or two I actually wished we had a 15 year old in his place. At least those tend to be good at figuring out a game.
One was not just a complete CS-head, but actually proud of his spewing the most offensive sexist remarks at anyone who had a female name in the game. There was stuff he was telling me (and you know you can't stop them from talking about CS even if you tried) that made _me_ cringe, and I'm a guy. And he's standing them beaming proud of how witty he was.
Etc.
So, 15 year olds? I can deal with 15 year olds. It's the older retards that I fear a lot more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
All these articles about the next step in MMOs blah blah blah has already been done by Second Life.
If people stopped treating Second Life as a joke and actually realise there is something behind it then people wouldn't be posting redundant stuff like this and people wouldn't so far behind.
For more information look for the MMOX project.
I know many MMO's that are single server. The biggest usually have shards, but so extremely many MMO's do not, and for so long already. So I don't even understand why they call it a "technology" in this article summary.
Well, that's still shards. City sized intead of planet sized, but shards anyway. I was more under the impression that what these guys want is one huge non-instanced world with everyone in it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The question of how big an MMO should be is a simple matter of planning desired player density, introducing sufficient hooks to ensure interest, and mitigating player turnover by making the action easy enough for low-level characters to get into. All of this is part of the design of any MMO worth its salt.
However, remember that "should" is the most dangerous word in the English language. Forget "should." Screw "should"'s eye sockets until its ears cry.
How big will the game be? Because all that planning won't amount to anything if nobody shows up and the place feels like a well-lit and mip-mapped ghost town. Or if it takes off faster than expected and suddenly you're running the most popular lag machine in town.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
that that super large servers would have the exact opposite reaction of what they seek. You would reduce the player to part of the herd, people having an effect on the world would be those you read about and never met, very much like the real world.
With smaller population sets among servers it allows more players to actually have "firsts". It allows for tighter communities to be formed. Then there is this small problem of WOW's player base, as in size. They have a couple hundred servers for a reason. I can't imagine trying to play on a server with the combined population of even four current servers, there just isn't space. If you instance zones then your right back where you started. I always found instanced zones to be less immersive than having multiple servers.
A game like wow, with achievements and goals, needs to have smaller population sets just so more people can have the chance of being first at something, let alone establish a rep for themselves based on character (and don't think people don't develop reputations on individual servers)
Nah, I wouldn't want to play in a world of millions of people... I do that in real life and I certainly won't pay to do it in a fantasy. At least give my character the chance to be the hero instead of the fodder
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
To the user it would look like a single server but in reality it would be many. I expect EVE works very much in this way although much of the infrastructure challenge would be coping with extreme events such as fleet invasions. But at least each system is effectively a separate zone which would simplify things a lot. It's not like one server has to cope with 100,000 user connections at once.
The upshot is an MMO could start small and scale depending on demand. There is an initial outlay - a very large outlay for some games - and of course a lot of planning in getting the infrastructure right but the hardware could grow naturally with the customer base. I also assume that the subscription costs would be sufficient to fund the expansion, so its never like you'd ever be down 100 million. The biggest danger is in screwing up the architecture so its buggy, or grossly overestimating the appeal of your game such that you never recover the initial expense of developing and deploying the thing.
Sure Americans may not mind having a latency of 150 ms from West Coast to an East Coast server. But what about a player from Singapore or Australia? You think playing with 500 ms to even 1000 ms is fun? What kind of game are you running? A turn-based hug-fest? Anything with combat that is even slightly dependent on timely user actions will be a nightmare for players from around the globe.
I really wish people would stop falling for marketing hype. EVE runs on shards like every other MMORPG; the difference is that you can move from shard to shard. That's what happens every time you jump gates - you're just getting moved to the server running the system/shard you're jumping to.
Get too many players on one shard (system) though, and BAM! lag.
paintball
First, there are a few people who have way too much influence in the real world.
Second, they are neither the ones with the best skill, nor the ones who invest the most time into the "game".
And finally, quitting isn't really a viable option.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
None mentions Project Darkstar in all of this...
http://projectdarkstar.com/
is a giant douche. Look at his profile from his gaming company
I know the guy, and that is not at all a joke. He's one of the most pretentious people to ever come out of CMU, and that's really saying a lot.
and single servers, http://www.shardsofdalaya.com/ for those of you who would enjoy a new twist on an old game.. MMO, singe server, great community, and fun.
The problem with Eve Online, at least it was one a few years back, was that they chose to organize servers by star system. In other words, loads were distributed by named location. (Which was why certain populous systems like Jita often lagged.) Also, this distribution was static and didn't adapt to changing situations. (Like roving fleets of 200 ships.)
Processor load should be distributed by population and user activity. The unit of processing should not be named locations. Aggregations of players should be the basis for the units of processing. With a space game like Eve, this is easy. When people form a fleet or a squadron, the fleet's inertial frame of reference becomes a "locale." (This would be appropriate for a game which actually had Newtonian dynamics, not Eve. Eve could still use it, though.) When two fleets merge, two locales merge. This would be an inherently dynamic load distribution system. The merging operation could be disguised with "warp-in" effects. You could even have a locale moved from server to server, and this could be covered for as a "warp storm" where both sides are effected. (And maybe gangs/fleets are undone and individual ships are all caught in a "warp bubble." That could be cool. It also might encourage some interesting small-group tactics, or units trained to reorganize themselves on the fly.)
Mabinogi is split across several "shard" servers and "channels"
You can change channels at will, but not servers. The newest server has 1/7th the population density of the largest. The dungeons are procedurally generated, and no two people will enter the same dungeon unless they give the 'entrance' the same item.
Ideal, would be to micro-manage areas.
For example, one "server" supports 100 people
101 people enter the area. Copy everything and Divide the area in half, and send that virtual machine over to another server (vmware, etc), then as people transit in or out of the area, the duplicate data is removed until the data is gone.
Same in reverse. If an area is no longer popular, start a merge and make the server support a larger area.
Makes enough sense, but let's keep going.
Decouple NPC's from the world. Decouple as much static assets as possible. Dump these in as random seeds or other kinds of procedural data.
When "loading", use a pseudo-p2p network so that everyone rushing into an area the first time, can get parts of the data as it loads. Those already in the area then support those still loading until they have enough. The game client should throw away any mismatched data.
In decoupling the NPC's, the NPC's should be no different from players other than a flag in the system that says that it's a local NPC and not a remote user. The NPC connects the same way as a player, has it's own schedule of activity, and will attack monsters if unleashed on them. So as areas are divided or merged, the NPC will move to the correct server, and not cause item dupe glitches.
As for item dupe glitches, gold dupe, etc. These can be solved by simply having everything in a MMO have a serial number. each gold coin and each player. It then just has to check who has is, and therefor can't be duplicated. The reason duping exists as the items are stored as a integer counter in a database, and not a serial number. eg
BAD:
Playername: X
Playergold: Y
GOOD:
Playername: X
Player inventory:
Gold:#12 - From Billybobb2
Gold:#501 - From MONSTER444
GOLD:#2342341- From NPC10
etc, lots more data to store, much less headache.
Financial subsystems should be more like a real bank and keep track of all deposits and withdrawals, and which branch and player are responsible for the transactions. The game can then garbage collect items that were dropped, and redistribute things as necessary.
Real banks store account information where? I don't know. But it seems like the two biggest tripping points in all MMO's is separating users into shards (that prevent friends from getting together) and resource starvation/deprivation that borks the game economy.
There shouldn't be an unlimited supply of things. In a space based game, this can be implemented as discovering new places. But in Fantasy games, most of the resources would long be drained, so things that are scarce should only be grown to prevent hoarding.
They ahve the processing power to run their 1000 ship attacks in single systems. Far more than World of Warcraft where only 50 run attacks. So a single shard needs the massive bandwidth and a location where they are on the actual Internet backbone.
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
Is the Economy. It's 100% player driver. The only thing that the developers add is a sink hole for the Initial blue prints for equipment. Everything else is player aquired / sold. If there were additional shards, than there would be no need to fight for systems. Which is why World of Warcraft is just a 3D social playground for developing characters rather than aquiring and fighting for your goals which you achieve in EVE online.
Face it, people don't like EVE because it's too intense and feel that there is a lackluster in the PVP fighting. If they take their time, the fighting is more drawn out than any other MMO and that character development is your choice not a 70 hour hack-n-slash to gain levels.
Skills allow you to use items, and money allows you to buy them. Everything else is community based.
OH and it's one of the only games where you CAN be a trader and NEVER have to fight to gain levels.
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
I think some day we may see an MMO run entirely peer to peer. Take the current staples of MMO design, and do almost exactly the opposite. Here's how it might work.
Each player essentially homesteads their own small chunk of game content. They can put in whatever they want, and are responsible for its rules, persistence, and accessibility to others.
The game world geography matches the network topology of the player base. Friends link their sandboxes together. Popular content becomes replicated rather than crowded.
The gameplay becomes providing the most interesting set of experiences to others, and experiencing others play design in turn. Resources are limited by how much CPU/RAM/network the players dedicate to the simulation.
It's not centralized, pre-authored, static, or formally moderated. Players with specific tastes can coordinate to develop consistent setups. Cheaters can be left to their own devices.
It's less a game than a meta-game. All it really needs is a basic protocol. A system like this is probably quite a ways off, but it could happen.
This 'article' seems more like someones day dreams, this article belongs in an MMO forum somewhere, not on the front page of slashdot. There is nothing of substance, mostly its just this person's musings on what their wet dream of an MMO would be. They randomly state 100 million as a development cost for this 'new technology' for a single shard world. Amateurish is the most flattering word I can think of to describe this post. The ideas arent that new or interesting, and again, it's mostly a post about what someone wants to see in an MMO, very little in the article actually talks about the concept of single shard MMO's, or the technology needed to create them, which is the main headline of the article!
Precisely. Although I have enjoyed some RP in some games immensely, its usually the exception, and many players who want to RP fail dismally at it (IMHO, YMMV). I like to RP from time to time and can enjoy playing my character, in character with another player who understands how to do so effectively. Many however are obviously new to things and try too hard which can be grating at times.
However, as a means to filter out the fuckwads, choosing an RP server is a great tool. Playing on Percival (and the other RP servers) in Dark Age of Camelot was quite enjoyable for me, for a few reasons:
First, the naming restrictions prevented me from being distracted by people with names like "Monosodium Glutamate" (someone I met on an non-RP server who told me he picked his name off the ingredients for the bag of chips he was eating when he signed up). I enjoyed seeing names which suited the culture and interacting with people who mostly talked in character. For those who didn't want to do so, there were plenty of non-RP servers.
Secondly, RP servers tend to attract a slightly more mature audience within my experience. As a result we had a few less asshats generally speaking. Nothing will outright prevent asshattery, but anything that helps is welcome.As well the quality of gameplay was enhanced when it came to Strategic PvP (by that I mean the strategic level of planning that guided armies on raids of other realms etc. It got quite involved in DAOC, with hidden websites, raids planned 2 weeks in advance with specific orders to task force leaders and people planning and scheduling the departure times for various forces etc). I am sure that took place elsewhere of course, but Percival was widely regarded as having some of the best RvR in the game.
RP has to be the reward for good RP. Offering in game rewards means you are encouraging people who don't *want* to RP to do so for the perceived benefits, thats only going to breed frustration.
Usually the biggest discouragement from RP is the nature of the game design itself. The best game for RP that I have played so far was the original Star Wars MMO. Why? Because it was a sandbox world where everything was completely wide open. I am currently playing LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online) and while at first glance it would seem perfect for RP, the mechanics of the game which are heavily focused on doing fixed quests, means that RP is at best confusing and generally discouraged by the system (ie, in a game where the LOTR story is unfolding and based on your progress through the game only characters who are roughly the same level and have completed the same quests are literally in the same time period. How can I roleplay about seeing evidence that the Fellowship of the Ring has passed through Moria and Lothlorien, when from your point of view you just met them in Rivendell 30s ago?).
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
With seperate servers for each region, instead of each server having a copy of the full world. Travel far enough, and you shift from one server to the next.
Background: I play a small, 2D MMO. I'm going to try to provide as much context as I can, since I doubt anyone else here plays it. Also, I don't play WoW, so if I'm describing things that other games already do, sorry...
First of all, WoW recently got "achievements", which I believe are like the Xbox Live or Steam "achievements" -- they don't get you anything except a little badge that says "I did this." Nexus has had these for pretty much as long as it's existed, which is over ten years -- they are called "Legend Marks".
This game has four main paths -- I believe WoW calls them "classes" -- Mages, Poets, Rogues, Warriors. However, each of those is split up into four sub-paths. One of those is "NPC", as in, just a quest like anything else, and in return, you get some new spells.
The other three sub-paths -- per main path, so twelve sub-paths, total -- are very much roleplay-oriented, and player-run.
Each sub-path has its own unique spells. Some are useful, some provide a real advantage, and some are just fun. For example, the Barbarians have a "push" spell, with which they can shove other players around.
Each also has a number of roleplay requirements. For example, to become a Geomancer, you must be knowledgeable in Taoism, Feng Shui, Elementalism, and a number of other things. To be a Muse, you must keep a journal, and occasionally write stories, poems, plays, etc -- indeed, the Muses often host a Dinner Theater (in-game). To be a Spy, well, I can't help you -- to even know what you have to do to become a spy, you'll have to do some information gathering on your own -- in other words, spy on some spies.
Each can also give legend marks -- for example, "Scouted with the Rangers" might be desirable, while "Disruptor of Balance" wouldn't be. At the moment, nearly all clans and subpaths will reject people with negative legend marks like "Disruptor of Balance" or "Angered the Horde".
Finally, each subpath has their own unique areas -- both a path-only area, and an area open to the community. Barbarians often invite people into their cave to drink brew, to train, to brawl...
What am I getting at here?
It's a nice balance, I think, between the two extremes you're talking about. It's not just "roleplay for its own sake" -- while there is plenty of that, many players do see that as silly, with good reason. After all, if roleplay was all we wanted, with no "physical" consequences, why bother with a game? We can do that on IRC, or on a tabletop, for that matter.
On the other hand, people who are just in it for the loot aren't likely to get far. This is a lot of work, and it's completely different work than just grinding. Even if they're very good actors, and simply pretend to enjoy roleplay just to get the item, they may well find themselves enjoying it anyway.
And if they don't, I'm not sure I care too much. If they can manage to actively roleplay as a part of the community, no matter what their real motivation, that's a good thing for those of us who do enjoy it.
The game designers absolutely have a reason to reward roleplay, in this case, because they've managed to carve out a niche for themselves in a very crowded market. Some people come for other reasons -- some hunt to millions of points of vitality (there's no level cap), some do nothing but play events (elixir wars are fun) -- and some come for the roleplay, or even for a sense of community that's missing from many larger games.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Vendetta Online only has one server, granted this may be due to the small/medium sized player base.
Busy areas of the game were having problems with performance, but the game devs have been working hard to resolve those issues (news posts from the devs can be seen here http://www.vendetta-online.com/h/news.html) I think currently most of the issues have been resolved.
As I might have mentioned, I was talking about a more traditional MMO, which is a bit differently structured than EVE. (Not saying either it's better, mind you. Just that they're different games for different people.)
A zone in WoW (or EQ2, or WAR, or whatever) isn't just some terrain where you mine and occasionally fight each other. Zones must also include some _quests_ at the bare minimum. Zones which are/were just a big empty space, always tended to be mostly empty. E.g., Azhara has only a couple of quests, and really at any given time there are 1-2 players there tops.
So creating some zones which might, or might not, be made available later also means writing a lot of story and scripting quests... which might not be needed yet, or indeed might never get activated if you don't get enough players to require them.
Conversely, even if you do release them, how many quests _do_ you need for, say, levels 15 to 20? A bit of variety and choice is good, mind you, but past a point you're just creating more and more content which any given character won't need. If you end up with 20 zones with level 15-20 quests, the average character will just see one and then outlevel them all for good. Except a few of us terminal altoholics, nobody will make 20 characters just to see them all.
Even if they do make that many characters, you just created more work for yourself in balancing the quests and rewards against all other zones for the same level range. If one of those level 15-20 zones gives better rewards than the other 19, you just made those 19 obsolete for most people. (See: how many people still do Silithus instead of buggering off to Hellfire Peninsula?)
Basically I still maintain that for a traditional MMO it's a lot more work and _expense_ to adjust world size to player population, than spawning/merging shards is.
Again, if EVE's game type works that way, more power to it. For a game like WoW, it's a bit different, due to different game design.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I repeatedly asked that you prove you are a programmer here in this link http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1222893&cid=27957379 and many times all this week. You said you were and yet you refuse to provide proof of your own words, despite your nagging an ac named apk all last week about that and he did provide you that proof making you eat your arrogant words. You sir, as far as I am concerned, are nothing but a cowardly liar ion.simon.c and one with no class to boot.
Unique names = artificial limit. There is no reason why game servers couldn't allow multiple characters with the same names. They can use internal uid's for tracking instead of names and let talk and chat boxes show some additional information for ID purposes to separate the names if there is a conflict.
This is why we have social security ID in real life. No reason why we couldn't use a similar system in games to let everyone play as Conan.
The problem with single server shards is that certain prodecures, calculations, and tasks are not intrinsic to the operation of the world itself.
I have been tinkering with procedural content development for about 2 years now and have found several things (as an example).
In the proto-world system I am tinkering with mobs (npc creatures) spawning patterns are simualted by a simple cellular automation system (Think conway's game of life) such that populations shift based on desierability (number of times killed, damage taken, damage inflicted, idle time, food accessability). The spawn locations are updated every 24 hours but processessing the simulated PC activity, kills, available food, etc in't a real time activity. Currently that data is bundled (along with the next day's weather info) and dispatched to a utility server for processing. The game world itself (and hence the server running it) only needs the result. Why bog down the core game loop with that activity and why add another low SCHEDID task to the processor to deal with?
Two: As mentioned in other posts dynamic partitioning is already in existence. The Big World engine for example has technological solutions for dynamically scaling the world information to minimize updates sent to the client. You do not need to processes empty cells nor do you have to send information updates to a client if the information is beyond a given distance. (Aka Folks in Queynos don't need to know about objects in Freeport) Why keep zone information in memory when no one is anywhere near that zone? Remember even a simple check of who is where is just one more checkpoint in the core game loop. Even with event versus tick driven game logic it is easier to shift zone information to other systems when not in use and let a different processor handle the low priotity checks. With memory de-duplication host 33 instances of ZONE A requires only 1 base map of ZONE A and then 33 deltas.
Three: In experiementing with procedural game world development I have found that single systems are not practical when having to dynamically create new content.
Example:
I created a 400 x 400 unit map. When I get within 20 units of a border I generate another 10 units in front of my current direction. During that time, on a single server setup I am running out of resources even on a Core 2 with 4GB of RAM. With just me. Now admittedly that is very crude but I found it easier to have a secondary computer handle generating new content then copying the map information over. Even better, when maintaininng multiple maps (simulating multiple shards) I could generate new map content for BOTH maps on the secondary computer with much better results by using the input from both "shards" as salt information and preventing redundant map cells from entering the queue for generation. (In short MAP A is already generating zones x,y, and z so just copy x, y, and reset z as they overlap and give me a, b, and z for MAP B).
Weather simulation is handled on the laptop. I generates a week's worth of weather then dumps it into a proceess queue to simulate the weather. As the maps are dynamically generated, the weather patterns have to be updated as new content is added. If zones are identical I can just hold the primary weather map and just maintain deltas in memory. Trying to do that with all of the map information would take at least 60GB of RAM with 5 shards without using deltas.
By segmenting the zones and using deltas between systems not only is more efficent memory wise BUT FOR GODS SAKE IF THE SERVER DIES I'M ONLY OUT 1 ZONE NOT THE WHOLE WORLD.
There is too much to gain by using discrete specialized servers as well as zone specific servers. If you are hauling dirt you use a dump truck, picking up the kids at school, and SUV. You can haul kids in a dump truck and you can haul dirt in an SUV, but they are optimal for certain workloads an inefficent at others. Generalized servers are not the way to go IMHO.
(Global)
Database Server
Application Servers for Batch Activity
Specialized Servers for Instances with MAXINSTANCECOUNT=X with load balancing between Y servers
(Per Shard)
World Servers cluster with dynamic region balancing with n-1 servers in the cluster.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-