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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.
Warcraft has this problem, especially in towns. It can take between 30 seconds to two minutes to fully load Dalaran the first time you log in as it has to not only download everyones armour, but then read/decompress that off your disk. My friend - who has 48Gb of RAM - created a RAM Disk and loaded WoW's game files onto it (WoW's game files come to around 13Gb). It loads fast, and I mean lightning fast, since the RAM has a faster throughput than the HDD.
Most of the 'lag' in Warcraft comes from the user end, as opposed to any server creaking.
This has led to some humorous bugs in the game. For example, "The Naked Bug" - which tends to happen either in Cities or when going into an instance (25 man instances mainly) Where characters armour fails to load and your buddies are all running around in the nip. Anyone already in the instance is naked to you, and anyone joining after is normally fully clothed. And the only way to fix it is for you to exit and re-enter the instance, or for each naked person to exit and re-enter (for example, by dying).
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
What i'm saying is that a single server, or multiple servers, can't do anything for over-zealous reading from the users disk. That the Lag problem isn't solely related to the server.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
EVE solved this problem by creating a big world to start with then artificially cordoning off certain regions. You literally couldn't go there, even though the regions existed in the database and showed up on the galaxy map. As the population density grew they gradually started to open up more regions to the players.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.