Slashdot Mirror
The Problem of Shards, Servers, and Queues In MMOs
An editorial at GamesIndustry takes a look at a couple of problems many MMOs have failed to solve as the genre has evolved over the last decade: log-in queues and a split player base. The most recent example is Aion, which launched in Europe and North America a few weeks ago. Players on some of the game's servers had to deal with lengthy queues until enough people left the starting areas and spread throughout the game. To NCSoft's credit, the queues are mostly gone already, and it wasn't simply launching with too few servers that was the problem (nor was simply launching more servers a perfect solution, as Warhammer proved). In fact, several servers had no queues at all, but many players had set their sights on the more popular ones — a problem facing other MMOs as well. At this point, it becomes a matter of programming — how can the developers for these MMOs build the networking aspect of the game such that more hardware can easily be allocated when it's needed, and also make it easier for people to play together without the restriction of different shards or servers? EVE Online has done well with a single game universe, but it's not clear how far that model can scale upwards.
Champions Online has also launched with a single world architecture. Each zone has multiple instances, dividing the population in dozens of copies of each region, across which players can freely move if they wish to do so. Zones with friends, supergroup (guild members), and party members have priority, of course. These instances CAN fill, but if they do--just get your friends and all go to a new one.
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000002990 Just FYI
This is a computational problem that the major game studies are hopelessly under prepared to solve.
Mostly they hire people who get degrees in game design that include very little in the way of computer science. This is actually a fairly difficult problem to solve.
The fundamental design flaw they all have is that servers represent space in the game, it's a flawed assumption about the best model to use.
The question of scale for an MMO applies to more than just the ability of the servers to host an increasing number of simultaneous players in a single virtual world. It's also about gameplay, and the MMO paradox: the more massive the world, the less important each player. I would argue that one of the factors in WoW's enduring success is that Blizzard knew when to add new servers not purely for performance reasons, but also to keep the number of players in any particular server at a particular sweet spot.
Too few players and there's no sense of a living, persistent world; too many players and that world is stifling and uninviting.
Actually, it will be interesting to see how things play out with Sony's MAG -- an action game that sits somewhere between classic multiplayer and MMO scale.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
DAoC is now, for most intents and purposes, one server. The cluster is called Ywain, and I think it goes from Ywain-1 to Ywain-9. Each server shares its RvR (realm versus realm) areas with the other servers, so all Ywain players go to the same RvR instance. The main cities do as well. However, outside and in dungeons, the servers are independent. This is to keep 1,000 people from showing up in the same area.
You can change the server in main cities and other important areas by means of an NPC.
It's a nice way to do things. If Ywain-1 is too populated, go to Ywain-2. It lets the player decide how full or empty they want their experience to be.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
...manages to run a single world instance - it does raytraced graphics in real time, the fees aren't too bad but I'm not sure how to respawn.
But most MMOs' business models revolve around selling as many copies as possible before people realise the game is shit.
Because load balancers are for situations where each request is independent and transactional. Online games depend on interaction between characters, which basically makes loadbalancers useless where it counts.
Reboot macht Frei.
most MMOs these days seem to draw a big crowd and lose most of it in the first few months
It's rather that most MMOs these days create a huge hype around themselves that they can't live up to. So people join, find out that it's anything but the hype, and leave.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We designed a "peer-to-peer" MMO many years ago, although I have to say we didn't implement it and the devil is definitely in the implementation. Anyway, you can read the design docs here. After it was clear we weren't going to write it, I published the docs just to give a priority date (1998) to invalidate any stupid patents ...
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
This article is primarily about load, but the idea of single game-world has to fundamentally change the game system. In many MMOs, such as WoW, RuneScape and so on, there would be a gaming problem. Even with small world populations it's a minor issue.
Fundamentally it's the suspension of disbelief that would be required.
For example. Across WoW there might be one guild trying to complete some über quest at a time. However, if you compressed all US worlds, there would be hundreds of guilds doing it simultaneously. Now I'm just me, but it would strike me as just slightly odd if 300 people all handed in Onyxia's dead body to Stormwind one after another.
In EVE Online, nobody is a hero. Everyone's one cog that can be a 'Butterfly Effect'. The problem with most modern MMOs is that 99.9% of the time it's lots of people playing the same RPG. Not everyone contributing in some way to an overall plot. Ahn'Qiraj is the only time WoW got near that and as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71sVv__DryA perfectly demonstrates, that was frankly rubbish.
"In fact, several servers had no queues at all, but many players had set their sights on the more popular ones"
ALL EU servers had long queues. Most of them was so long, you couldn't even get IN the queue.
The NA forums reported some server queues, but not on all servers.
Quite the opposite on EU forums, where people were going mental on the boards, complaining about massive queues and no response from NCSoft what so ever.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
More accurately Eve partitions their blade servers slightly differently than this. A busy system like Jita will be on it's own blade, and probably one of the newer ones. However slow systems with fewer players may be on a blade with 20 other systems.
With alliance and fleet battles, an administrator actually needs to move the busy system on to it's own blade to handle the load. I'm pretty sure this isn't automatic yet. I've heard fleet commanders say they'd talked to a GM and they were moving the system. Some systems are always busy so are already on their own blade.
Another factor is that Eve online limits each player's bandwidth to 28.8k. When you are talking about 500 ships in the same grid it's _impossible_ for there not to be lag. Every client needs to talk to the server which then needs to pass on what that player is doing to everyone else in the grid. There's simply not enough bandwidth to handle the throughput of all this data past a certain point. They limit everyone to 28.8k in the interest of fairness so people don't gain advantage because of their connection speed as well as the fact that their bandwidth is finite. At some point you get packet loss, which is why you activate your guns and nothing happens, or you are firing, run out of ammo and your weapons keep firing for 5 minutes and you can't control your ship. In reality you are probably already dead.
For the same reason when you are on teamspeak with 250 people in channel, no one is allowed to talk but officers and fleet commanders. Otherwise bandwidth gets choked and everyone is talking over each other.
Sorry I'm an ex eve geek =D I still play occasionally now but it's around 1-2 hours a week mission whoring in empire. I used to do the whole pvp/alliance thing (RAZOR, and before that fighting with IRON alliance as a 0.0 guest corp) so do have some 3 years experience with lag in 500+ ship alliance battles, but then I got a life ;-)
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.