On the Feasibility of Single-Server MMOs 316
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.
Re:Lag. (Score:3, Informative)
Tabula rasa did something similar.
Each combat area would be split into 2 or 3 identical instances, and you could teleport between them. Due to it's dynamic arenas, if you wanted something in a town that had been taken over by the enemy, you could teleport to another instance and hope that it's player-controlled.
Re:Lag. (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:Lag. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Impact? (Score:3, Informative)
Not, like the article implied (it's a general public article, after all) WoW with a single shard, but something different. EvE shows it's possible[...]
It's possible on EvE because the place is basically empty. A space station here, an asteroid belt or two there, a couple planets... In the end, it's just a bunch of generic models thrown around in what otherwise is a lot of empty space.
Now imagine doing the same on a WoW-style game. You would have to do a huge work of world design. Surely there are algorithms that can generate assloads of terrain, cities, etc, but your designers still have to tweak things in the gameworld to make it interesting.
Not to mention the amount of disk space that would be required for the data files making up this non-empty gameworld.
Re:Impact? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Impact? (Score:3, Informative)
It also means that there isn't really 'levelling up' - anything you choose to do, doesn't mean you fall behind said 15 year olds. And also, in EVE, the other players are targets, resources and obstacles, which means having more annoying idiots, just gives you that much more of a warming glow when you exploit them mercilessly.
EVE ONLINE IS NOT SINGLE SERVER! (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:EVE ONLINE IS NOT SINGLE SERVER! (Score:2, Informative)
I think by shard, what is meant is world instance, not physical server, and Eve is only one shard.
Being in another starsystem (and thus, located on another physical server), you can still interact with players in other starsystems, even across the galaxy.
And, the system can move starsystems around between physical servers, so if there is an influx of players in an otherwise empty system, it will be moved to a larger server, to better handle the load.
Ofcourse, every server has its limits, just like with any MMO, and when you reach peak (which, with the "new" stackless IO, is well above 1000 players), there will be lag, ofcourse.
Re:EVE ONLINE IS NOT SINGLE SERVER! (Score:3, Informative)
When most MMOs have too many users, they end up firing up a new copy of the code on a standalone server, and let there be another 'copy' of the universe, for someone else to be 'king' of.
The only place that's happened with EVE, is the China implementation, and that was solely because China has rules regarding MMOs that
Re:Actually, I see an even bigger problem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lag. (Score:3, Informative)
For WoW typing /RL in the chatbox will fix it as well. That forces the game to reload all user objects within the game according to the server data. No exiting, death or other things required.
Re:Lag. (Score:3, Informative)
Age of Conan implemented this too, and it causes no end of trouble. Players can't see one another, organising a group of 6 people in 4 shards is a nightmare. It's hard enough to get everyone in the same place let alone on the same shard.
Of course this was exacerbated by the entire *world* being sharded like this, not just cities, and the interface for moving between them was poor. But the concept is essentially flawed.
The concept of dynamically sharding off part of the geography (rather than the players) could solve this, but I'm yet to see it done well.
Re:Lag. (Score:4, Informative)
Fracturing a game based on location is not that difficult design wise. The main problem is cost effectiveness I hate pulling out business models and cost benefit analysis, but unfortunately centralized systems usually take either large centralized shared storage, RDBMS, schedulers, resource allocation management, etc; or the proper development of a distributed data server farm. This ends up costing a lot of money and a decent amount of development & operations manpower...in the MMO world your profits are not that high to begin with.
Even on some of the grids that I've built that have gone google-style (map-reduce, column based DB, true distributed file system, on cheap hardware) the costs quickly hit a few million per location. On our larger GPFS, oracle, vmware, on HP based clusters the software site licenses alone will eat most game companies.
Your best bet these days would be to try to develop something that uses Amazon's elastic compute cloud, apache's messaging system, run something like greenplum to distribute the DB load, and don't skimp on developers...cheap ones usually don't understand that in a distributed environment that every little chunk of code from the network/disk/etc up has to scale and be massively efficient cause you can't afford to 'just throw faster hardware at it'
Re:Lag. (Score:2, Informative)
1) You mean like the Dalaran/Shattrath city portals
2) The Mage-generated portals (Ask a mage for a portal, it's not that hard)
3) the 30-minute hearthstone
4) Players NEEDING other players for something other than questing (enchanting, transmutation, jewelcrafting etc)
That's how Blizzard tried to build a community.
What they got was
1) Everyone in Dalaran, incase someone wanted them in another city, causing lag
2) Like I said, asking a mage isn't that hard, getting him to do something other than ignore you is something else
3) People complaining that it makes travelling TOO EASY and is a symptom of the dumbing down of the game
4) Players scamming others out of materials, or getting shirty about not being tipped for their services
The building blocks of a community is there. People screwed it up.