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Worlds/servers/shards why arent together?
zenoax
Member Posts: 4
Hello people,
I was wondering if there is any special reason to divide the servers into worlds (or shards)
For example, if we see EvE, it only has a server for everyone, so the all the players play together in that server. In the other hand we have games like World od Warcraft, in which you are forced to play in a shard and can t change to another. And there are other games like runescape or guild wars, that have shards, but you can change between them whenever you want..
I can understand that not all the games can have all the players in one and only server, EvE is a special case with its almost empty universe. But the possibility of changing between the shards when you want, make the game with all its shards to be just one, at the end all players are playing under the same economy, the same problems or the same adventages.
From the point of view of a player, does it really matter if a game have more than 8 millions of players, if they cant interactue with more than 4.000 (or whatever is the max amount of people that the shard can admit) ?
Sorry for my bad english and thanks for reading
Comments
1.) EvE has a very small population compared to most mainstream mmorpgs.
2.) It lags because of having everyone on one shard. The graphics are not advanced anywhere near enough to cause the lag it gets. It is server side lag.
3.) It does not have the activity/mechanics present in most other mmorpgs. For example, no real maneuvering of your ship, just point A to point B. No individual avatars running around in the hundreds with different clothing/armor/etc.
Those are just a few of the reasons.
Also, even with only 4,000 people in a world or on a shard, you think you will run out of people to meet? Are you telling me that you have met every single player of every single mmorpg you have played?
Given the choice between stable servers with multiple shards, or unstable servers with a single shard, I'll take multiple shards any day.
Edit: You figure how to put 8 million people on ONE shard, and Blizzard will kiss your feet and name you God.
EVE maintains approximately 5-10 times the concurrent users of most WoW servers. I'll split what affects and doesn't affect the maximum user count per server.
Doesn't:
Anything graphics related. Believe it or not the numbet of bytes required to transmit each item on a character is unlikely to be above 2 or 3 if that. the amount of detail required to render that item has absolutely nothing to do with the way the server structure is setup. Also WoW and EVE would be close to the number of objects required to transmit information for. Figure on average 12 items for a wow character that are shown (not even going to count faces and such because of the pitifully small amount of options would make it likely less then a byte) to about 8-10 for a ship in EVE(8 weapons plus tanking mod graphics). Graphics in general are all on the side of your computer, the effects of the ability is not rendered by the server it's just a code that is sent to the other users in range.
Game Mechanics, this goes into both since it really depends on the game mechanics, individual game mechanics do not effect server architecture and max users unless its something that is inefficently designed. Besides that code wise it doesn;t affact it much
Does:
Game mechanics, told you it would be in both. Game mechanics matter because of player density. Its the problem that EVe has at the moment because it encourages large groups of players interacting in a small environment. a 40v40 battle in EVE is considered a small to medium skirmish where as in WOW that covers the largest of the battlegrounds. If the players work together in larger clusters the amount of data being sent out to each player increase exponentially. If the system forces players to spread apart and limits the maximum number of people that are on average to intereact then its easier to maintain stability(the fact that blizzard servers still go down semi-regularly is kind of sad in that regards).
Player movement, really depends on the amount of what i call "Rabid bunnism" in your game. The more a game encourages players to do erratic movements then the more it will be a problem, WASD movement does not take up much more bandwidth by itself. WoW has far more movement related network traffic then CoX. this is because of the fact that it is beneficial in WoW to have your character jumping around while changing direction as much as possible to get out of facing in combat.
Difficutly... The big enchilada for this problem, In the end it comes down to the number of transactions/computations per second that the server CPUs needs to do. If you can spread the number of users out then it comes down to creating the server sysmte to handle it. Personally a trip through CCP's london server center would be a near wet dream for a IT guy like myself just ot see how they have it all setup in Real life, but the key is the design itself which would be no small task. Sharding is a easier cheaper, method ot designing your server/game architecture it allows you to force players to spread out to minimize network load and generally makes it cheaper to build and maintain the server systems.
Overal in the end I would say the choice comes down to the desired amount of people the devs want to interact with each other at one time. CCP wanted EVE players to work in large groups to accomplish goals, Blizzard wanted to limit the number of people that interact to a very small managable number. As such they both designed their games around that and i would highly doubt that you will see blizzard ever trying to increase the size of thier combats to anythign ever capable of being classed as "epic-sized". CCp will try and push that at every chance it can get and pays for it with a very expensive extremely complex server architecture that wil by devblogs be getting even larger and more complex over the next few years to allow for even more players in the game.
Well even EVE has two live servers one for China and the other for the rest of the world, the reason not to have one big server is massive lag also if the server crashes then your game is AWOL until it's fixed. EVE has problems due to the fact that large fleet battles were encouraged when the playerbase was sub 50k and the peak amount of users was no more than 5k. It was easy to handle, however now the server has reached the limits on what it can handle. When 30k people are online you can't have a large fleet battle, assaulting stations is a mere slideshow and even 20 vs 20 battles ends up lagging out many of the participants.
I used to support the one server for everyone philosophy until EVE seemed to hit a wall and the lag beast set up home on the server. Nowadays I'd prefer the multiple servers philosophy as I prefer smooth gameplay over the benefits of having one world, having one server has benefits for gameplay until there are too many users. I think CCP need to set a cap on their server and open a new one instead of upgrading the current one with little to no effect.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
The cleanest and easiest way to set this up would be the GW way. Instanced combat areas and sharded towns. Everyone can see everyone who is online at any given time, even though they are on many different servers at a time. This wouldn't work for a world PvP based game like EVE, but it is still the only real way to have a single "world" where everyone can interact with everyone else, and not kill the servers. Another possible way that is not quite as clean in the EQ way, zoning. Each zone can be on a different server, or shard the zone and have multiple instances of it at a time, ala GW and their floating shard system in towns. that way the world is one world, but everyone can still interact with everyone, and there can still be world PvP. The only drawback is that the only guarantee you have of being in the same shard as someone else is to party with them, or know where they are.
"There are two great powers, and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
John Parry, to his son Will; "The Subtle Knife," by Phillip Pullman
Well EVE has the advantage of outerspace! Ships don't need animations, they're just textured polygons with a few lights. It's just a lot easier to do.
Which allows stuff like this, which is kind of cool.
Edit: fixed link.
Still waiting for your Holy Grail MMORPG? Interesting...
The reason is that nobody is as clever as you.
because MMORPG worlds are too tiny to support that many people in them. and more importantly it's easier to design and do the programming with fewer people.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
It is possible to have one big world.
Just look at the server software Big World Tech provides.
It's a cluster server where you can combine as many servers as you want, to take of the work load. I pressume it's the same way EVE works.
http://www.bigworldtech.com/games/index.php
Futilez - Mature MMORPG Community
Correcting people since birth.
It is because of laziness and lack of ambition on the part of developers.
It is NOT because of technological barriers.
If developers weren't so lazy and lacking in ambition, they would develop better technology, which would destroy any barriers, making massive worlds possible.
The improvement of technology is based on development and demand. If developers and producers demand the technology, then it would be created and improved, and the barriers destroyed.
Software technology is hardly the limit when it comes to what the OP is asking for. The hardware can handle it plenty well. All you need is the software to be developed, which requires desire, demand, and ambition.
Current software technology is NOT a barrier. The barrier is Ambition, Ideas, Hard Work, and Money to fund such developers.
All good developping teams that are well funded produce exactly what they set out to produce, regardless of how high or low their ambition is. If you have the money and a competant team, you can do anything you want.
Just look at any of the new "big" future releases. The next-gen star wars and Indiana Jones games, Crysis, Bioshock, Assassins Creed, etc. Look at current releases such as Halflife2, WoW, etc. Look at great ideas like Vanguard, and thus what happens when you lack the money.
Because one world/server simply can't handle 1,000,000 players at the same time.
It could if they wanted it to and had the producer (money) support and a hard working dev team.
People who say impossible are just giving developers/producers an excuse to not be ambitious.
Not very many MMO's even have a million players, but even then it would be as simple as connecting current servers with one another in a cluster. It wouldn't be one server, but it WOULD be one world.
The fact that all current MMO's have server transfers and multiple servers proves that it's possible in an archaic form. If developers actually worked to make their MMO especially big (one world), it would be completely possible.
Everyone here must understand that just because it is ONE WORLD, does not mean it has to be ONE server. It would be multiple servers that make up one world.
Stop talking rubbish.
Futilez - Mature MMORPG Community
Correcting people since birth.
As some others have said, it's not impossible to have one big server with some good engineering. However, it's rarely even considered because if the game is successful, the game world itself will need to be enormous to accomodate all the concurrent players. Just imagine half a million people in Ironforge at the same time.
On a technical level, something like WoW would use dynamic load balancers so that the cluster of people in Town A might be handled by a server* (or server process), and they'd automatically switch over to new servers as populations shifted around. Or, a much easier way, designate X number of servers for specific regions based on historical population levels. However, this can easily lead to serious lag if the players all decide to storm something together on a whim.
The reason EVE accomplishes this so easily is that they have a very modular design as far as play areas go. Each system is easy to split off onto its own server process if need be, and there doesn't need to be any network communication between systems other than to notify when a ship is jumping in (chat is most likely on a separate server). In such a large game, the network code doesn't even have to be all that particularly impressive since it's rare that hundreds of ships will all be within range of each other. And even when they are, the lack of freeform flight reduces the network transmission requirements dramatically. Games like warcraft and everquest send tons of updates when characters turn and move. In EVE, it only needs to send the new heading and probably an occasional update to confirm position.
*As noted in a prior post, there is a difference between one server and one game world. The servers I refer to here are all clustered together to manage a single game world.
Don't know the technical part of why or why not everyone can be on one server but I would guess even if they could do it they rather not for business reasons. If you have one server and it goes down you have angered your entire subscriber base which is not good but if you have hundreds of servers like WoW and one goes down, you only have temporarily angered a few, which is less than a bump in the road, who probably will just log into a working server and play and be happy.
From my experience in servers being down in MMO's, it's usually ALL (or most, 90%) of the servers are down, or the login server being down (meaning nobody can join any server).
There have been few times in my long MMO career where only a few specific servers were down except scheduled downtimes. Most of the time, it's all of the servers for one reason or another.