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Single server MMO: why aren't most developers going this route?
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,400
Some MMO are going the route of having single server, while others may have multiple servers. I was wondering, but what's the downside to single server worlds, that make many developers go with the multiple-server model?
this such as a Cross server LFG tool wouldn't be needed if MMO games were more single server structure, you agree? So what's the deal behind it?
this such as a Cross server LFG tool wouldn't be needed if MMO games were more single server structure, you agree? So what's the deal behind it?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
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Because it limits the hell out of performance when it comes to certain aspects of mmo's. Although the times are changing.
how come certain (unnamed) MMO can do it while others can't? What determines this?Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Massive lag comes to mind, especially concerning animations and poly counts. Eve only has to worry about space ships, no real atmophereic poly's or animations
Massive lack, different language and what not. So no single servers aren't going to cut it EvE is a different beast they don't have to render as much models in a short period of time, because there aren't character animations, they just have to render the ship and some combat style.
We need a MMORPG Cataclysm asap, finish the dark age of MMORPGS now!
"Everything you're bitching about is wrong. People don't have the time to invest in corpse runs, impossible zones, or long winded quests. Sometimes, they just want to pop on and play."
"Then maybe MMORPGs aren't for you."
Yeah from what i have always heard it is that fact that you would get imbalanceing lag for those that are further from the servers location then antoher player. Like if you were in Japan trying to play a game with the server being in Europe or such, compared to a person from europe trying to play the same game. Also stability issues having all 3 million players playing a game on a single server would make it more densely populated, but also drive up the amount of thigns you would need to deal with on screen as well. Also what you would have to do to allow and help the server to physicallly function well with such a load on the system too.
I agree it's bullshit! I think if we had one server MMOs then population wouldn't ever be a problem in MMOs.
Look at Fallen Earth sure its not a sandbox FFA PvP and all that but it still gives everyone that sense of population in a an actual world.
Its because some people want less populated servers and some people want high populated servers. Another thing is that its easier to make the small amount of people funnel through small zones than large zones that will get filled by a large amount of people.
Imagine world of warcraft if there was one server. The zones will have to be a LOT larger or itll need to be instanced n stuff. o.o
Now lets look at something newer like FF14. Imagine if it were only 1 server. Itll be jam packed even if there were only 30k players. o.o
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10 million people wouldn't fit in Azeroth.
Eve is mostly just open space, and it only has 350,000 players.
Because innovation and experimentation is dead. Even something as simple as experimenting with servers is "too risky" for modern day MMO "designers".
It really depends on the design of the game and the server architecture. If you have a space game that doesn't have a whole lot of objects that need to be checked for collision and there aren't all that many players in the same proximity most of the time, then your going to be a lot more efficient network wise than if you have an area that often has many players in a close proximity who must all be checked for collision, and must be aware of one another.
Another limiting factor is the size of the world. If your doing a game in space then you can have many areas that are generated with not a whole lot of world design going into them, which again helps for something like a single shard server. Where if your designing a land based game you can generate the terrain, but without decorations, landmarks and monsters, it's going to be pretty boring. It takes more developers to develop the same size world in those situations, and it's less easy to generate the content, which means that in general land based worlds will be smaller and more subject to overcrowding. Network load grows exponentially the more players or npcs who are in awareness range of one another. So a crowded world is much less efficient.
I think most developers would love to have as many players on a single server as possible, provided it wasn't overcrowded. But it's not as viable for certan game designs under current technology.
https://www.therepopulation.com - Sci Fi Sandbox.
They don't want to experiment + it is quite a challange to do one big server or even just few big servers instead of i.e. 50 'normal' ones.
Though I think that's what should be future. Either one big server or few very big ones. Like one server for PvE, one for PvP, one RP. Maybe one hard server / custom rules, etc
Anyway themeparks games like WoW don't really hmm need it, as developers tunnel players to instances making 95% gameplay at max level in instances anyway, changing their games into practically lobby games.
That's other matter though...
If this unnamed MMO is EVE, think about it for a moment. It's actually quite heavily instanced. Every time you transition through a gate, you're going to another instance. If necessary, as I'm sure the case is, your session could then be passed to another physical server within the same cluster of servers that appear to act as one.
Now, doing this with the more standard open world MMOs would be quite tricky as you'd need to insert points where you would be transitioned from one piece of hardware to the other, and that's just asking for people to complain about loading screens.
As far as the server is concerned, the players may aswell be stick men, all the graphically intense work is done client-side. The problem with having a lot of people in a small area is the need to broadcast what one player is doing to every other player for every player in a timely manner.
In reply to the OP;
A game doesn't get better just because you have more players into it.
Most MMO's tend to be played SP style which totally defeats the point of them having more than one player at the server in the first place...
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Wrong.
I'm 100% sure you have no development, system analyzing, or software managing experience.
Somebody's post hit it 100% on the spot while everyone else is wrong. I'll let you guys figure it out. Now fight.
Even on one single server games players are divided by shards when population increases too much. If one million people log into EVE tomorrow i am sure even CCP would have to come up with something similar to divide the population.
How many servers SWTOR will launch with on release?
ShredderSE - Umm how many do they need? Maybe 6.
US, EU, Asian, France, German and Russian.
Subs will be so low there is no need for more
Snoocky-How many servers?
The first 3 months a lot...after that 2 i guess, one for PVE and 1 for PVP...
Thorbrand - SWTOR doesn't have longevity at all. Might be one of the shortest lived MMOs.
EVE server is actually several servers connected, right?
So it's a matter of logical separations rather than hardware limitations. Such as;
- Different languages
- Different rules (pve, pvp)
- A good relation betwwen land extension and players
- Closeness to players country (eu/us/asia).
At least this is what i think, don't know much about it.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
Well, I remember their servers being absolutely hammered by an in-game event a year ago (the destruction of Boneclaw). So, while their architecture can (notionally) handle lots of players in the big spread-out world all at once, it doesn't do so well with 300+ of them in the same area all at once.
The event was still a lot of fun...but FE can only do what it does because it doesn't have to handle hundreds of thousands of players all at once. From what I've heard they had a heck of a time with the servers during the F2P launch.
As has already been posted, this kind of idea has myriad problems associated with it, and they're not so easily dismissed with a simple expletive.
Lots of reasons.
Personally, I like the method Champions used. There was one 'world', but many instances of each zone. I'm not sure how well this would scale chat wise if you had a million people playing, but I liked the idea better than having named servers. It may have worked well with Champions because of the limited population.
I also like the way SWToR subdivides players in each zone into instances, even if I don't like picking servers. There's plenty of space to move around and get stuff done, but at the same time there's plenty of people for groups.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The problem isnt with games having only one server. The problem is with companys keeping barely living servers online longer than needed. WoW for instance has servers that at peak only have a few hundred people on it. Thats stupid to me. Rift is another one with an overload of dead servers. Consolidate the servers and keep people from feeling like they are paying 15 bucks a month for a single player game.
All Murlocs must die horrible, painful, bloody deaths!
I don't get why none of you are seeing the obvious way round the issues of lag or too many people in one zone and that is to clone the same zones over and over again. You can easily make seamless transitions between zones so you'd never realise and it can be smart about picking which one if you're in a group.
I just don't see why we don't see this, even EQ2 had a none seamless form of this and they decided to throw out like 20 servers instead. Them servers all died pretty quickly and cause you had no one to play with everyone quit. We see this trend in every MMO so I really don't get why we keep seeing it.
Well the obvious is that cloning zones sucks.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
Playing on another server is doing the same but you'll have less of a population...
Anarchy Online, back at it's peak, had a total of three servers. Two primarily english speaking, and one german.
If I remember right, the secondary english server, with the smaller population hit 250,000 players.
It was cool to have so many people in teh game world....it felt like a world.
And then the Notum Wars expansion was released. And we discovered that having all these people in one place for a PVP battle was worse than horrible.
As awesome as it sounds....it's just not practical. Hell, look at Darkfall during it's single-EU-server phase....a decent sized siege would crash the server every time.
There are REALLY good reasons that MMOs have evolved to smaller, multiple servers. At least until technology advances a LOT, this is the best we're going to get if we want a stable, enjoyable gaming experience.
Five reasons.
#1 - Server performance. You would have to have a fairly high powered server to cover a game with a moderate amount of things to track and calculate. More complexity in a game = more server processing power... especially if people are looking to concepts like untargetted combat and physics.
#2 - No backups. What if the one server crashes? What if the one server suffers a hardware failure?
#3 - No way to offer a different experience. Ultima Online learned pretty quickly that their allowance of open PvP and gear loss due to being killed meant that the same people would always be on top by repeatedly griefing everyone else, thus they opened a PvE server. Now those who don't want PvP don't have to have it.
#4 - Regioning issues. I like the ability to pick a server that's hosted closer to me. I like that in WoW there are servers with server times in PST, CST and EST.
#5, somewhat related to #4 - A worldwide market base. One server means that those outside of the country or continent aren't getting very good pings, and may not even get people that speak the same language. Some people still play cross-continent anyway, I've played with Austrailians and folks from Europe on WoW, but it's just not an optimal experience, especially when you consider group play and timezones.
Now, if you had said one overall world instead of one server, that's different. You could have different servers dedicated to different zones in the game and they would communicate with each other to send data around. You could have different "channels" in these zones to split up the population since nobody wants millions of people all in one world concurrently(there's no game world big enough for that). However this introduces load times between zones since you have to now connect to a different server by hopping zones. You could have one server keeping track of a few adjacent zones to alleviate this though. And then of course there's computer performance. Computer performance will always be an issue if you have too many people in one area, there -has to- be a way to split people up.
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Money.
You quickly reach a point where you lose money by trying to have enough power, both server and bandwidth to cope with too many things/people in one small area.
Really is simple as that, EVE spends so much cash trying to cope with large space battles that every year their profits are going way down compared to when they launched the game.
It is one of those trade off's. You make the amount of people and items and so on larger, and spend many times what you do for smaller zones and smaller pop caps, to get roughly the same gaming levels. It is just not worth it.