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Single, Shardless worlds?
Dhaeman
Member Posts: 531
Out of curiousity:
Which upcoming MMORPGs will be featuring all of the gameworld on a single game server? I know Dark and Light has this in their plans but I was curious as to which others games will be trying it out too.
Comments
Roma Victor
Maybe The Chronicle(I really have no idea for some reason I thought it did though)
Your mind is like a parachute, it's only useful when it's open.
Don't forget, you can use the block function on trolls.
Under current hardware technology, a shardless mmo is impossible.
If I remember correctly, the largest servers of today can handle roughly 2-3 thousand players at once, but anything much more than that and massive lag sets in. =/
It will be a long time before anything like this happens (if ever)..
Suggestion-
Make a huge world
Sections of the world would be devided up like a server
IE like this
Continent 1 has it's own server, with a bunch of different cities and a capital, consists of many different servers (some towns would have their own servers, especially the capital city)
A player could reach the level cap without ever leaving this continent because it's so massive
Same with continent 2, 3, and maybe 4.
Each would be equally good so that players dont amass in one.
I'm not talking about Guild Wars type, where a city has 4 or 5 different instances that you click. I'm talking about how you break up the world into servers, each having a different look and feel so that it feels like your in a real world and you can still meet up with your friends if they ended up on a different continent (you'd just have to travel really far)
Do you guys get what I'm saying?
Much like how WoW uses two seperate servers for its two continents, and then a seperate server for instances and such. IMO this type of setup is ideal, super high character immersion, and not to mention sprawling landscapes that let you actually EXPLORE!!!
I would love to see a developer create a game with like 3 continents and this same type of server setup. Have 2 continents belong to seperate factions and have the third be the best area for resource gathering and high lvl content. This is of course more geared towards PVP in mind, but thats my forte
This would incourage parting groups and a fighting over territory, which is what I have always wanted in a game...
And I'm not talking about fighting over territory like in L2 where the only territory fighting was only against farmers... I'm talking about faction wars between opposing forces over good resource areas, etc.
that makes perfect sense. Then, have all chat run on a separate server of its own, so even though youre split across servers, it feels the same, because theres no gaps in communication.
I shall try that... some day
Eve Online is shardless and has 20k players on at once. It hardly runs flawlessly but when it ran up to about 15k at a time it still ran just as well as a loaded WoW server. The problem with another company going "shardless" is that Eve has no real backgrounds to speak of and obviously anything not set in air or space would.
that makes perfect sense. Then, have all chat run on a separate server of its own, so even though youre split across servers, it feels the same, because theres no gaps in communication.
I shall try that... some day
Except it would be quite the problem if one server malfunctions.
Less of a problem IMO than if the entire game world went down...
If say just the instance server went down, or of 1 continent went down, It would be a much easier problem to fix since its more isolated, and you'd still be able to have your other players online and playing while your resolving the issue. I've seen this multiple times in WoW, and at least this divides the complaints up haha.
It's not a matter of infrastructure, as EVE Online has already managed this. I consider the problem of content quite more severe.
What's the point of having a large world, as as Dark and Light's, if the content is not unique in each region? I'd rather have a small but meaningfully filled map, with quests, points of interest (monuments, etc), rather than a vast map full of repetition.
Currently playing:
* City of Heroes: Deggial, Assault Rifle/Devices Blaster. Server: Defiant.
* City of Villains: Snakeroot, Plant/Thorns Dominator. Server: Defiant.
Wrong, every area in World of Warcraft has it's own server, which are linked in a cluster. However, a different server cluster is used for the different continents.
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No Userbar here, sorry to disappoint.
Im pretty sure Worlds of Warcraft uses more then 2-3 servers per server. Its just that the game loads the new area when your in a certain range of it. I know EVE uses multiple servers per server block, like 20, and they load as you jump throughout the galaxy.
Each individual area in World of Warcraft runs on a different individual server. So I think there are 40-50 individual computer servers per realm.
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No Userbar here, sorry to disappoint.
as others have already noted, this is already how it works nowadays.
Each "server" or "shard" is actually a server cluster (or more) consiting of any number from 2 to 64 different servers with each server devoted to a certain function or region of the game. It has been like this since UO and it has not changed. (in UO you could even "feel" when you approached a server line).
THe problem is one of content as said before. Most mmorpgs sports 1-3 starting zones. Having, say, 50000 players all there would causate massive problems beside the lag. You won't be able to see the monsters or the npcs... but just a mass of people standing right next to you. Each monster would be attacked at the same time by hundreds of player creating a real mess.
EVE works because of the vastity of the galaxy and the fact not many newbies comes to the game at the same time. So the servers can manage the workload, but we know that if you gather 2-300 ships in the same system, the shard is gonna crash.
Sadly, the vastitty of Eve is viable for a space game where systems are constituted of a few points of interest in middle of a lot of nothing, but in planet-based games, this is simply much harder.
DnL are doing it, not with excellent results for now from what i heard, but the game is not out yet, so we will see what they pull out of the cap.
A solution to the problem? i frankly don't know. Multiple copies of areas ala CoH or GW kinda defeat the whole purpose of having a single gigantic server.
"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime"