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Do single servers make more sense?
zethcarn
Member UncommonPosts: 1,558
Prime example is EVE Online but of course it's huge open space. But if you consider how smaller/older games have to constantly merge servers to maintain a healthy population. Wouldn't it makes more sense to have just one server for the entire player base from the very benginning? Now I know your first concern is LAG, but if it is done like City of Heroes it would be no problem. When a certain "zone" reaches too many players a duplicated zone is created to host more players. And everyone on your friend/guild list will always show up in the same zone.
Tell me what you think. Should new MMOs use one server?
Comments
The big AAA games are shooting for over a million subs, close to two million subs.
After a game's initial opening months, concurrent players, on the server at the same time, is usually around 10%. So for every 10 players, 1 is always playing the game.
So you're looking at 200K players on at the same time, for a successful game.
We're not talking space, so they can't spread out like EVE.
What's a town going to look like with 10K players there? Way to crowded, way to much lag.
To spread them all out, you need like 30 or 40 instances of that town, maybe more.
You do solve the problem of consolidating servers.
But you create the problem of splitting up your players.
IN the normal game with say 3K on a server, I'm going to run into you in town, and in a dungeon, if we play at the same times, and are close to the same levels.
But what if you're in instance 27, and I"m in instance 19? And the next time we play, I'm in instance 11, and you're in instance 23?
It would go from feeling like a world where you begin to know the inhabitants, to a lobby game, where you never see the same people twice.
this ^^^
That's why I mentioned: people that are on your friend's list (or guild) will always show up in the same instance automatically.
Yes, from a player's perspective, it should play like a single "server" no matter how many pieces of hardware the company uses to support their game. Guild Wars did this a long time ago. And added "channels" for the times that some game area gets highly crowded. But from a player's perspective, it all acts as one server. If i play GW and you play GW i 'll just tell you my name and you will find me in game and we can play together. Simple as that. No need to move servers, reroll toons from start on new servers and so on.
And i don't buy the thing some people claim that "GW isn't a MMO" and that the world wasn't shared. Sure the world wasn't shared but cities were shared. With that technology, they could implement exactly the same thing on external, shared, areas. Just give the option to players to change "channel" when it gets crowded.
"Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars combat, exploration and character progression. In Alganon, in addition to these we've added the fourth pillar to the equation: Copy & Paste."
Wich is basicly what Cryptic did with STO and all their other titles
STO takes the cake tho.Its more like "Loading Screens for Instances Online" if anything.And all instances are pooled in little groups of 50 ppl.Imothep is right in what he said just go play STO to experience it for yourself.
EvE hat bcs of its setting the best condition and oprtunity to break with the tradition of splitting the playerbase into fragments sending them to different servers and the time is right to find a solution alike for the non-space-mmos too.
Channeling and Instancing is working nowadays and if they start not asking what server you want to start at but in what npc-city do you live and what is the number of the house of yours all friends and guild can stay together easy while the fragments of the playerbase are not longer disconnected to each other.
For PvE/PvP/RP you set a flag and if necessary there are instances for the different tastes of gameplay...
Server-Merges are no longer a problem...
AND i would like to see a worldwide server at a location the connectivity is good to all continents so there are many prime times and the sun ever shines while its always night^^
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As far as your idea of "guild/friends list showing up in my zone automatically" it'll probably never happen. There's 2 huge problems with it. First are technical issues. What if a guild has too many people on for one zone? Who has priority? If Mr. X is in my guild and on your friends list, does he go to your zone or mine? What if someone wants to join a group in some other zone? Second is customer relations. No matter the reasons, if you shift folks automatically there will be some that won't like it. Which means companies won't like it.
Champions has a decent system for this currently. In any given area of the world there is a global chat channel that covers all zones. When you join a group the game asks if you want to be shifted to the group leader's zone. But that's probably as colse to it will get.
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
~Omar Khayyam
Then what if i am friend of A and B but they aren't friends, so A is in instance #34 and B is in instance #12? Or if one instance is full and can't contain all the guild members?
You'll create more problems than you solve, and destroy any apparence of community.
What you *can* do is make a huge world and NOT force everyone to do the same path and visit every place in the world doing the same quest chain (it's the Eve Online way, basically you tend to stay around one place for a lot of time and get to know other "neighbors"... you don't *have* to visit any place or go anywhere in order to continue to progress your character and stuff... long-range travelers are mostly merchants, pvp and pve players tend to have their own "hunting grounds" and seldom leave them)
Just noting that the answers are going to be different depending on how "sandbox" the game design is.
Once upon a time....
Single server is best. But you wil lhear lag excesues, becouse game servers arent run on new hardware. Split popuation and u can use 5yo servers with ease.
To add to this, there isn't really a one-size fits all answer. It depends on the scope of the game and what the developers want to achieve. In EvE, territorial control and large fleet combat is often advertised. These features make more sense in a single server where that control of territory has an impact on everyone and therefor has more meaning. Now, if you look at WoW, there is some territorial control of sorts (Wintergrasp would be an example), but there is much more focus on the overall story line so splitting people up is not really a detractor from the game (even less so with Dungeon Finder).
My personal preference is for single-server, but not for the sake of having a single-server so much as the features that I feel are implied in that scenario.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
Maybe that's all a company can afford. I don't see it as that big an issue. You stil have to choose which server or which zone you go to. Frankly, if the comapny takes the money saved with 5 yr old hardware and spends it on better graphics or more content I'd consider it a win.
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
~Omar Khayyam
Ah geez. Some perspectives in this thread are realistic. But many want instances or multiple shards. Instances do work but they take away immersion. Multiple shards also work but they also take away immersion, especially if you are telling a story. You can have a single shard like EVE but everything is zoned off which also takes away from immersion. Here is a solution in which I think may work but may still have to use some zoning techniques.
Create one colossal world. I am talking about the size of a world three to four times of Darkfalls or Vanguards. Have multiple shards that are linked in one world. This can work I believe.
Divide the world into 6 chunks using the cardinal directions. (Imagine a map with longitude and lattitude cordinates, each chunk would be the block) North East, North, Nort West, Central East, Central, Central West, South East, South and South West. Each of these can be implemented as a single shard. Essentially, each of these 6 servers will be linked together. These 6 single shards are sub shards which are linked to a master shard.
From a players perspective in game, when they traveled over to another shard it would just feel like zoning. This also gives ample opportunity for the world to be non instanced and seamless for each shard. The only immersion breaker would be the loading screen to a new single shard.
This design can work if the capacity of players succeed or breach 100-200k. However, if the game flops its going to be barren like Vanguard was a few months after launch. This design also relieves server stress and lag tension for players. A flaw I do see if the majority of population is in one single shard at a time.
Eve has less stuff to render. There's no mailboxes, no fountains, no chickens, no grass, no blacksmiths hut, no tavern, etc.
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A typical MMO has all that stuff so it requires a lot more processor power. That's why there is more instancing, to get down on the system requirements needed.
.
So having one big server for a typical MMO is harder, will require that the customer has a better PC and will be laggy.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
I don't think the EVE example is relevant.
EVE is stars. It's easy to generate stars. They all look the same.
But ground based games are rocks, and trees, mountains, rivers and canyons, etc.
How do you generate something like that, as big as EVE, without it being repetitious?
I mean you COUOLD just duplicate the terrain over and over, but that would be incredibly disorienting. Gee, this mountain range and stream is the same one I've seen 8 times, but I've been traveling ina straight line. Where the heck am I?
Or you could use a program that randomly generates terrain, but that usually looks very bland compared to terrain designed by hand.
Or could could spend a bazillion dollars on the game hiring artists to design that much terrain, which means you'd go broke.
How about free server transfers?
I don't think it's very hard technology to transfer a character from one server to another.
Something like a 72 hour wait period during which you can't play, and your character is transfered to any server, that is not overcrowded.
Free.
Once a server is underpopulated, you send out notice, either transfer yourself, or we'll transfer you to a random server.
It's not a big deal, because even after that, you can transfer to a server you like. Free.
My thoughts: http://elvesmustdie.com/2009/02/single-shard-universe-eve-online/
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And if you take the EVE style, and put that into a fantasy game world, it would require a very, very large world. There's two issues here, that I can think of off the top of my head.
1) You'd want to both spread the players out by offering many starting points/cities, as well as design the game world so that players would centralize into different "zones". Player built and run cities during the growth stage ( a massive thing at the start ) and the means/incentives to tear them down and move, and you'd want a means to cause players to keep within what I think of as trade routes, leaving huge tracts of lands open outside of the branch system of trade and centralization.
2) Video streaming (term?) in MMOs will be a huge boost in making such a fantasy world. And I think we're getting very close to seeing this. I think maybe Richard Garriott is on this track, and also many others.
Once upon a time....
Being able to play with any person that is subscribed to the game without the hassle of server transfers would be nice.
Unfortunately, even if we were to ignore the tech limitations, the game world would either have to be obscenely large(which still doesn't solve the problem of popular zones being overcrowded ala EVE's jita), or i suppose the game must have a very niche appeal and therefore would have planned for a rather low pop.
As has already been said overcrowding would ultimately push for single zones to have several instances anyway, an idea which i really dislike as it breaks immersion, is annoying as all hell, and which makes having several servers without zone instancing seem the more attractive of the options again.
If there is anything that we have learned from MMO's is that people are going to geather into one general location no matter how many options you offer them. You could have the largest game world ever seen and thousands of cities. But people are still going to find a general spot to meet up at and talk and stuff. Then once that happens its just going to be a cascading effect until that spot becomes so overpopulated the game can't handle it.
This is why they put limits on the number of people allowed in the game world. It doesn't matter how much hardware (new or old) you through at the problem. It's just not going to fix it. Every person that meats up in an area creates that much more information that needs to be tracked, sent, and recieved. And once enough people reach the area the issue becomes beyond solveable. If you add 1 person into a mix of 100 person you increased the problem by 100. Not just by 1 since now that data has to travel to 100 more people. This is why Eve has lag issues in large fleet battles and they manage to stay on the cutting edge of tech. It's just a issue that can not reasionably be solved with how the internet works and how information is tracked.
This is why developers have started to explore the single server with multiple instances approach. As you really do get the best of multiple worlds and it does solve alot of problems with a multiple server approach. In WoW they charge you $20 a pop to transfer to a new server (same with Aion from what I hear or will be anyways). Now if I hop into say STO it doesn't matter as I can instantly move to other instances where my friends are playing. Theres no chance of rolling on different servers or anything.
It's just something that is not going to change anytime soon. You get the multiple server approach (with limited server pops) or multiple instance approach (with limited instance populations) and thats about where the options are at this time.
More MMOs are switching to a single world option, they are just doing it with instancing. So every logs into the same thing, no choice on login screen, but you can be standing in the same exact spot and never see someone else standing in the same exact spot because he is in another instance of that town. I'm not sure how much I like that over choosing my world and always seeing the people there.
The positives is that you can't ever pick the dead server and have to pay to transfer out. It also means you won't level up someone and then find out your friends are on another world and either have to pay to move or reroll.
The downside is it is immersion breaking to walk out of a city, walk back in, and have all the players change because you changed instances. That can also have HUGE effects on PvP when someone can run across a boundary and disappear into a different instance then you so you can't finish the fight.
I like to always run into the same people and get to know them so I do prefer a world which isn't completely instanced. The technology is a long way off from being able to have 10,000 people on a server at the same time with no instancing and not crash. The best games out there can handle <100 people or so in one area without issues, so for now it is either a hugely instanced world or multiple worlds.
Ihm, on terrain redundancy, what could be done is this...did you ever play the board war game Squad Leader? They had boards with maps on that could be flipped around so that any side will match up to any other side of the adjoining board maps. Streams always met streams, roads always met roads, etc. But flipping the maps meant that sometimes a stream might run in any direction.
So what you'd do is use this idea as a base, then go in and tune it all by hand. Widen a stream here and maybe add an island, change the course a little here or there, etc.
Then you'd add all the special stuff. Caves, ruins, villages, dungeons, all that would be separate after the base map is made and "stitched" together, and polished for uniqueness.
Once upon a time....
Why isn't EvE relevant? I mean, there are competitors such as BlackProphecy and Jumpgate Evolution so it exists in a relevant MMO genre. Regardless of what is being rendered though, the underlying mechanic isn't new. EvE accomplishes a lot through zoning which has been used in fantasy MMOs in the past and could certainly contribute to a single-shard design for a fantasy game. When you want to add more "land" you can introduce them as new zones. They wouldn't be capped instances like the dungeons everyone is used to so you still get the single community versus dividing people up into channels. (not to say instances couldn't be present in the game of course. Just clarifying a difference).
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
Aside from ping time issues, single servers do make more sense.
Zones = outdated technology. The current technology is seamless game worlds. Any argument involving zones is ridiculous. In a seamless world if an area becomes too populated for the current server structure to cope, add another machine to the array and do some load balancing in the bogged down servers region.
MMO players = fickle. 300k subscribers one month. 50k the next. Instead of opening and closing down instances of the world in order to artificially inflate population, let the population all be on one large world. Darkfall makes good use of this. So does Asheron's Call, EvE, and Entropia Universe.
GM staff = more effective on a single world. If you have a staff of 20 GM's, splitting them up over 20 worlds makes 1 GM for every world. Combining their efforts in one world allows the developer to track problems and respond more effectively, increasing customer servicability.
Single world = single storyline. It dispenses with the players who argue that worlds are evolving differently and should show it.
Single world = single cluster of servers to maintain. Size may be bigger, but monitoring is ultimately easier.
/waits for the amateur IT group to tell me how wrong I am.
/prepares to laugh at the amateurs for being... amateur.
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Crappy, petty people breed and raise crappy, petty kids.
My only question is regarding the quoted. The most successful example of a single-shard game, that I am aware of at least, employs zones. So, is this technology really outdated versus just being tried-and-true for some scenarios?
Again, it goes back to there being no one-size-fits-all solution, but I am not sure the underlying "zone" mechanic has seen the end of its shelf life.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
"Single world = single storyline. It dispenses with the players who argue that worlds are evolving differently and should show it."
Huge huge plus, in my opinion.
Once upon a time....