Simus Marcus
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Posted - 2005.11.09 00:28:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Tide Oden
Well, geographic concurrency is always the weak spot in any MMO. Despite instancing and redundant systems, most MMOs have to map virtual space to specific zone servers at some point in their setup. EQ, DOAC, WOW, SWG, RO, GW, Eve, and so on all have this technology. Its kinda the defacto backbone of any MMORPG.
Guild Wars is the only MMO I've ever seen that is really resistant to high concentrations of players/player-owned objects. It doesn't solve the problem, but side-steps it via a dynamic instancing and zone-server allocation system. The rest have to handle it in the normal fashion - beefy hardware , selective instancing, and in-game pressures to make players spread out. Obviously such methods can be defeated as they rely on cleverness rather than absolute barriers.
For example - a game designer could simply set caps on the density of renderable objects per virtual zone. This would enforce a maximum level of load on any given zone server. However, that would suck. How well would the game work if players couldn't enter a given zone due to too many objects/people already being in it? Or not be able to create any new virtual objects in a given space due to the cap having been hit?
The reason that companies use multiple servers is because the power of any one server cannot scale with its load as it is a finite amount. Thus clusters and arrays of servers are used so that processing can take place in parallel and can scale with demand. This type of processing is still limited however by the need for servers to communicate with each other. If 2 servers are assigned one zone, then each server has to share its data with one other server to maintain consistancy. If 20 servers are managing a single zone, then each server has to match data with 19 other servers to maintain consistancy. So with 20 servers there's (19*19) 361 times as much cross-server communication taking place as there is with only 2 servers. See the lag yet?
Its never as simple as - why didn't the company make sure this couldn't/wouldn't/didn't happen? There are limits on technology folks.
Maybe its time they gave up the goal of all accts in one big universe and created a 2nd cluster .. whole new universe .. whole new economy .. Im sure most would stay due to time invested, but i been playin for a month and a half .. I'd jump to new cluster .. and less lag.
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