Massively Multiplayer Online game design choices – Servers and instances
Recently I’ve started playing Star Wars The Old Republic, which provoked few thoughts about MMO design in general
Server instances are one of the oldest design concepts in Massively Multiplayer Online games. Although this concept long outlived its usefulness it is still widely used by new games. I believe mostly because World of Warcraft is using it and a lot of people like to copy everything WoW.
Server instances solve issue of spreading the load of players and form nearly physical bounds allowing servers to handle a well defined amount of pressure. Unfortunately this pattern creates more issues than it solves. For instance a player may create a character on one server that becomes so popular that it becomes difficult to log in – as the server may put players that it cannot handle at the moment into a queue which empties when other players leave the game.
Another issue is that friends of said player may start playing on other servers, making it impossible for them to play together. Some companies fight this by providing character transfers, some even charge for this. However character transfers are a workaround they raise the operation costs (support) if it is not automated.
A different approach, taken by only a handful of games such as Star Trek Online, is to have one server and completely invisibly to players separate them across servers. If a server becomes full, new players connect to new instance without even knowing about it. If they however want to play with their friends, by creating a group the game can put them on same server.
This also solves issue with inevitable server migrations – once game becomes less popular, most server’s population becomes so scarce that the company behind the game decides to merge existing servers to save costs and increase overall population per server. As with any change, it comes with mixed feelings from any communities and issues of its own – like conflicts in player character names.
Another solution is to have only one world – without instances. This is least used pattern as it affects other game design choices as well. For example the game world must be designed in a way that it can support hundred of thousands, even perhaps millions of players in a way that it would not create overcrowded areas.
There are also other technical and design issues with this approach that I would like to discuss in future.
Arena Engine first tech demo!
I’ve announced this before last week here but I’ll mention it again – ArenaEngine will be presented for the first time in public at the next Open Coffee in Cork (that’s tomorrow!) and the Beta1 will be announced soon as well.
Read MoreIf you want to see my LinkedIn profile, click on this button:
Member of
