Originally posted by UOlover

Well if people think it can't be done it certainly won't be tried. That's certainly a way to get progress in this genre. I'd rather people try and fail than have these status quo games that wind up failing anyways.

 The question then becomes, if tried and failed . . .

Would you be one of the ones prising the publisher and developer for trying to move the gnre forward or would you be one of thyose flaming them for lag issues, releasing a game that wasnt ready, unplayability, etc...

Originally posted by dragonbrand

Would you be one of the ones prising the publisher and developer for trying to move the gnre forward or would you be one of thyose flaming them for lag issues, releasing a game that wasnt ready, unplayability, etc...

Games are failing to inpsire, there is no greater crime. It's not simply a matter of some technical issue. I bet there are developers out there who would be dying to have their problem be a technical issue for once.  If games are failing to inspire the entire genre has to go back to the drawing board and actually come up with some gameplay and features that will inspire. Nothing should be off the table.

Originally posted by UOlover

Well if people think it can't be done it certainly won't be tried. That's certainly a way to get progress in this genre. I'd rather people try and fail than have these status quo games that wind up failing anyways.

 Unfortunately no company is willing to lose tens or hundred's of millions of dollars to get told "nice try".

Originally posted by komarr

Originally posted by UOlover

Well if people think it can't be done it certainly won't be tried. That's certainly a way to get progress in this genre. I'd rather people try and fail than have these status quo games that wind up failing anyways.

 Unfortunately no company is willing to lose tens or hundred's of millions of dollars to get told "nice try".

Actually Aventurine already did.

It's called DARKFALL ONLINE.

Originally posted by komarr

 Unfortunately no company is willing to lose tens or hundred's of millions of dollars to get told "nice try".

 They already are, they might as well go for my nice try!

Remember we're not operating in imaginary land here. Year after year we are watching flop after flop. If the status quo was successful there would be no need for this pesky creativity.

Someone mentioned Guild Wars, and that's basically the best combination of avoiding the "low server pop" issue without running into the "degeneratively bad gameplay" issue.

To a degree permanent sharded servers has the appeal of letting more players feel like "top of the server", but it's just really not worth the disadvantages.  I don't like the possibility of ending up on a low-pop server (either by creating a char on the wrong server, which I've done, or by the server's pop simply drying up.)

I also don't like how WOW has 11 million players, and all your RL friends play, but you can never play with them because they're all on different servers.

Originally posted by Ihmotepp

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.

COUGHGuildWarsDoesThisAndItsFineCOUGH

Originally posted by uquipu

Eve has less stuff to render. There's no mailboxes, no fountains, no chickens, no grass, no blacksmiths hut, no tavern, etc.
.
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.

 Surely the scenery rendering is a client side issue? You only see what's in your immediate surroundings, regardless of how big the map is, so why would the size of the map make any difference to the client?

The reason EVE can manage to have 50k players simultaneously on a single shard is that EVE is zoned, by system (and again by region for features like the market). The zoning works because perceptually its makes sense for systems seperated by a jump gate to be seperate zones. 

But I dont see any real reason that a "ground-based" game cant do something similar. For a trivially similar example, imagine a "Pirates and Ninjas" MMO which is set on a large archipelago of 200+ islands. You have 200+ zone possibilities, meaning you can have up to 200 server nodes supporting the single shard. You could mask the zone loading with (for instance) a ship embarkation sequence. All the islands are accesible by every player, but in practice they'll be more spread out. It's up to the game designers to give the players reasons to do so (eg: resource density) but I dont see any real technical difficulty.

Originally posted by Hagonbok

Single servers destroy community. Simple as that. To get everyone on the same server the game needs to be heavily instanced. Even with EvE with the way the game is set up one might as well say that it's heavily instanced too. It sounds good on paper, but is a complete fail in practice. See CO and STO.

 The nearest you get to an instance is EVE is your station hangar which hardly counts. In space there are NO instances whatsoever. So one might as well say that EVE isn't instanced at all.

Do single servers make more sense?
yes there is no population problem if the game made around single server idea
if u have more server some will have less players and will bleed players until they die

Originally posted by Luxumaru

Originally posted by Ihmotepp

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.

COUGHGuildWarsDoesThisAndItsFineCOUGH

That may be fine for some players, but certainly not all.

Ihm, I tried to make this point earlier. The game design needs to give players reasons to spread out into many cities. There are lots of ways to do this, and still make it feel like it's a player's choice and that they have freedom. Malcanis just said: "All the islands are accesible by every player, but in practice they'll be more spread out. It's up to the game designers to give the players reasons to do so (eg: resource density) but I dont see any real technical difficulty." And that's one of the means to spread players out. Ideally, I think you want player built cities in such a huge world, and many options for management of their cities, as well as control of resources in their "zone of control", then players can control populations in a natural seeming way through regulations, taxes, etc.

So a city "busting at the seams" might be somewhat harder for non-citizens to function in, while cities in need of citizens might well be running recruitment drives and even caravans to bring people in. And resources would be a huge driving force for this in both growth and limitation of over population.

[quote]Originally posted by zethcarn
 That's why I mentioned:  people that are on your friend's list (or guild) will always show up in the same instance automatically.
[/b][/quote]

So what about friends of your friends? And friends of your friends of your friends? And so on. That simply doesn't work.

Heavily instanced games do not have a very healthy community. Even Guild Wars tries to keep as many players as possible in the same hub.

As long as they split Normal (PvE), RP, and PvP up I don't really mind much past that...But one Server with all mixed play styles is not for me at all...I absolutely hated that aspect of SWG...I could never understand why they did not offer at least one PvP Server...It's just stupid if you ask me...And I know no one did...

to answer the OP, i personally prefer one world with instancing-type technology to solve population issues rather than multiple copies of the same world (servers).  

when zone-instancing is done well, it's barely noticeable, whereas if thousands of people are on another copy of the world altogether, it's distracting.  but i guess it depends on personal preference of what creates/destroys immersion for players.  i know for many people being in a zone with only 500 out of the possible 1000 people breaks immersion, while having a whole separate copy of the world with different people does not.  Either way you're dealing with copies, so it's just a matter of the way your mind works.

The way EVE is built is pretty unique to the type of game it is, but i also doubt it can handle 1 million players on it's single server.

[quote]Originally posted by arieste
The way EVE is built is pretty unique to the type of game it is, but i also doubt it can handle 1 million players on it's single server.
[/b][/quote]

Actually, the server is a cluster, completely modular. You can simply add hardware to the cluster to increase the capacity. 1 million may be a bit of a stretch, but 300 to 500k might be possible (with some trouble).

Originally posted by komarr

Originally posted by UOlover

Well if people think it can't be done it certainly won't be tried. That's certainly a way to get progress in this genre. I'd rather people try and fail than have these status quo games that wind up failing anyways.

 Unfortunately no company is willing to lose tens or hundred's of millions of dollars to get told "nice try".

 ^^  This

That was my point earlier, AND the general gaming community would come down on them like no tomorrow for failing. I see people saying they want someone to try and be different but ultimate we all dont want "good try" to be the result. We all, gamers, developers and publishers, want the games to be successful.

Originally posted by zethcarn

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?

 

 

Simply put, yes.

There are adavantages and disadvantages to both types of server cluster set up.I do not think one really makes mor esense than another from a gameplay and consumer stance just perosnal preference.

Now from a Business standpoint I can see the single "world" server model making more sense.it would be more efficient in adding and subtracting hardware with fluctuations in game population,it would also be mro eeffecient when it came to support staff hiring and firing.This would save a company a lot of dollars over having multiple "world" servers with shardware server clusters for each.

From a PR standpoint it's great to because it makes it even harder for outsiders to know your actual population numbers and you never have empty servers.

I think it can be done without too much problem.  Like the OP said when a zone became too crowded just duplicate the zone.

So for example, instead of having 40 servers in Wow.  Have 40 instance of the zone, and people are free to move which ever zone they want to be in.  And zones can be closed or opened depend on the amount of people in the area.  I think there are games already doing this.

And to stop over crowding just put a cap on the number of players that can be in a zone. 

Another thing is people shouldn't expect every MMO to follow Eve's one universe model.  Eve can be eve because it's environment is just a blob of black empty space.  While Eve dont' have instance, it's zones is basically replica of other zones, just plain big blob of empty space.