Originally posted by almerel

1 server would be great for just about every game but WoW lol. Server caps of a couple million would be the kind of revolution the gaming community would like imo.

Yeah, WoW has such a large population. maybe if they grouped people up by region.

a NA server, Euro server and Korea server.

They might need to expand the gameworld a bit and make portal links to every city so players spread out more instead of all being in 1-2 cities.

I could see it working with maybe 2-3 million a server.

And keep in mind even though 2-3 million accounts are on a server doesnt mean thats how many players would be playing at once.

imo a server with that many accounts could probably have a steady stream of 500-750k players on during prime time.  Which wouldnt be bad and with a few tweaks would work with WoW.

It depends on the land mass. You fit 10M people in the WOW world, even there is no technical problems, every single inch of the land will be filled with people and it is no fun with that crowded a world.

WoW already makes heavy use of instancing.

no reason they couldn't (conceptually, the reality of legacy code is often different of course) just instance every region and allow people to choose whether they want that region all for themselves or if they want to play it with small amounts to huge amounts of players (having a choice on which instance to join).

they wouldn't even HAVE to have a menu to choose from whenever you cross a region's line.  they can have an option for what kind of population you prefer for overworld and dungeon areas, and then automatically select an appropriately populated (or unpopulated) instance for you (which you could always change manually, and could have you and your party member's synched to go to the same instances).

Originally posted by phatpetey

Hi,

Well I choose for multiple servers. Because in some games you already see that there are too many people playing on one server (waiting for mobs, lag in towns, ...). And that really sucks, it drains the fun of playing a MMORPG.
But on the other side I also agree with some of your points. Sometimes (in WoW) you really need to wait a long time till you find yourself a decent party to party with.

bear in mind such games are designed with smaller populations in mind while single server games are designed with bigger populations in mind.

So am I going to get to know all of these 300k people?  I don't think so.

I would rather have small free to run servers, so a group of 200 or so could all have their own server.  For hardcore roleplayers this is the way to go.  Especially if the game allowedfor GM interaction.

How could you possibly fit 300k people into a game world like WoW's? 

I'm pretty sure Eve can pull it off because most of the game "world" is empty space, so it can be pretty much as big as they want it to be.

Sure it can be done with 5 min delay on everything...

The drummer from def leppard only has one arm.....

Originally posted by metalhead980

I know atm due to technical limitations this isnt possible, but lets say it was possible. 

Would you prefer a MMO with one server/game world for the entire community or the multi- server system we have now where only about 5%-10% of the community actually plays together?

I'll toss up a poll I'm actually interested in reading what you guys think.

For the ones that seem to have trouble reading OPs i'll highlight something for you.

Obviously due to tech limitations you can't have a million freaking people on one server.

Read and understand a post before posting please!!!

 I am playing Planetside on the USA  server and I get no lag. Also that with Vanguard.  It feels like theres no reason to divide the people betwen usa/europe.  (other than patch hours, maybe)

Originally posted by GreenChaos

So am I going to get to know all of these 300k people?  I don't think so.

As it stands, if a server can handle 3k concurrent players, it will probably have over 100k characters at least infrequently played (counting alts).  Are you going to get to know all 100k of those?  Of course not.

In order to have a game where you really get to know people (apart from your guildies, where it doesn't matter if there are a thousand players on a server or a million), you have to restrict it to at most a few hundred characters per server--counting the ones that are offline at any given time.  That leads to maybe 10 or 20 players online at a given time, which for most games, simply isn't enough.

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The EVE model of one server with players greatly spread out won't work for a "theme park" game with heavily polished content.  If there are supposed to be 100k players online at a given time, and one geographic region can only hold 100 players, you need a thousand such regions.  You're not going to create all of that by hand.  If you go with randomly generated regions, you lose some polish.  If you make a lot of copies of various regions, you're effectively having lots of servers.

Most games now are useing a server farm which allows them to have several intances on each server,they set a certain number for each instance when thats met a new instance opens on that server.Example say its set at 30k for each instance and theres 10 instances thats 300k on that server alone.

EQ2 was one of the first that used this,they went as far as to use zone instances with in the game so no zone would get over crowded and you could join your friends too between instances if that instances wasn't too crowded.

Well, for a game like WAR? Abso-fuckin-lutely. But you're right, due to technical limitations it's just not possible (for a fantasy themed game anyways), so it's a pipe dream.

Besides that, EVE just broke the 51K Concurrent Users Online or whatever mark. That's great, but that really means there was, at max, only 51k people putting strain on the server, not 250K.

I'd go for the Guild Wars route of having multiple channels. Having just one world without channels would be too overcrowded, in the case of fantasy mmo's anyway.

I would love to see single server with massive worlds to contain everyone.

Idea; A giant world could have different areas similar to countries in real life..and you can go from start to finish in each area without leaving. (I'm talkin' big!)...

You could move to different areas of course....but starting in the different areas would be like the same game with all new content since the world is so big..... I can only dream since this would mean the devs would need to create about 4 games worth of content... Call me crazy--but thats what I would love to see!

Originally posted by objeff

I would love to see single server with massive worlds to contain everyone.

 

 

Idea; A giant world could have different areas similar to countries in real life..and you can go from start to finish in each area without leaving. (I'm talkin' big!)...

You could move to different areas of course....but starting in the different areas would be like the same game with all new content since the world is so big..... I can only dream since this would mean the devs would need to create about 4 games worth of content... Call me crazy--but thats what I would love to see!

Make it too big you have to much open space with no content like EQ2,DnL,too name a couple failures.

I agree, an empty world would ruin any game. 

Although a big game could be full of content...like I said it would be up to the devs to create about 4 games worth of content for just 1 world.... enough to hold a large populate and enough to replay a few times and not have to redo the same content.. I know I'll never see anything like that due to the amount of content and design needed.. but a man can dream. 

I agree, the term they us is Massive-Multiplayer-Online-Role-Playing-Game. Having more people to play with equals more FUN.

Originally posted by mmorpgmaner

The drummer from def leppard only has one arm.....

i saw a pregnant woman so i kicked her in the stomach...

Do you want to share the World of Warcraft gameworld with 300,000 other people at one time (and that's on a slow night)?  No?  Didn't think so. 

Eve Online can have a single shard because the game world consists of thousands of randomly generated sectors of mostly empty space.  If World of Warcraft had thousands of zones, then it too could have one server.  But it doesn't.