Meanwhile, back on topic....

I'm one of the PlaneShift developers and I thought the review at the top of this thread was pretty accurate.  Let me try to address his points in order:

Character models: Character rework is in progress.

Character creation history: Don't know on that one.  Points in the review sound valid.

Forums down and mod didn't know:  Is the reviewer proposing some sort of automated tool for the moderator to know forum uptime status with?

Tutorial quest got off track: Yes it's annoying when that happens.  See quest comments below.

Dated graphics: See a message from our project leader on this subject here.  I think you'll like it.

Boring fighting: Not in progress yet but under heavy discussion and high priority to make more action-based.  Probably still a ways down the road but we know it is an issue and want to remedy it.

Quest dialog is hard: The quest dialog is all being converted to popup menus now.  We've also built a voice audio system for the NPC side of the dialog which we believe will make the quests more immersive and fun.

Skill training: Progression is going to get an overhaul in the next release or two also.

Sound problem: No idea.  Go to the forums for help.  They have a pretty good success ratio and the forums are usually up.  ;-)

Random renaming with no explanation:  We now have a non-RP server with very minimalist naming rules.  I suggest trying the next release on that server if you don't like your new name.  :-)

Regards,

Generally Mysql is viewed as an extremely fast database which has problems with high concurrency environments. The PS server has a grand total of 1 connection to this database, so concurrency is not an issue for us.  Hence, Mysql is a pretty good choice for us.

That being said, we used Mysql in 2002 because it was free, available on all platforms and easy to code for.  We have a plugin architecture for our database connectivity, so if someone were to want to run their own instance of PS using Postgres or Oracle or whatever, they could do so fairly easily.

Also, I should point out that we are very aggressive about preloading and precaching any and all reference data when the server starts up.  This keeps querying at runtime to a minimum, because the reality is that ALL databases are too slow to keep up with an MMO server at some level.