MMORPG.com's newest columnist Victor Wachter pens his first column on the shardless server that has been implemented by Cryptic Studios with the launch of their new superhero MMO, Champions Online.

Champions Online recently launched, and one of the innovations that it brought to the table was shardlessness - a single server hosting the entire game population. For years, we've played with game populations that were divided across servers into smaller sub-communities. Putting them all together is an interesting idea and one we will no doubt see more of. But, like any innovation It carries some implications to the business and to the community that will no-doubt change things in the MMO space.

Disclaimer: I am a former employee of Cryptic Studios and worked on Champions Online. This article is by no means a critique of their implementation of the system, only a consideration of what it means for games in the future)

Pro: One huge community that can play together. I have a ton of friends who play WoW across different servers. We talk about playing together, but it almost always ends the same: We roll noobs on the server, play maybe a couple of nights in the week and then go back to our mains. We don't have time to essentially play the game over from the start without the resources that our home server provides from our guilds and our mains.

Read Going Shardless.