Determining Your World Size
Two of the really tough decisions you’ll ever make when creating a massively multiplayer game are: how many people should be in a single game world, and how much space should that world cover? Do you make one massive, seamless server? Do you make a massive, instanced server? Do you make a bunch of worlds? It’s a tough decision, and there isn’t a heck of a lot of formal research to base such a decision on.
The first part is, in my mind, the easiest. The only way to have one massive world with everyone in it is to have the right type of game. The best candidate for this is a game like EVE. Exactly like it, in fact. A game that will be for a niche market, can expand its borders without much trouble, and is designed to spread players out. There are probably one or two other criteria I’m leaving out, but that’s an ideal situation for a single world.
The trouble with making a single world is that the community becomes spread thin. It becomes difficult to find your position in the community, because there are so many people around. This will lead to the formation of smaller communities, but it tends to make you feel insignificant in the scheme of things.
There’s the variation of the “single” shard structure, which allows for a whole lot more people, but comes with its own set of issues. Specifically, the heavy utilization of instancing. Or, since these aren’t traditional instances and are instead fairly persistent (and shared), perhaps it should be called persistancing. See: Guild Wars. This game uses persistancing heavily in city areas, and uses traditional instancing for adventure zones. The main issue I have with persistancing is that it’s not unlikely that you’ll never see the same person twice. At least in massive, single world games, you can see the same people who congregate in the same areas more than once.
That leads us to what is usually thought of as the traditional MMO server model: shards. Multiple versions of the same basic world, shared by a limited set of players. This is my favorite for a few reasons. The first is the obvious development benefit: You don’t have to make a ridiculously massive world for people to adventure in. The larger the world, the less handcrafted it can be (with the same budget), so it becomes less interesting for players. Even if you have the budget and manpower to make a massive, massive world, there’s still a point at which you lose cohesion when the dev team gets too big, not to mention the more important reasons I have for liking shard systems…
The other two reasons are social. It’s much easier to form a great community with a smaller set of players than it is with a huge set of players, because you can really carve a place in the society of that particular world. And, in a massive world, the population becomes spread so thin you don’t see the same players often (so it’s hard to form communities), and it becomes very daunting to decide where you need to go for adventure.
My personal opinion, based entirely on my own observations and no research? 500-1000 players per major faction. In EverQuest II and World of Warcraft, that would mean 1000-2000 total players logged in at one time (Freeport/Qeynos and Alliance/Horde, respectively). In Ultima Online, a game with one major faction, that’s 500-1000 total. Server sizes, I have no idea. Smaller, really concentrated, handcrafted content is what I like personally, but I can’t give you a square mile or kilometer number.
Before I go on too long, I’m going to ask for your input on this issue. Does anyone know of any good studies about world size, or about the size of real world society sizes and their impact on the people in the community? What are your observations in this area?
Keeping your world size small with shards is great for a nice tightly knit community, but it causes real problems for anyone who is trying to bring their real-world social connections into your game. I guess the number of quests, diversity of bad guys, etc. in your game don’t have to depend on how bit your world is… you could have a small but incredibly dense world, but often they do. The smaller your world is, the fewer hours of gameplay you will provide for your players. It seems like you can only go small before you have to limit yourself to being a boutique game.
That said, a totally instanced system like the one in Guild Wars doesn’t really work well either. Guild Wars has problems not just with community size, but also because you can’t ever meet someone organically when you’re out adventuring.
Well it really depends on how much imput you allow the players to have on the world.
If you let the players have a lot of impact on the world the world can be bigger since the players are providing content (for example what makes BoB star systems different from other alliance star systems sure as hell isn’t something the devs did) putting Spore-style technology into MMORPGs will allow this to go a step farther.
If you don’t let the players have a lot of impact on the world the world has got to be smaller. Probably whatever size allows everything to be handcrafted as possible and there to be no instances.
I was just curious if you could comment on the perceived faction imbalance on the EQ2 PvP servers (Nagafen in particular). It seemed pretty rough for the Quenosians in the early days. Was their really a significant imbalance? If so, what do you do when the player base significantly chooses one faction/city/alignment over the other?
Don’t know much about published studies, but you’d probably do well to tap the shoulder of the folks at playon for some info.
While they’ve been doing the best they can scraping data from WoW, when I met Bob Moore last year, they were looking for access to more direct “backend” data for better analysis.
My own preferences: I do like shards, but I also prefer more heavily instanced adventure areas, like City of Heroes does with “missions.”
From a storyteller’s point of view, I’m able to craft a tale specific to the quester’s point of view. From the game design point of view, I can scale the encounter to meet the team that’s in it- giving them a challenging, but do-able experience. From a player’s point of view, there’s less camping, less killstealing, fewer lines to “kill a named” and fewer moments where you have to stop your adventuring due to the sudden appearance of a baddie designed for a large team.
City of Heroes isn’t perfect in this regard. I’d make instanced missions in a zone have access to the zone’s broadcast-range chat (too many people use broadcast activity to find teams and measure the “life” of a zone). We also NEED a few non-instanced mission areas to serve the “meet and team” experience a little better. CoH had “Hazard Zones” but a design change in issuing XP debt (and too many of these zones) has made most of these underused.
My observations, as someone who’s played EVE extensively, is that the one world, one server philosophy has made the community pull together in ways that WoW (my other primary MMO) cannot. In WoW, when I troll the forums looking for info, lots of people post saying “oh yeah, I did such and such yesterday, it was cool, if you’re on Draenor tonight I can show you how it’s done.” It’s similar with sites like Thottbot, where you scope out this sweet epic sword you want for your raids, and some guy says “yeah, I’ve got this on Crushridge, PM (name) and I’ll sell it to you.” Arg, but I’m on a different server!
I love EVE because we’re all tangled pu in the same politics, and the actions of anyone can affect everyone. If someone’s selling a tech 2 blueprint, I can contact them, whoever they are, and tell them to deliver it somewhere (and then blow up their ship, yarr). Politics is also insanely complicated and fascinating, where you have a web of non-aggression pacts and wars going on between tens of thousands of people.
I agree, however, that for the moment this can only occur in niche games. It would be practically impossible to have WoW with 8 million (or even the 2.5 million NA players) in a single world. The world simply isn’t big enough. EVE was designed to have 5000 star systems, 200,000 asteroid belts, moons, and stations, so it has enough sheer space to hold all those people. WoW was designed not to
I would like to see the trend increasing. The news from Lord of the Rings Online is promising - the NY Times says it has a 50-million-square-acre Middle-earth. With that much room, it could be possible to fit many more than a few hundred or couple thousand per server.
Why do I believe in more people per server? Because the more people you have playing, the more connections you can make with each other. It’s like a telephone - when you only have two people with phones, you can only call each other. But every person you add doubles the number of connections possible between people in the system, because each new person can make a connection with every other person. This, in my opinion, deepens community into a true virtual world, rather than drowning out someone’s voice.
Just my two cents
I love the idea of a single server for the main reason that right now most companies make you pay for server transfers, so if I get a new contract gig and find out that a few people at the new office play the same game I do, unless we are also lucky enough to be on the same server either we can’t play together, we have to pay to play together, or somebody gets to start over. The one aspect I liked most about EVE was simply that when I found out a friend of mine played, I asked where he was, set the autopilot and then went to make a sandwich. After I finished eating, I was there, we grouped up and started playing together…. the only thing I lost were my contacts, but those are easily replaced.
However, as you say, with WoW there are just too many people to pull that off… plus, in EVE the one world is supported by the fact that the other players are the content (for the most part). I’ve said in other forums that EVE isn’t really a game, its a sandbox full of tools with the skeleton of a game (more like an extended tutorial of mining and bland missions), the players have actually created the real game.
So, I accept multiple shards, and for some of the same reasons stated here… content is easier (and better) designed in smaller amounts for a smaller group then the repetative blandness of content in games like EVE where the most distinguishing characteristic of each system is the players who frequent it and not the stations, asteroid belts or missions.
As I said over on my blog though, I’d really love to see more games fully embrasing the multiple shard idea and integrating it into their lore, including methods and means for crossing shards to play with your new co-workers…
I so totally disagree with you in some of the points you brought up that I would like to share my point of view with you. Maybe I just have different preferences or maybe I see some solutions for the issues you raised (I would be happy if the second one would at least partially apply).
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You may be right when you say the world size and setup is driven by the type of game you are going to develop. I just don’t see it as restrictive as you seem to see it. Expanding worlds is done by every expansion release for a MMO. In addition releasing an expansion is also spreading out the server population. Using different starting areas, moving around through character development are just other examples to spread out players in a MMO world. I think for expanding a world there are plenty of solutions available in games on the marked. Shrinking the world is the unresolved issue. But that’s ugly with the shard concept as well.
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I think there is no new problem with a thin spread community by a one world MMO. If you have several worlds you have that thin spread between the servers, with expansions you have the spread between the old and new content. Over time you have that spread by level. It’s there, the problem, in the shard concept as well. I think the only way to address it in a one world MMO is to keep the world size in relation to your population and build interest points where people gather (like quest hubs, marked hubs, class hubs, …) and put into the MMO reasons and tools for creating and maintaining communities. The community building is an important and difficult point. I think there is a hierarchy in how you build your relations. There are 2-6 people pretty near to you and you are used to hang out with them all the time. Then there is the next layer of probably 20 people of who you regularly interact with. And then there is the last layer of 100 people which you know by name but you only seldom interact with them directly. I think the game would need to support that 3 level of community with an in game structure and tools. Than you would address your community issue much better than creating shards. The shard is not really fitting in any of the layers instead it’s just creating a max cap and I think the max cap is not solving the issue as you can see in lots of the MMOs currently on the market. With a shard concept, I think, you create an additional dimension in your community issue by creating an additional barrier, not solving the problem.
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I don’t feel insignificant in a game by the number of players. I feel insignificant in a game by the content. In a traditional RPG there is normally not the problem with insignificance, in most MMOs there is a problem. The difference between both is the number player but that’s not the reason for the insignificance problem. The other difference between them is the type of story which is told. If I would tell a typical MMO story in a RPG I think you would feel the same insignificance in an RPG. Shards are not solving the insignificance issue. I can prove this with lots of the games currently on the market.
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The issues with instancing you mention is something which really needs some new solutions. I’ve experience with DDO and EQ2 primarily. I love the idea what DDO is able to do with the dungeons because of the instancing but the city and the overall game play feeling in DDO is a little bit alien because of the heavy use of instances. I prefer the overland concept of EQ2 where you can walk around with other people to get somewhere. The only solution I see at the moment is to do the right mix. I don’t see how a shard concept is helping you with this. The right mix for a one world concept is probably the same as for the shard concept. I played shortly Linage II which had a seamless world and I’m looking forward to Vanguard who promised new concepts in that area. I think it will work but you will miss some opportunities to do cool stuff. For some tasks you need to be “alone”. It’s crazy to think of 10 other group of people try to break into the same warehouse at he same time to secure the same rare artefact.
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Regarding your point of how much content is handcrafted I admit I have no idea what is state of the art on tools to build content. But my feeling is that even if you just glue 4 times the same world together, you would not be much worse off then have them in 4 separate shards (I’m not serious proposing the glue method). Just multiplying the content into different shards doesn’t crate any benefit for the people. I think you need to address this with a development tool which is freeing you from the burden to mange the details. No one is writing programs in assembler anymore, I think the tools for content need to do a similar step and should work with templates and variables. The combination of the different values from the variables with the template could create the main content. If I have may own quest progression with may own quests which are based on templates but the variables are different (like location names, NPC names, item names, …) then maybe it’s also a little bit addressing the insignificance issue. Thats because I’m not the same as 100 peoples around me trying to kill the same mob because of the same reason which should not have brought up to me because 100 people have done the same thing before me already. Same is true for terrain. I think it should be possible to create with the right tools very fast larger areas of terrain which feels like handmade but is not micro generated by hand.
I’m a fan of having larger worlds with less sharding, but it’s hard to do. It’s very dependant on the amount and type of content you have. For example, in EQ2, most dungeons had to spawn a new instance at around 50 players because otherwise they got overcrowded, and that’s just not fun.
In a level-based game where there’s a definite progression of content, I think you’re going to have to go with shards just to split players up into managable groups. Otherwise you’d have to have so much content that players can spread out and not be stepping on each other. Vanguard has a gigantic game world that will eventually be full of content, but even with that they’re still going to operate multiple shards.
I think the ultimate decision is going to be made based on the type of game and the amount of content you have. If you have a vast world with lots of content (hard to do) and your game is set up in such a way that players will spread out rather than pool in certain areas, then you can do a single world. On the other hand, if your content and advancement systems encourage pooling, or if you have a smaller world and less content (due to budgetary constraints prior to launch) you’re probably better off going with shards.
If the internet has taught us anything, it’s that anonymity enables malfeasance. The real advantage I see to smaller shards is a more stable community. It becomes more of a small town environment where everyone has at least some idea of who their neighbors are. Pick-up-groups and pick-up-raids especially become less daunting when no one is a complete stranger.
I see this as being especially important in a faction based PVP game (like Warcraft or the PVP EQII servers), when a strong sense of community translates to more of a team feeling.
How many sensible names can you fit within the world? Will 90% of all your players be forced to add stupid l33tspeek suffixes to their names as all other names are taken or will you be unable to find other players based on their names. You can always go for the surname trick, how does EVE track your friends list with all those names floating around?
I know a lot of people who get annoyed to the brink of quitting character creation due to “name unavailbe try again” and they end up with names like Teabagsukkah53″ just to get something through and see the game. They dont exactly pull a community together by radiating fun roleplaying.
Wolfe, that’s an issue I never even considered. I would say you could let people put spaces in their names to make them more unique, but I would still be annoyed as a player if my normal character name was taken.
Beyond that, I’m going to go so far as to issue the following challenge:
If any developer creates a traditional MMO with one world without the heavy use of instancing (or persistancing, or whatever), and peaks simultaneous users over 500,000, I will give them $500. What is a traditional MMO? Think WoW or EQII. It costs a little money to play, has a lot of concentrated content, doesn’t get expanded by players, takes place primarily on land, etc.
If you can do that AND the content is actually interesting throughout, you get $1000.
Point being, I don’t think it’s possible to make a good traditional game with enough physical space for 500,000 players. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but I’m pretty damn sure I won’t be. I even went nice on the number, because if I wanted to support WoW’s peak sims I’d have at least doubled the number and made the task even more impossible.
First, I want to address something Vaiko said:
In a single world you tend to accumulate friends over time. While my corporation may only have 31 unique people in it, I carry with me friendships over the past 3.5 years, which broadens my close relationships to something approaching 50. Beyond that the numbers jump much higher, since I have 150 people in my alliance whom I see relatively frequently, but several hundred more whom I talk to irregularly to check up, commiserate with, etc. Beyond that, since I was a high-level diplomat for a major alliance, I have (thousands?) of people I’ve talked to at one time and sometimes talk to again.
Having a large, persistent, single world allows me to keep my social contacts and broaden my community beyond what a single shard would offer.
Second, to respond to Wolfe’s question:
Spaces and unicode. Plus, as characters get deleted, their names become available again. But this is really a problem that can be answered by the people at any major e-mail provider or social network - how can myspace handle tens of millions of unique users? People get used to it
And lastly, to Ryan:
The way that EVE addressed this was to add all the “space” in space. If you chose to, you could go anywhere between the thousand, tens of thousands, even hundreds of millions of kilometers between planetary bodies. The server just doesn’t deal with that space unless something’s in it. So, you could have the server ignore space unless players arrive in it. Even if the world is massive - say, a million square miles, maybe a third the size of the U.S. - the server would only handle the space that players occupy. “Sure, you can walk to those mountains by foot, and see all the land between, but there’s only one really cool place to see and we can get to it this way.” Have some kind of random generation of terrain that follows a general plan, random monsters, random wildlife (I dunno, I’m no programmer) but have it only come into effect when a player arrives to see it.
This isn’t a question of one right way to design around size and per capita metrics, but rather a need for games to make serious desitions about the kind of game they want to be and execute on their principles well. Tobold has a very good post about the size of Azeroth and makes some interesting observations about games thinking less about land mass and more about ‘quest mass.’ Or content mass I suppose.
Basically, it really doesn’t matter how many concurrent users you have on how many different shards as long as you feel part of a fluid world. In my time on WoW Magtheridon-US, I have never once felt alone. There aren’t too many people to be anoying (i.e. server quests, spawn stealing) but at the same time, there are always people around you, and there is a vibrant community and bustling economy. The land mass is relativly small compared with some other titles on the market, but each ’square unit’ of space is chalk full of content, making you feel like the world is massive without becoming overwhelming or stale.
Take Vanguard on the flip side. The world feels incredibly immense, but wholy devoid of life and content. And for the flames, it ain’t Beta anymore, that ended today… So great, a huge continent capable of supporting masses of players, yet each locale is simply for show. So is Vanguard bigger than WoW? In units of physical measurement, yes, but it value of those units, no.
EVE was mentioned above, and is a great comparison. They had a design concept and executed on it, in some regards, flawlessly. The concept of space doesn’t require filled content though, as space is expected to have areas devoid of life, and thus allows for their design choices.
What matters is not the specific metric, but the execution and the design choice. Big is not always better. Small is not always better. Choosing size because of a critical element of your overall game feel and lore is what matters most.
Actually, I could imagine a solution to most of the issues brought up but it will take probably a month to iron it out even on a high level. Implementing a solution of that scale will take more than a year and some state of the art equipment and tools / technologies.
Nobody is going to do this because there is a prize money set for it. It will only be approached if the game concept is calling for it and is helping to sell the game.
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Regarding the naming issue: I think you would need to segment your namespace by prefixing or suffixing with the region your are coming from (or the family, or political background, …). All normal operations then would be on your segment. If you like to interact with people outside your segment you would need to use the prefix. Internally every char should have a unique number anyway therefore there is no technical issue only a usability issue. If you going to pick from a list there is no problem either, only with typing in names regarding commands you have to deal with ambiguous names. The same concept is used currently for communication in a shard environment.
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Alex: I agree with your numbers. It’s a question of personal preference and social interaction. I think you are looking more from the high numbers point of view. My numbers are more likely the lower limit. About 80% of the people are probably in between.
One thing I always see people bring up in world size discussions is the name thing. If you put 8 million people in one world server, how would you uniquely name them all?
Well.. for one thing, you have to look at why people have unique names in MMOs.. its mainly for Friends lists and sending tells (instant messaging). But if you got 8 million people, like say listed in a phone book, would they all have unique names? One step I’d like to see games take is to separate your character name from your play account. Make the friends list and tells be done using your play account (or an alias to your play account), and let your character have any name you want, even if it conflicts with someone else.
It would be odd at first, but I think people would adapt to it fairly quickly, just like the association of a person’s name to their ICQ/AIM/MSN/Yahoo account name.
Something else to consider is how fast are people going to outgrow the content and start to gather in only certain areas?
If you have a small server population and have an area designed for players of level 5-10 of a certain faction, what happens to when 95% of the (500 - 1000) players have leveled past that range and it’s now devoid of PCs except the occasional alt-leveling? Now you have unused content and more and more people as time goes on crowding into the highest level areas until finally it’s expansion time and the players spread out a little bit until the cycle repeats, but now you have even more unused low level content areas.
Eve has handled that in an interesting way in that even though you may go to a higher level mission agent in the same system to get a harder mission, the ‘instance’ area he sends you to might be in the same general area as a low level mission. The trick is the system is huge and only you have the directions to your particular mission. Thus the same world content can be re-used and no area is ever fully ‘outgrown’.
I’n not sure if anything like this has been done. I’ve played a lot of things, but I haven’t seen it in what I’ve played.
What would be interesting to see would be some dynamic areas where you have say orc-infested hills. Players could choose to do quests or missions (solo or group) and the more players do level-based missions in the area, the less orcs there are and possibly something special opens up. Vendors move in or a special NPC reappears. If the players don’t keep running the missions in the area though, the place would slowly degrade back to the orc-infestation causing the loss of the specials in the area. This could also lend into dynamic events like the orcs trying to regain ground or invading causing an increased or immediate loss of specials.
I guess what I hate about most of the games I’ve played is enjoying some area and having good times / memories from it and then passing through months later to see it completely devoid of players and interest no matter how many players are on.
UO didnt have unique names, you could impersonate any other player at will. Worked fine with the type of communication system the game had back in the day when I played it. Its however prone to abuse of various sorts. Impersonating other players is already a problem on a much higher level of abstraction than through names. Like guild names such as “Lollipop” looking the same as “LoIlipop” with the font used in WoW, which fuels innovative scam projects.
If players cant relaible separate different players from each other the whole system becomes vulnerable to large scale identity culprittery. Remember how the volume of masks are used as a strategy for toppling the government in the movie V for Vendetta?
(If the difference between two players is some abstract number you will get a similar problem when the other players go like “Hmm, there were something like ~300 Johnny players and I think number 562431 was the one who cheated.”) Its not fun to be a number in a system, MySpace, eBay and other RL large systems get by through linking in to the Real World identity to differentiate Johnny_5 from Johnny_572.
At least I dont hear complaints from eBay or MySpace users that their names are taken, but I do hear these complaints from MMO players rather often.
Ravenwind: the point about outgrowing content and crowded areas because of level ranges is valid independent from the world size or a shard concept.
I think instancing is one possible solution to this because you could scale the instance. I think the more interesting approach is in the direction you are suggesting: Putting dynamic content directly into the world. Just view ideas I can come up with:
Quests are triggering level dependent content.
Mixed content where you have isle of mobs of a cretin level but isles itself mix up to a larger level range.
Another option is to have contested mob in that areas which need to be activated (eg: A camp of Orcs with some low level roamer; When enough roaming Orcs got killed it starts a script which activates the camp; The goal is then to destroy the camp; The camp itself could be of higher level or my favourite - it could scale because it’s activated by a group and the system knows the group level).
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I like your idea of changing content by usage as well. It would give that area a very special touch. I think this type of world interaction will be difficult to manage without a large world. If you are changing unique content that way it’s gone as long as the change stays.
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Drawback with changing large parts of an area to another level is the risk of squeezing out the low level player when a high level group is taking it over. But that should be avoidable with careful area design.
I was part of the initial public beta of There.com, and while it isn’t exactly an RPG implementation, it is a single shard MMO (social rather than adventure). And it does suffer from that wide open spaces, where the heck is everyone syndrome. When it initially started, most people stayed in the starting areas, and the place felt crowded, but dispersal soon set in, and last time I was on, an area that used to be busy was devoid of life.
My preference is a shard implementation similar to Warcraft or EQIIs. I’d prefer zoneless though to give a larger feel to the game, EQII was huge, but didn’t feel that way because of the zoning and rapid transport.
Another idea touched on above, why not make the level of a zone more nebulous. As one area is depleted (becomes low level) another area becomes higher level. Questing in these area’s start to become more about changing the flavor of the area..The players actually have an impact! As they kill orcs, the area shifts towards new player oriented, but because they are concentrating on this area, the monsters in area 3 are breeding faster. Do this in segments and with enough information that a player doesn’t suddenly find himself in a lvl 20 zone that was just two minutes ago lvl 5 though. Also, make the wilds, wild. The occasional rampaging lvl 40 creature wandering around in an area normally lvl 15 can be quite interesting, provided it is loud enough that players know to keep distance as it walks, and keep it away from the ’safer’ roads.
Let some creatures occasionally be Killmobs, occasionally Questgivers, depending on the monsters mood, the time of day, and the rep of the players. That dragon over there… well, if its hungry, you are lunch. If it recently fed, and you approach nicely, might just ask you to perform a service for it, (’I heard that the next kingdom over the hill has a very nice looking maiden, could you check it out for me?’).
What makes a world seem smaller is familiarity, add some uncertainty and randomness and things get a lot larger.
Oh, another reason for keeping shards, and not one single world. It is easier for people to avoid the social drama’s that *don’t* help the game. In a single shard world, I can’t avoid playerX who likes to just go out of his way to annoy me because he claims I stole a kill of his 4 months ago, or because I took the name his GF wanted etc. It can easily get to the point that one leaves the game because it isn’t enough harassment to cause the other players banning, but there is nothing else one can do to stop it. With shards, one can, if need be move on and still play.
Larry Niven touched on this with one of his earlier stories about transport booths and murder was the only option one character could see to escape a person who was no matter where he moved to, his neighbor in the end.
This sounds overly simple, but it would be a starting point for a single seemless world.
World size = (expected peak concurrent users * % estimate active) * sustainable content per user + cities + roads + misc points of interest.
expected peak concurrent users = self explanatory
% estimate active = % of people logged who aren’t AFK or only chatting
sustainable content per user = measurement of space that will keep one player happy/busy.
cities, roads, & misc points of interest = self explanatory
I did forget to figure in a % of empty buffer space, to avoid having the game feeling over run with content.
sustainable content per user = measurement of space that will keep one player happy/busy, this includes crafting/harvesting areas, along with monster bashing areas.
It also should be said that this would be for a more skill based world (UO). A level based world would need to adjust the content for the “sustainable content per user”.
Brad McQuaid wrote a few scant words on the subject of instancing. While I disagree thoroughly with his conclusions, as a matter of preference, he does lay it out pretty well in terms of “what kind of game do you want to make?” including analysis of the business side.
He puts down instancing with single player games and traditional pen-and-paper RPGs. I’ve always felt instances are far more immersive than not. What’s so real about mobs on a 8.5 minute respawn timer? Or getting in a jam and being able to /ooc “hey, can you guys give us a hand here?” Or having multiple groups lagfest competing for resources? *shrug* I’ve always played single player / small group games in addition to online ones because they always have tighter graphics… immersion.
Brad actually manifestos on the whole PvE competition thing, which, I dunno, aren’t we all pretty much tired of watching the bots versus pro camp crew smackdown, while scratching our heads going “but they told us there was some content here….”? Brad ignores the concept of a competitive-by-consent instance as an alternative, which is something “those ex-blizzard guys” did very well with Guild Wars - PvP pickup raiding FTW. Further, Brad dismisses PvP replayability based on an unnamed “study”… those slacker Chess developers… haven’t released an expansion in like 700 years… amazing anybody ever plays that stagnant game anymore, eh?
That being written, Guild Wars could definitely use some sharding. Sharding, though, should only ever be a social construct to lend the small town, “everybody knows your name” feeling. Careful to avoid queues and annoying matchmaking lopsidedness because of faction. Matchmaking being something you would want to operate on the player base as a whole. Nobody really cares if they are black or white in Chess. While you lose some possibilities with that, it beats waiting around for a game if everybody online only ever plays the black side of Chess. Day of Defeat would’ve sucked if you were hardcoded to your first choice of faction. Hmmm. 15,975 allies versus 3 axis.
Player created shards might be interesting. With a minimum (500-1000) of signatures to start one, and no cap on population. And I agree with Jason, one should never be hardcoded to a shard. Switching shards should never involve copying data or Customer Service.
There’s value in both Tokyo and Topeka.
Ideally, I would like to see something more closely resembling our own global “community,” that is to say, an incredibly large world which is actually a bunch of smaller worlds, or land masses, with great distances in between.
It would work something like this —
1) The MMO “inventors” creates a game kit which establishes all the universal laws and rule sets for the world (graphic models, shaders, lighting, physics, AI, etc.) and then distributes them to several different, independently operating dev teams.
2) Each dev team is assigned a land mass (or server?) within the world.
3) The dev team for each land mass would design their own races, mobs, items, etc. All working within the game kit “boundaries.”
4) The player would then choose which land mass for their homeland, and from that choice, they would then be able to choose which race, alignment, class and whatever else is necessary to begin.
5) Players can then migrate and travel between all land masses assuming they meet whatever requirements are in place: currency, boats, passports, etc.
This is just like the real world where we have continents and countries and nationalities and religions and politics, etc.
I believe in time we will see something like this, but for now I can only assume that the resources and funds needed for such a grand scheme is just too much at the moment.
But someday.
Well, what me bothers the most in “shard” scenarios is that they are still can get crowded and need to split up. But unlike RL splitting up means no ingame contact anymore. I do notice that on my WoWServer when whole raidgroups move to a new Server, that you can’t even talk to them.
When several hundred years people moved to America you could still write them a letter … when people move to a different shard, they are lost …
So, my 2 Cent, how ever you decide to implement the world, a lot of pain would be eased if you would just incorporate a global chatting system. 1on1 with accepting messages only from pre-registered friends would be nice enough.
Mike
Yeah, that is one really nice thing about EQII. Cross shard tells are possible.