Well, as an old time player of Anarchy Online, I remember when they touted "Everyone on one server!" and then had to add a second server because of overwhelming traffic. I'm just not sure current bandwidth solutions make "everyone on one server" a feasible feature. Or even instant messages, which would require the servers to update each other on the current users online status, etc.

Now, I like the idea of being able to send an email-like message to another server- that would be a handy addition to many games, but convincing folks to add on a feature that will be often ignored is hard.

Posted by: skyknyt on November 14, 2004 06:12 PM

I know that Galaxies has a "hidden" feature where you can send /tells to people on other servers, and there might be a way to email them as well, I'm not sure.

A game like CoH begs the question, why can't each city be a different city? Instead of each one being Paragon, why not have them all be neighboring cities (or servers), and if you wanted to travel from one city to another, you just hop on the bus/subway/whatever and hop on over to another server/city?

Granted, there's going to be problems with that system, but it's certainly more reasonable than any other game, such as Galaxies or Everquest where entire universes would have to be explained as being "neighbors."

Posted by: bowler on November 14, 2004 08:22 PM

Final Fantasy XI allows one to send messages to people on another server. But there's no mechanism for migrating to a server that your friends are on yet.

Posted by: William Huber on November 14, 2004 09:19 PM

this is the biggest obstacle to my future addiction to mmorpgs. my last foray into it was everquest for mac, but i spent all of my time on some card-table-at-christmas-time secondary or tertiary server that was never populated by much more than AI. i LOVE rpgs. always have. but in order for them to be truly massively multiplayer, everyone has to populate one world. otherwise, where does the word massive apply to my gameplay experience? and don't sequester the mac and linux players to some siberian server either. in that case, don't bother making a port of the game.

Posted by: eric on November 15, 2004 01:39 PM

Yeah, sharding. It's *lame*. I had to pay 30 quid to SOE to transfer my character from one SWG server to another (when the European servers launched a year after the US launch, obviously I wanted to live amongst my crazy euro neighbours).

Grid computing / Butterfly.net I *think* are aiming to solve this sort of stuff, but seems that our sociability is more advanced than our networking capacity at the moment.

Moore's law'll fix it soon enough, I spose.

Posted by: Alice Taylor on November 16, 2004 03:05 AM

For those who wanted to know our reasons why we still shard, I've discussed it on my blog (http://www.zenofdesign.com/index.php?p=115). Long story short - it's not technical easy, and the design questions it opens up aren't trivial design questions. Will we get there eventually? Yes, but I have a feeling that the next wave of games will be trying to reduce technical complexity of the MMO, not make them more complicated.

Posted by: Damion Schubert on November 16, 2004 12:45 PM

i don't know if you've looked at guild wars ( http://www.guildwars.com/ ). according to its FAQ page:

"Finally, unlike existing MMOs, all characters in Guild Wars inhabit the same virtual world -- they are not divided onto different servers or shards -- so players can always team up with or compete against any other player in the world."

how do they deal with the technical issues of a shardless virtual world? this might be a clue:

"Unlike many MMOs, when players form a party and embark upon a quest in Guild Wars, they get their own private copy of the area where the quest takes place. This design eliminates some of the frustrating gameplay elements commonly associated with MMOs, such as spawn camping, kill stealing, and lines to complete a quest."

http://www.guildwars.com/faq/default.html

Posted by: bunnyhero on November 17, 2004 02:03 AM

i meant to add this to my last comment: it looks like they're effectively doing "sharding on demand," so to speak.

and... i was playing disney's toontown for a while. i'm pretty sure that you could message across servers, but i'm not 100% sure.

Posted by: bunnyhero on November 17, 2004 02:09 AM

Purchase, and play, Guild Wars as soon as it is released (Feb)

To get playing before that, buy the pre-order package and play some weekends, details on http://www.guildwars.com

It has multiple servers but you can switch between in-game. And you only worry about servers when you're inside cities. And better? You can /whisper or /msg anyone on any server.

Posted by: LadyAphelion on November 17, 2004 02:31 PM

I'd just like to point you all to Eve Online (www.eve-online.com). This is a MMOG on one server - everybody in the same game world, often with in excess of 10,000 people logged on at once. It works, though I'm told it was less than perfect in the beginning.

Posted by: roBurky on November 28, 2004 04:14 AM

I'd just like to point you all to Eve Online (www.eve-online.com). This is a MMOG on one server - everybody in the same game world, often with in excess of 10,000 people logged on at once. It works, though I'm told it was less than perfect in the beginning.

Posted by: roBurky on November 28, 2004 04:15 AM

It's odd that you mention City of Heroes when discussing this. They've been testing a Global Chat System that works across servers. It should go live within the next couple weeks. Find out more here: http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/item349.html

Posted by: Llava on December 8, 2004 01:39 PM

It's odd that you mention City of Heroes when discussing this. They've been testing a Global Chat System that works across servers. It should go live within the next couple weeks. Find out more here: http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/item349.html

Posted by: Llava on December 8, 2004 01:46 PM