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Original post by Saruman I mean that first quote had nothing to do with you, I just stated some very simple mathematics and what we have seen in the past.

Why would that simple math and past references violate posting etiquette?

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Original post by Saruman You said yourself you have no software to test with.

Can you please produce a quote? I've read the intire thread but alas that statment by the OP eludes me.

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Original post by Saruman Just FYI I never once said it was impossible for you to do, I just told you what you would have to achieve in order to attain those numbers.. and that is basically to have the number of subscriptions of all current NA + Lineage MMOG games combined :)

Actually, you said he would need more. Implying that if he had 6 million subscribers, for instance, 1/12 of those would never be playing at the same time, not even during, say, a weekend special event.

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Original post by Saruman I am sorry if you are offended by that as it wasn't meant to be a bash against you

You should be, you were inaccurate and unnecessarily blunt, wich would make your post easily perceivable as a bash.

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Original post by xor Can you please produce a quote? I've read the intire thread but alas that statment by the OP eludes me.

Sure thing.

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I appreciate the candid honesty, I guess it will be difficult to figure out exactly how many without testing the software first and doing stress tests.

If the OP actually had the software to run stress testing he would have done just that, he wouldn't have come to a forum asking strange questions.

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Original post by xor Actually, you said he would need more. Implying that if he had 6 million subscribers, for instance, 1/12 of those would never be playing at the same time, not even during, say, a weekend special event.

Correct. It has never once been done before and have reason to be highly sceptical.

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Original post by xor You should be, you were inaccurate and unnecessarily blunt, wich would make your post easily perceivable as a bash.

Blunt delivery of the truth. Take it how you want to, as it was actually help.

= Forgive me if I am not replying to everyone's post the second they post it. I work 13 hours a day so I am trying to bang out several replies in one shot =

hplus0603 - MMORPG's like SWG, EQ 2 , Matrix Online and others have proven time and time again that high graphic quality results in lag and other game play issues. So I am trying to encourage our artist to go for simplistic yet beautiful. Two concepts that go well together like ice cream and yellow mustard. = p The simulation we are shooting for is a MMORPG that incorporates real time strategy. So a concern for us , is making the game look phenominal then suddenly realizing the game is chugging along at the speed of a garden snail and hundreds of hours of graphical artwork have to be reworked or removed. - Not Good.

vidalsasoon - Why are you here ?

RayOfAsh - 500,000 players could easily be achieved as Xor mentioned earlier. Star Wars Galaxies "could" of reached numbers similar to WOW subscribers if they didnt make bonehead choices earlier in the game's infancy. Also during a game's debute and major events you can certainly expect a rise in logins. This is a main reason why WOW had a difficult start , they didnt plan to have a massive selling like they did when WOW first game out. They took the mind set like you and made choices based on what others achieved. So during the first week of WOW's servers going live it was a mess.

Saruman - I will make it easy for you and clarify what I have written. I am curious to know how many players can effectively be placed on a server , it has already been said several times now the number is 1,000 players. Which I was not aware of when I wrote this post. I used a number like 500,000 not because I think, we can met that number but simply to guage the max number of people could fit on a server. So the big question is, WHY ? Because we do not want to seperate the community. We would much rather try to keep all the community together on the same virtual world to avoid ghost towns or even ghost servers. It would also be efficent for running major events and keep the player economy vibrant.

My question now is , why 1000 players per a server ? and is their ways to go past that number effectively with today's network technology.

A. Asking engineers business questions always leads to excessively detailed answers. It kinda seemed like you wanted an executive summary; we don't do that =). Well, not unless you specifically say you want an executive answer, vague guestimates, and the sort. We don't like vague.

B. Just cuz he's been here in the forums a week means nothing. Do you know how long he's been browsing here? Are you tracking his IP(s)? I've been here for awhile, but I just keep my mouth shut most of the time.

C. Your software solution is gonna be more important than your hardware solution i think, since you can just buy new hardware. Your dynamic load solution is gonna have to be pretty bada$$ i think to handle 500k at once. Eve was built specifically for a single community, unlike the other MMO's out there, but even then, I don't recall Eve's theoretical limit being anywhere near 500k.

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Original post by xJOKERx hplus0603 - MMORPG's like SWG, EQ 2 , Matrix Online and others have proven time and time again that high graphic quality results in lag and other game play issues.

False actually. SWG and EQ2 are threaded and what you may perceive as lag might be fps, might be network lag, but the two are completely seperate issues unless you built your client wrong.

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Because we do not want to seperate the community. We would much rather try to keep all the community together on the same virtual world to avoid ghost towns or even ghost servers.

Take a look at Wish and their blade server cluster they are ebaying for $120,000. They couldn't do it obviously and had major lag as balancing a simulation properly is probably one of the hardest possible things to do in games if you ask me.

EVE Online has been successfull but there is a reason for it, with minimal collision and being in space so able to seperate servers very easily. Their game design actually fit an easy way to load balance. It is also a million times easier on the content creation pipeline. I have no doubts with the server AND game design of EVE they could hit 500,000 concurrent if they had that amount of people, although obviously they would have to greatly expand their server cluster. Than on top of that players will still get together in certain areas and you will have to load balance the simulation there somehow.

Which brings us to the fact that you are forgetting the downside (well one of many once you get past load balancing the simulation).. and that is that your content creation must be through the roof. Think of an MMOG server with 3000 players.. there are always areas where people will rather or perceive as 'the best'.. like it or not. If you think you can build 100x the content that Blizzard did than all the power to you and I wish you luck on that. I have zero doubts that it could be done with procedural generation and a smart generation system.. but it still won't be nearly as good as a hand placed world.

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My question now is , why 1000 players per a server ? and is their ways to go past that number effectively with today's network technology.

It is totally dependant on the game and there is no possible way you can get a number like this without testing your actual software. I have seen people put together games that hold 20 people, I have seen 1000 people, I have seen 8000 people. It is completely, utterly, 100% based on your server architecture AND the game design.

A game like Ultima Online you could easily hit 10,000 concurrent users per server if you have a good architecture (such as RunUO) because you don't have the expensive collisions, etc. I would estimate a game like WoW getting maybe 1000 users per box (counting that each zone is a box), although that is still obviously a total guess as it completely utterly depends on the server software and game.

I hope that helps, and good luck :)

The 1K/server is completly arbitrary. Depending on very many factors, a server can hold much more than that, and you can divide the world in multiple zones and hold each zone in one server. So, in theory, you can have 500K players on a single 'server' (actually, a central server, with many many slave servers).
However, that would be a really bad idea, because it takes tremendous skill and experience to implement an economy that can survive 500K online players. Many of them will cheat (macroing, for example) and it would be a nightmare to police that huge world.
Dividing it in separate servers (maybe 1-2K players/server) is a much ebtter idea, because that way people will actually start knowing eachother a little, and form a community. Plus, if you implement a top players thing, it will be extremely hard for someone to make it in the top 100, on a 500K players online server. But if you divide it, like I said, in multiple servers, then many players will be in top 100 (each server with it's own top) so you will encourage competition and communication between players).

EVE Online have upgraded their server clusters a few times from going live. I'm not sure of the actual figures but at one stage they had 30-50k subscribers with an average nightly turnout of 8000-9000 online.

Recently they've been hitting 11.5k concurrent users. Which I think is a record MMORPG wise. WoW may have many more subscribers, and I imagine a huge number of more players online at the same time, only WoW uses shards, eve doesn't. So with Eve your 11.5k users are all in the same world and could feasibly meet any other player of the game they wanted to.

That puts a fair amount of stress on the hardware though. Even with recent optimisations to the client and server code and the addition of beafier servers you can still see lag occur in larger battles when 200-400 players fight it out. (although fps lag is much more prevailent than server lag).

This isn't aimed at the OP, more of a general observation. I honestly think anyone planning on developing a graphical MMORPG should first of all develop and run a MUD. This would involve many of the same techniques and technical issues server side, such as persistant storage, game world simulation. Many techniques could be tested in this environment as well, such as clustering.

If a team can't do that, then the chances of them doing the same coding as the MUD involved but with the additional complexity of realtime communication and graphical clients is slim.

Just to state again before that upsets anyone, it was a general imo observation and not a aimed at the original poster.

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You can do a fair amount of prediction on the client side to help reduce some of the graphic lag.

That is exactly the mis-conception I tried to dispel when saying that graphics-induced lag (low frame rate) is very different from network-induced lag (position popping, slow game state updates, etc). Regular users seldom have the education to tell them apart, so they just lump it all into "lag" and blame the developer.

However, when you develop your game, they're very different. If you take a single-player game, it can still generate graphics lag, in much the same way. However, it can't have network lag :-) The thing that might be different in an MMORPG compared to a single-player game is that you can get 100 player character models on screen; that doesn't typically happen in a single-player RPG -- and those characters can be really expensive, from a frame rate perspective.

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Original post by muphicks EVE Online have upgraded their server clusters a few times from going live. I'm not sure of the actual figures but at one stage they had 30-50k subscribers with an average nightly turnout of 8000-9000 online. Recently they've been hitting 11.5k concurrent users. Which I think is a record MMORPG wise. WoW may have many more subscribers, and I imagine a huge number of more players online at the same time, only WoW uses shards, eve doesn't. So with Eve your 11.5k users are all in the same world and could feasibly meet any other player of the game they wanted to.

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The Eve-Online Homepage: 11.7.2005 New Online Record Yesterday, Sunday, you set a new online player record when 12.895 of you were playing at the same time! No reports of lag were reported, the 'cold war edition' seems to have yet again lessened the server load.

Over 12k is common enough that I see it regularly. A graph of the server population can be found on EVE-I. I've heard their subscriber base is ~60k+, although I have no links on that information.

Just thought I'd throw in this data :-).

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Original post by xJOKERx • Intel P4, 3.2GHz, HT, 800MHz Bus, 1MB Cache • 160GB RAID rated Server-Class Hard Drive • 1,024MB Dual-Channel DDR400 SDRAM • 3,000GB Monthly Transfer • 100Mbps Non-Capped Network Connection • 5 IP Addresses

Sorry for the OT question:


What does the none capped network connection mean? It says above a 3TB Monthly transfer. Is that not a "cap". Or does that refer to transer between the server and the server owner (for uploading content and such)?

Good luck with your game xJOKERx. They're hard to pull off :)