well i was thinking of showing player around 15m near you
What view distance, and how many players do you expect to be around in that distance, though?
How far away is it acceptable to see innacurate information? And again, what update rate are you confortable with? These are questions for your team members who are experienced on the network side. Only they know what they're planning, and what the requirements are.
@conquestor3 I don't know much about this topic and my question may be offtopic too, but I never understood why it is rather possible, and less costly, to have many servers handling many players than one powerful server handling them all? I mean, of course such a powerful server would be costly, but aren't many smaller ones too? And isn't it inefficient to pass data between servers all the time?
Some games take a 1 server approach, but the issue is that one server can only do so much. For example, APB has 1 server per instance (not including db/chat/mail/persistance servers) for gameplay logic, however, the tradeoff is that they can only have 100 people per instance (If any more than 20~ go to an area it becomes really laggy/incorrect).
The goal when engineering an MMO is to reduce how much data's passing through the servers. This is why there are seperate servers for things like persistance storage, and zone servers only communicate absolutely necessary data to each other.
The problem with most programs is that many items become a n^2 problem. In other words updating for 20 people in an area requires more care then updating an area for 2 people. This is similarely scaled up when people start congregating and you need to have an effective solution for 200 people.
In order to reduce this, you want to try parralelize as much work as possible. Going to multi-server setups is a natural solution to that. Even better if the servers can take work from the same zones. If you can take a 2k+ccu server down to 100 20CCU servers without ruining the illusion, then you've got a solution.
