Hi, I don''t understand what all the the concern about MMORPG bandwith is? I was hoping someone could elighten me. I mean, ultimately all you are doing is sending text commands from client to server and server to client showing what is happening. There are no actual images or videos or files going through. So how''s it that an MMORPG claims that a significant portion of the 9.99/month is about bandiwth while plenty of free download sites can give out MBs of files or videos and still maintain an income source through the revenue from banner advertising. You can have everything dynamic and make everything very advanced and still its all just more text. That wouldn''t compare to the bandwith costs of those free download sites with MBs of file transfer. Don''t get me wrong. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with the MMORPG pay to play model. That is definately not what I am saying. I do realize the extensive costs of such massive production, live teams to constantly updates, GM/Customer support and obviosuly the company wants to make money too. Thats not what my question is about. I am just trying to find out why bandiwth seems to be such a big concern in MMORPGs when to my knowledge, its just text commands going between server and client. How much can text possibly come out to? Thanks, I am just curious about that.

sure it''s only text commands, but the concern is that MMORPG''s have hundreds and even thousands of players. With updates ever second or less, then you''re sending a lot of text back and forth. Therefore you need a good connection that supports a lot of bandwidth(which costs lots of money) to keep the game from suffering from to much lag.

Big downloads sites most definitively do not make enough money on banner revenues alone.

Quick estimate:

3 kB/s * 80 000 players = 240 000 kB/s (234.375 mb/s)
19 775 Gigabytes per day.

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Original post by Someone1
I mean, ultimately all you are doing is sending text commands from client to server and server to client showing what is happening. There are no actual images or videos or files going through.

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That''s not true. There''s a world of possibilities between "text commands" at one end and images/files at the other. In actual fact, most of what is being sent is binary data that corresponds to many different events. For example, if there are 20 other players in view, you will need to be sent information about all of them every time they move, probably including their position, direction of travel, and orientation. When you first encounter them, you''ll also need to recieve details of how they appear, and that will get resent if they change anything. And those other 20 players are getting the same thing sent to them. It''s not as trivial as you make out.

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So how''s it that an MMORPG claims that a significant portion of the 9.99/month is about bandiwth while plenty of free download sites can give out MBs of files or videos and still maintain an income source through the revenue from banner advertising.

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You''ve been misled as to how much money banner advertising makes these days. Most of these sites have some sort of commercial backing.

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You can have everything dynamic and make everything very advanced and still its all just more text. That wouldn''t compare to the bandwith costs of those free download sites with MBs of file transfer.

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Even if it was text, what makes you think that text is somehow ''cheaper'' to send than a file? You''d be surprised just how much text is sent to a single player on a text mud, never mind an MMORPG where there needs to be far more broadcast messages.

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It all has to do with the average data transmitted per user per second. Figuring 3.5KB/sec to be in the ''acceptable'' range, that means that a single full DS1 can serve ~440 concurrent users. Ramp that up to MMORPG numbers and you''re quickly outgrowing DS3s and heading into OC-12 territory. You ever priced installing an OC-12 and paying the monthly access rates? You''re talking about large amounts of money.

Figuring you place your largest emphasis on efficient use of bandwidth, you could probably squeeze your per-client bandwidth usage down to 1.5-2KB/sec. You''ll be using some sort of compression that''s going to bog down your servers more, so you''ll end up having to upgrade processing requirements for each server.

It''s easier to just get the bandwidth usage to some sort of acceptable level and bite the bullet to pay for your internet access.

The only MMOG that I have played that costs about 9.99 is Everquest. And if that is what you are referring to, then you are completely incorrect in pretty much everything you said in your original post. (not to mention the fact that they recently had to raise their prices)

The first thing that you do when you launch EQ is download a patch. That would be large binary files (incidentally, some of those files probably contain compressed graphic and texture information). Also, for most commands, you do NOT send text over the network. If you issue the command on the client "/pet back off", you certainly do not send a string that says "/pet back off" across the net. That command is probably mapped to some numeric command and subcommand and sent across the net as a much smaller binary representation than ascii characters. The only time you send text across is typically when issuing "chat"-type commands such as ''say'', ''shout'', ''guildchat'' etc.

I have a sneaking suspicion that someone has seen Diku MUD code and assumed that MMOGs are implemented in the same manner. Sorry, but they are not. The typical MUD is lucky to have 30 players on it regularly. EQ has up to ~96,000 simultaneously.

OC-12s are very expensive as previously mentioned. When you are running on several of them, then you know that you have 1) a successful game, and 2) a huge bill.

The difference between a webserver (say) and an MMOG is that when a webserver is serving too many people, then all you get is a slower download. Not that big a deal.

If an MMO game is serving more people than it's bandwidth can handle, then you get lag. Lag leads to anger, anger leads to hate and hate leads to people not coming back again...

That means that when you calculate the amount of bandwidth you need to run an MMO game, you've got to work with peak-time numbers. So, assuming the maximum number of people you've ever had is 1,000 (which isn't unreasonable, for a fairly successful non-commercial game). Also assuming 3kb/s per player (which isn't as easy as it sounds). That means you'll need about 24 megabits of bandwidth. That's at least DS3 (aka a whole lot of money...)

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[edited by - Dean Harding on April 24, 2002 8:26:25 PM]

So then how much would you guys estimate is the average cost per player per month for bandwith? In a case of an MMORPG like EQ, AC, DaOC etc. which charge 9.99/month, how much of that usually goes to bandwith? In the case of Starwars galaxies, I read somewhere that its about 25% and I think they charge 9.99/month. Is that about right?

I was also curious about something. Is it possible to have a completely dynamic world where everything in it is changable. Is that possible or would that cause a massive increase in bandwith usage, making it impossible?

Thanks alot for the info,
I really appreciate it

Double Post...

[edited by - Someone1 on April 24, 2002 10:53:31 PM]

A MMORPG on one world server during normal usage times can have 2000 players online. Some MMORPGs have more than 30 world servers so that is 30x2000 = 60000 people online at the same time. Each person during normal use sends 500bytes/sec and receives 3000bytes/sec. This means he server has to have a bandwidth of at least 200Mb/sec. Given that there are 86400 seconds in a day you get 17280000Mb/day or 16875Gb/day or 16.4 Terabytes/day.
That kind of bandwidth does cost a lot of money to provide.