[DGD] DGD/MP 1.0

[Felix A. Croes]

Alistair Milne <krug at krug.org.uk> wrote:

> The scale doesn't matter, if there's a point where your virtual world 
> game has too many players for the available content, then you haven't 
> done enough to address the problem of too many players.  What I would be 
> curious to know is if the limitation imposed by Blizzard is due to game 
> design issues or server limitations.  If it's simply because of server 
> limitations, then Dworkin's argument stands.

The limit WoW imposes on the number of players per shard is almost
certainly due to content, or to put it differently, to the size and
depth of the in-game world.  And with such a limit imposed by design,
perhaps they did not find it quite necessary to allocate a stack of
20 sparcstations per shard, as UO did in 1997.  I do not have actual
knowledge of this, but one can make an educated guess. :)

Still, there is something odd about a "massively multi-player" game
that is fragmented into so many shards, each isolated and identical
to all the others, and with each shard containing isolated and identical
instanced dungeons.  I'd say that a world in which the landscape is
algorithmically generated, as in SWG, and in which the players are
let loose to build their own cities, as in real-time strategy games,
could be built on a much larger scale, and for a fraction of the cost.
As a middleware developer, I hope that DGD/MP will be used for such
games.

Regards,
Dworkin