[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[shren]

On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Jessica Mulligan wrote:
> At 07:35 PM 12/10/2002 -0800, Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com wrote:
 
>> Anyway, I'm not sure where you think they are wet behind the
>> ears?  In the dynamics of implementing network code - if so, I
>> don't see a problem there, it ain't that hard. If its in
>> balancing gameplay dynamics, I'd argue they are
>> experts. Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo all show that they are
>> really pretty good at balancing diverse ability sets and creating
>> an interesting and rewarding game.
 
> Raph is right; they are wet behind the ears when it comes to
> persistent worlds.  It doesn't matter how many P2P games they've
> done or that they are masters of that style; P2P games are not
> Persistent Worlds.  It is one thing to design a system that merely
> chooses one PC in a session as the 'master' and lets it run the
> session; it is quite another to build out a client/server
> architecture that requires an ability to hold and discern 3,000
> simultaneous connections per server cluster and has servers that
> must keep track of all simultaneous users and display the proper
> data and results to them and they move and interact.

Diablo 2 Realm play hosts all of the servers itself, with the game
being hosted at a central location.  What you describe is the Diablo
1 model, which they are above, if not that far above.

With Diablo 2, they host the processing and the database, which
means at the least they have some hardware experience with
clustering.  I agree with everyone who says that plugging all of
those seperate gamelets into a mmorpg will be at least a little
tricky, but they certainly have the hardware knowledge to get
started.

> And as I noted in another reply, customer service, player
> relations, community relations, billing and account
> adminisitration and NetOps is even more different and has far more
> impact in a PW than on something relatively simply (comparatively)
> like battle.net, where the CS is pretty much non-existent.

Yes.


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