[MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server

[Mike Shaver]

On Dec 19, Travis Nixon wrote:

> At the surface, yes, until you read the "sharing over multiple
> servers" part, at which point you're right back to the cost of 2
> characters on 1 server being exactly the same as the cost of 2
> characters on 2 servers.

I read "multiple servers" to mean "multiple computers, which provide
services for a single game world".  So the sharing and
synchronization concerns (and perhaps parallel-database premiums)
are still an issue.

I also find it a little odd that people who are all over the "load
everything into RAM from a flat file" approach to data management
still try to make people believe that storage is "fractions of a
cent per megabyte".  Tape is cheap too, I guess.

If your characters do things while they're offline, and SWGs very
much will from everything I've read, then there's more to
per-character overhead than just the disk space or even database
space.  Every character is another blip in the event loop for
resource gathering, updating of player-association stats, craft-item
production and associated PA inventory updates, horoscopes,
exit-polling, whatever.

  "We're going to have the characters doing a lot of stuff while the
  player is off-line, so that the player's online time is more
  interesting."

  "That's never going to work -- everyone will have 5 characters on
  their server, the processor lag will be crazy and the database
  vendors will be majority shareholders in SOE by Q3."

  "Oh, then we'll just stick to one character per server."

I like that ending a lot better than "yeah, never mind, we'll have
to strip out all that cool stuff".  I think the idea of doing server
scaling and resource division (both in terms of infrastructure and
in terms of housing space, spawn rate, ore veins, etc.) on the basis
of the number of players is a lot more interesting than dividing on
the basis of the number of characters.

And, to touch on the other SCS/MCS faucet thread, I also think that
the addition of offline resource gathering and crafting will make a
lot more people into faucets in some way or another.  Mainly,
because it's easy (spend a few hours playing with trade skills, and
then your character has a source of income that trickles in while
you're offline) -- the dichotomy of "crafter vs. non-crafter" is
gone, as it largely is in AC2.

It may also mean that people aren't as focused on min-maxing their
crafting selections.  If you're going to have to spend all day,
every day mining ore and clicking-to-win in the shieldcrafting
panel, you're going to make damned sure that you get every
GP/XP/skill-increase possible out of it.  If you can treat it as a
hobby within your hobby, but still have it be useful, you'll be more
willing to pick up a crafting specialty that fills a niche in your
group or just sounds neat.

Well, _I_ will, anyway. =)

Mike


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