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

[Dave Rickey]

From: "Caliban Tiresias Darklock" <caliban at darklock.com>
> From: "Dave Rickey" <daver at mythicentertainment.com>

>>>> Failure to scale is a design flaw, not a choice.

>>> Nobody's talking about failure to scale; it's really about the
>>> PRICE of scaling.

>> And you made a conscious choice on how expensive it was going to
>> be.  When Oracle quoted *us* a price, we laughed and moved on.

> Dave, this isn't about database licenses. Everyone seems to think
> about a character as being just a record in a database somewhere,
> which is sort of missing the point.

But in that context, it was the point (since Raph has been citing
the licensing terms as the reason MCS can't be done for SWG).  For
the rest of what you are talking about, yes, offline characters
*can* consume resources that are then denied to online characters.
UO had exactly that situation, and it worked poorly.  Not because of
MCS, but because the core concept doesn't work well.

If someone goes on a Dragon raid and gets the Ubersword, that
particular Ubersword is denied to other players whether that player
is online or off, whether the lucky player continues to use that
character or not.  The resource denial is completely independant of
the future play.

But there's a potentially unlimited number of Uberswords.  The
barrier to getting one is the scale of the effort involved, in DAoC
it's not even the spawn rate (there's no "Calendar" for raids in
Camelot).  You want an Ubersword of your own, you get people
together and go get one.  If there was only one Ubersword allowed in
the world, then there would be a resource denial issue.  But MCS
would have nothing to do with it (if the player is on the same
server as an alternate character, or on a totally different server,
makes no difference).

SCS doesn't go far enough to invoke the scenarios that are being
used to defend it.  For that, you would need "One Player, One
Character", backed up by a biometric scan that ensured the player
had only one and stayed at the terminal the whole time that
character was in.  No alts on other servers, and all resources
liberated from the character and returned to the system when the
player cancelled.

--Dave



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