[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] How big is enough?

[Mike Oxford]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 07:08:26 +0930, "Mike Rozak" <Mike at mxac.com.au>
said:
> Ian Hess wrote:
> 
> > I've been thinking about a world size in terms of howlong it could take
> > a determined character to walk fromone side to the other.  I was curious
> > if there are othermetrics that might be better used to determine a
> > maximumscale to plan for.

<snip>

> 
> If you target your game at hardcore players who can commit 500 hours,
> then you need 3000-5000 people in a shard, and a much larger world.
> 

Read up on the C10k problem.  Some of it's dated but the concepts are
still there.

You're going to hit technical limitations for scalability as well as
your planned content base.  Doesn't do much good to plan for 500 hours
of content (projecting 3-5k players at a time) and then be capped at
1000 concurrent users.  C10k today may be C20k in reality with today's
hardware (I haven't done any profiling in a number of years,) but it's
just a heads-up to keep your pipes/memory/bandwidth/CPUs/etc in
consideration.

-mox