Why you should be playing EVE Online: One server, one universe

Reader Comments (2)

I've always wondered why smaller MMORPGs use multiple servers. I've never seen any upside to it. More hardware maintenance, a fractured player base, and server merges if populations dwindle on certain servers. There's typically no performance upside either, since the performance problems in most games are the result of crappy client/server code, not the hardware that code runs on (WAR, I'm looking at you). Buy a gargantuan IBM or Dell bladeserver, grab VMware ESX Server and VirtualCenter, toss all of your blades into one resource pool and be done with it.

Obviously this wouldn't work for World of Warcraft, but it's great for any MMORPG hovering around the 300k subscription mark like EVE.

Reply

> I've always wondered why smaller MMORPGs use multiple servers. I've never seen any upside to it. More hardware maintenance, a fractured player base, and server merges if populations dwindle on certain servers.

I'm not sure you can easily get that many people into a single server. EVE does it by partitioning known space into very small isolated "systems" with defined transit points between, and even then they've done some fairly impressive stuff to get that many uses into a shared system...

For a nice comparison, see Second Life, where the grid spends most weekends screaming under the load...

Reply