Posts tagged shard 
WildStar explains how MMO servers work
Welcome, class, to MMO Servers 101! Your professor today is Carbine Studios Lead Network & Database Engineer David Ray, and he's here to give a technical overview of how MMOs set up and run their servers. Please take notes. While Ray won't reveal all of Carbine's secrets, his explanation ...
EVE Evolved: How would you build a sandbox?
Themepark MMOs and single-player games have long dominated the gaming landscape, a trend that currently seems to be giving way to a resurgence of sandbox titles. Though games like Fallout and the Elder Scrolls series have always championed sandbox gameplay, very few publishers seem willing to ...
Not So Massively: Diablo III open beta weekend edition
Diablo III's open beta weekend was a huge success, giving developers the chance to stress test the servers that will be used when the game goes live in just over three weeks. Torchlight II teased fans this week with the release of its official opening trailer, which picks up the story from the ...
Not So Massively: PAX East, D3 unlocks, and MOBA news
With just less than a month until Diablo III hits the shelves, Blizzard released another 275,000 beta keys into the wild. The share meter on the game's social media microsite also reached 30% this week and unlocked the first three pieces of exclusive content. Meanwhile, Path of Exile celebrated ...
The Perfect Ten: Non-vanilla server rulesets
I've always thought that rulesets are a golden opportunity for MMO developers to get creative with their products and try something fresh and exciting. Unfortunately, most every MMO these days, new and old, adheres to the four "vanilla" rulesets that have been in place since Pong. You have your ...
The Soapbox: The industry's obsession with shards
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. The MMO genre is now over a decade old, and in that time we've ...
Is MMO terminology invading database programming?
Raph Koster couldn't help but wonder when he read the blog post entitled, "Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups," if he had a hand in creating that terminology. Sharding, as this blog post put it, was a method of running databases parallel to one another and making sure that the program could ...
To shard or not to shard
As massive as we like our MMOs to be, the realities of modern networking have made sharding, the creation of identical game worlds hosted on separate servers, a practical necessity. Last week, Awen, Jumpgate Evolution community manager, elaborated on why the NetDevil team was looking at sharded ...
EVE Online blazes into The Empyrean Age
Massively has been beating the war drums as EVE Online enters a new era in PvP: The Empyrean Age expansion. This time of factional warfare will sweep players of all four races in New Eden into a whirl of conflict never seen before in the game. PvP will no longer be limited to low sec ganks, 0.0 ...
