How The Game Is Played

The problem with shards

I really had not intended to write two blogs today, so I'll keep this short.

I just got done writing my docs for the day and thought I'd blow off some steam by playing Matrix Online. Nope. No can do. Why? Because of something called sharding.

The architectures of modern MMOLRPGS are all pretty primitive on the back ends and cannot handle the user load of all the potential players. So they replicate the games making N separate game worlds, called "servers" or "shards" by the industry.

Each one is a totally independent instance of the game. This includes your characters. If you have a charcter on one "shard" or "server", you cannot play that character on another server. My character is on Method. Method however is over-loaded right now and won't let any new players in.

The result-- I'm sitting here writing a blog when I WANT to be using that service I'm supposedly paying monthly access for. This is a customer service problem.

The Sun Game Server fixes this problem. It dymaically shifts resources so that as long as the back end has some resources somewhere I can use them to do whatever it is Im trying to do. It will change the industry for the better.

I just wish we had released it a year ago and that MxO was running on it right now :(

Posted at 08:50PM Mar 29, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]