Timothy Lochner

Eh, I'm not sure I buy it. On @planetside2 their max server capacity was something like 1200, setting a Guinness record. And that's *one* process. The number chosen aside, I think there are better ways to distribute work than "geographically".

I’m not saying more isn’t doable, just laying out the difficulties of the challenge and why I think 100 is a bit of a magic number. An O(n^2) problem has to do 144x the work going from 100 players to 1200. It’s doable, but not trivial.

The way I see it, engineers are hired to solve non-trivial problems. The decision to be 100 per chunk of land doesn't scale. What happens when more than 100 people want to walk into that server? Invisible wall? (V:SOH did that).

We’ve stumbled upon my favorite problem I can’t talk about. :-(

I can't tell if "favorite problem" should be read literally or more like "most headache inducing problem I have personal experience with". Lol.

We’ve talked publicly about how WoW split its world sim among shards back when it was based on a grid, and we’ve talked about how we don’t do that anymore, but we haven’t talked about what we actually do now.

To leave WoW behind for a second and talk about the massively multiplayer world sim problem for a second, though; you’re absolutely right - geography alone is pretty terrible.

Like, completely abstractly, the question we *should* be trying to answer is how to weigh the trade off of latency/complexity/visibility? Let’s take movement for example: a desired solution must be low latency and high visibility. Complex systems are out.