DOF servers?

[Darathor]

I heard it explained earlier that everything was basically instanced, so it doesn't matter how many guys are on a server. Everything would be instanced into its own thing.

[lonewolf9567]

because this is an rts id think like in the hundreds

[LiTos456]

Nah, they said a thousand at max I think.

[Justin]

The problem with only a thousand players max is for a game like this where i believe you can only attack other players that are online there would never be very many people online. Even on an online game with a monthly subscription, from personal experience i would say less than half of the people are online on a weekly basis. Which would lead to not very many people to have pvp fights on at any given time.

[Darathor]

All the areas, like your city, will be instanced. This allows for all the players to be on one server due to everything being instanced in its own little place.

[frankein_fish]

And btw EVE runs on several nodes where one node handles one solar system (Depends on how populated they are)

[Darvin]

It's entirely possible that everyone could play on one server. Most of the DoF's MMO mode appears to be instanced anyways.

One of the biggest questions is the matter of synchronization. The traditional RPG sync methods probably won't scale to RTS levels, but using the traditional RTS sync method would mean you'd have minimal defenses against cheaters. How they handle sync almost certainly will determine their server structure, and I'm curious as to what technical direction they took.

[Swift sword]

There's no way there'd be 40k players on one server- even on MMO's such as WoW, where you command a single character, there isn't 40k players on a server. Granted, most of it is instanced, and not all of the cities are shown, but I still can't see there being that many people on a single server without mass lag. I'm more curious as to how many players there will actually be. I mean, there certainly isn't going to be 40k people on at one time...right?
I'm guessing 1000, maybe less, per server. I kind of doubt there will ever be more than 1000 players on a single server at one time. But, that's just me. I' quite capable of being wrong about many, many things, you know

[Darvin]

Alright, this isn't going to be World of Warcraft. Even presuming that DoF is an awesome game that's very successful (which I hope it is), it can't hope to have a comparable player base. World of Warcraft was the perfect storm of the right developers making the right game at precisely the right time. Dawn of Fantasy, on the other hand, is coming from a new developer, will have to compete with Starcraft II for RTS fans, and its genre is new and experimental. Let's be serious here: 40k people online at once is a pipe dream. DoF would have to be one of the highest selling PC games of all-time to even have a shot at this.

Remember, most people are singleplayer only gamers. Even in MMO's, the vast majority of gamers avoid human contact and would prefer an offline mode if it were available. The vast majority of people who buy DoF will never touch online mode, and only a small fraction of those who do will stick around for the long-run. It may be that we only have 1000-4000 people online at peak hours.

Secondly, the MMO term for "server" and the literal term diverge a little. In reality, one server is not managed by a single machine, but rather a network of custom-built machines. So in reality, one server is actually a network of servers in and of itself. The real question is how Reverie is building their server system.

It may be that from the user's perspective, there is only one "server". This is not to say that there is only one machine managing everything, but rather that all of these machines are part of a coherent network and are indistinguishable to the user. How Reverie decides to build their architecture will determine what it looks like in the end.

[Unen]

Originally Posted by zach12wqasxz

well, games like world of warcraft only have like 2000 people i do beleive, ( i have never played it ), now imagine 2000 people, all with 2000 man armies, i htink it would cause some serious lag without really good servers, mmos are a bit different from rts's, now combine them, i bet there will be a lot of lag in the beta testing

Originally Posted by Swift sword

There's no way there'd be 40k players on one server- even on MMO's such as WoW, where you command a single character, there isn't 40k players on a server.

Wow servers range from 1k to 38k players. At least thats according to wow census. EX http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php?serverid=749
You also have to take in account the mass amounts of profit blizzard makes which enables them to easily have servers able to handle that.