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WildStar: Crossing the Realm Barrier
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
WildStar's latest WildStar Wednesday feature speaks to the idea of ways that cross-realm (server) activities will function. Players will be able to communicate, group and game with cross-server buddies in specially instanced areas.
If for some reason you are anti-social and don’t want to meet people from strange new lands, we will be accommodating you as well. Most of our cross-realm features will have a checkbox to say that you only want to play with people from your own realm. By choosing this option, our system will only match you with people who are on your own realm, allowing for you to make friends who you'll be able to continue to play with after completing instanced content.
There are some limitations to our systems, however. We sadly can’t allow you to explore the world as a whole with your friends; as the world would quickly become too crowded. But anytime you enter instanced content, whether through battlegrounds, dungeons, arenas, or , your entire party will all be able to play together. There is also a limitation on being able to trade items. Because we feel the economy on every realm is very important to maintaining the economic stability of the realm, you cannot trade with your friends from other realms.
Read the full report on the WildStar site.
Comments
Everyone i talk to is by default a moron so the only valid opinion is mine.joking
Sounds good. I hope they have a cross-realm friends list though so you can talk to/invite friends just by clicking on their name.
I wonder what the <redacted> instanced content was?
So many great features and ideas to bring people together from different servers but that just raises the question: why spend so much effort bringing people together when you separated them?
Seems like MMOs going forward should look to having a single realm like ESO(but then not separate the platforms because of Microsoft).
But, the Group Finder having the option to only play with people from your own server is awesome and should be copied by all other MMOs that have Group Finder tools.
Though I wouldnt recommend doing it if you're a DPS.
Serverless works great when you have instanced zones that can be gradually filled up with players, or where you have a highly fragmented and disperse universe. A great example of the latter is EVE Online, although the former hasn't been used in some time.
If you look at WoW, they've used all number of tricks to hide dwindling server populations. Cross-realm zones, virtualization and more have been used to get more players on smaller amounts of hardware. Server mergers aren't the only way of cutting back, just the one that grabs the most headlines.
Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
It's a worthy goal, but not always feasible. As the number of players that are visible to other players goes up, your traffic increases exponentially. Every player needs to get updates on every other player (and every NPC). Add in more complicated characters (lots of points of customization, lots of potential different actions) and it gets worse. Eventually, you'll bring even the mightiest server instance to its knees.
The only way to control it is to limit the number of players close enough to each other for their clients to be aware of each other. That's why it works fine in instanced content, and for games like EVE or the Cryptic games. The population is segmented off into manageable chunks that don't really need to know about each other except in the most basic terms.
The only way to control it is to limit the number of players close enough to each other for their clients to be aware of each other. That's why it works fine in instanced content, and for games like EVE or the Cryptic games. The population is segmented off into manageable chunks that don't really need to know about each other except in the most basic terms.
If your MMO has 500 servers or 1 server theres the possibility of too many people in 1 area.
That problem is not exclusive to single server MMOs so why make it out to be the huge problem as to why single server MMOs are not feasible?
Also, any smart developer would have good LoD for overcrowding like simplifying character models so the lots of points of customization is not a problem and simplifying animation updates so potential different actions is not as much of a problem.
Whilst it's true it's also likely that for games with the same total population size the frequency at which you encounter groups of people large enough to cause problems is going to be less if that population is split between 500 servers than if they're on one server. Having it happen every now and then is annoying. Having it happen nearly all the time would make the game unplayable.
I think single server MMOs are possible (well obviously they are as they exist) but they probably need to be designed that way from the start. Looking at character models and animations as you suggest is one thing they'd need to consider. And they'd also need to consider how they were going to keep the population spread out. I imagine you'd need a very large world with starting areas quite spread out and you'd want to look at ways of avoiding ending up with a few hubs where everyone hung out. Also how would you handle expansions - if you released a new area it'd get flooded with players very quickly so it'd have to be either very large or perhaps you move the game forward in other ways.