How many people could in theory play a MMO at once? Assume they are on from the same continent geographically

Worst MMO ever

2016*

There is no physical limit, you just need enough computing power and infrastructure.

>Assume they are on from the same continent geographically.
Irrelevant.

So you and a Martian could play a MMO?

it would lag, but sure, why not?

>So you and a Martian could play a MMO?
If you were willing to accept the lag caused by the different locations, sure.

Some intercontinental routes are faster than game measurement times. It's only like 200ms from west coast USA to eastern europe. That wouldn't even need prediction in lots of games.

Certain amount of lag makes the game unplayable

over 9000

I can conceptualize a turn based MMO in which lag would have no factor. Imagine like a pokemon or final fantasy type mmo

Well google tells me that mars is 56 million kilometers away, so the lag would be about 200 Seconds minimum, if I did the math correctly.

its only like 30mins to mars, thats fine for chess or something.

it's not only that you can't play,
the prediction algorithms that are used in predicting your motion/movement when there's a packet loss, work up to a certain point.
so, anything other than chess or card games, there's little you can do with latency.

Try 10-15 minutes

I'm surprised there hasn't been much progress in multiplayer performance in the last decade. I already played on 64 player servers in Battlefield in 2006 when I had a 6 Mbps connection. Now more than 10 years later 64 players is still the most who can join a server in the newest Battlefield and I don't know other shooters which can handle more than a hundred players. You have these Battle Royale games like PUBG and Fortnite with a hundred players but these start to crumble when there are too many players in too close proximity. I also don't understand how with each iteration of a game from the same developers the netcode becomes a problem and needs a year after a release to be fixed. Shouldn't they have this figured out by now and shouldn't it be easy to carry a working netcode to a new game?

>Try 10-15 minutes
But 56 Mil km/300.000 km/s is about 200 Seconds?

>shouldn't it be easy to carry a working netcode to a new game?
No, every game is specific as fuck.

So, are we talking about can you play World of Warcraft with someone on mars or is it just any massively multiplayer game (even nonexistent ones)

C=300E6 m/s

>The minimum distance from the Earth to Mars is about 54.6 million kilometers. The farthest apart they can be is about 401 million km. The average distance is about 225 million km.

>fiberoptic cables running from the earth to mars
please be bait

>what is radio signal

also orbits are a thing, no fixed distance

Yes, obviously why are you telling me that, this is the exact number I used.

You can transmit data at light sped by other means then fiber optic cable...

Sure.

Yeah I know, I just used the current distance.

you got your units wrong in the post. 56E9m/300E6m = ~187seconds = ~3mins. I have no idea how you got any of your results.

>you got your units wrong in the post.
No, I didn't.

> 56E9m/300E6m = ~187seconds
Yeah, I just used km but did the exact same.

>I have no idea how you got any of your results.
Surprising, since you did the exact same.

oh i guess i read miliseconds and this was all retarded

epic

I think World of Tanks actually has the best MMO engine. its made by the Australians that made Fallout Tactics and ran the AIE video game school in Canberra. they still work on updating the engine from Sydney I think.

its like the most scalable MMO engine Microsoft was actually having them make the HALO mmo in the early 2000s under a code name "citizen zero" I think it basically support unlimited players.

blizards engine is more about running on shit computers and having decent textures it doesn't scale well and that hole sharding shit they did just shows how shit it is.

im sure blizzards like "next gen" mmo engine is really good thou the one they where using for Titan "overwatch mmo" and are prob using for the mmo they have been working on from 2013 till now that has vehicle physics.

also interesting note in the new WoW behind the scenes Dev tell all book on kickstarter the guy was designing dungions in 2001 in quake3 editor. wow was going to use quake3 engine for dungeons and some thing els for the overworld but they changed their mind and went custom engine for all.

image in WoW was in Quake3 … would have been weird.

yeah but he's referring to general standard practices for a working approach, and the answer is there is no standard. Usually each team ends up figuring out on their own the best lag compensation algorithms to best the general player experience.

For example what to do when different ping players shoot at each other and hide behind cover: Should I only trust the server or should I do client-server hit registration? Should input lag be increased to match the ping? Can my servers maintain a stable tick and virtualization rate?

Unfortunately it seems even these AAA devs don't do enough testing with imperfect conditions. That's not what shows at the presentation or sells the game to start, I guess, but It's always a good idea to simulate packet loss and high ping and shit comp specs to make sure your software or whatever is actually good/playable in real-world conditions.

On the selling point, imagine going to a gaming convention during primetime and seeing a presentation of a game on the lowest graphical settings with the devs saying, "And we're proud to announce, this game will be playable on any processor released in the last 15 years!"

Around ~30.000 users. Any more than that and the server would suffer COSMIC ANNIHILATION.

Nah 30k is super low, per server. Most MMOs do a lot of client side verification stuff and then only intermittently verify to the server's data. Depends on the game code though.

wow only has like 10k logged into any one server at a given time mate even on highest pop ones its the limit and has been since like 2007.

the prob with wow thou is all the popular servers are like 90% one faction which fucks every thing up and blizzard doesn't want to fix this because they like charging people for faction change and server change at same time because they earn more from that than subscription.

wow is dead prob only earns blizzard like 50mil a year profit ontop of costs and most of that is transfers and stupid meme mounts.

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WoW being able to max servers is unlikely, It's basically free to run though, outside development which is also probly super cheap after they got their infrastructure up.

7+ billion humans, plus hundreds of billions of other semi-intelligent creatures.
We're in a simulation.

not true servers cost blizzard like 400mil for 2 years back when it only had 7mil peak with 5mil average over that time.

now they have a 10mil spike every 2 years that drops massively inbetween. sure they could rent servers but I don't think they can due to risk of loosing source code etc. it would prob be more expensive to run now than then this was 2005-2007

One player in this simulation user, and that is you

>wow is dead prob only earns blizzard like 50mil a year profit ontop of costs and most of that is transfers and stupid meme mounts.

dude. WoW is a stable income for blizzard, the few million wow players make more monies for them per month because of the obligatory monthy sub (remembeR: if you buy a token, you paid $20 for a $15 worth sub) than the implied 30-40mil overwatch players who don't buy lootboxes (this was revealed last year, around the yearly stockholder meeting IIRC).

and that's just servers not support staff. also I agree development costs on wow could be quite low because blizzard has heaps of interns from southern Californian unis prob making wow for literally free but the tech support staff and senior programmers and stuff would be expensive and might have blizzard by the balls beacuse they only ones who fully understand the engine/systems etc.

also while the active accounts peak at 10mil each expansion like 60% of them are Chinese that don't even pay subscriptions and inbetween expansions it could easily drop to 3mil with only 1mil of them actually paying subs. im sure they earn more from race/faction/server change and mounts thou but the game isn't a massive winner. at some point they will stop developing it just beacuse of the organization required to maintain and update new content to it and keep old hardware running it. that would be the main cost.

earning 50-100mil a year might sound alot but for blizzard that's a failure they can earn way more by releasing traditional stuff like overwatch or diablo..

but yer imo Warcraft4 is next year and next gen mmo from blizzard will be teased in 2020 they might have time for one more expansion for wow but imo they wont the way the PR devs are talking about "setting up wow for future expansions atm in twitch streams" sounds like they are begging at the suits to let them do more.. imo it wont happen.

the raid with Nzoth will lead into the story of Wc4 imo and will change azeroth so much updating it to match wc4 wont make sense.

idknow I read a chart that said wow was still in the top 5 PC games for earnings but then emailed the statistics company and they assumed the 10mil subs at legion launch stayed subbed for all of legion and forgot that number included like 6mil Chinese that don't even pay subs.

wow isn't doing good just go onto the forums and look what the community managers are saying they are literally crying at players like babies they are all about to loose their jobs the game is about to die imo but yer its hard to know.

classic will be cool

100 peoples

SpatialOS from Improbable.io promises to allow 1,000 concurent players occupying a detailed shared world

7.4 billion

>I'm surprised there hasn't been much progress in multiplayer performance in the last decade
The speed of light is a constant, making it kind of hard to eliminate lag

>I think World of Tanks actually has the best MMO engine.
making a tank-based MMO is easy mode, they're big clunky vehicles that don't need fast response times

im talking about the bigworld engine it uses its used in lots of other games as well and Microsoft was using it for its early Halo mmo prototypes it can literally load limitless characters in one area and limitless world size. just the world of tanks devs brought the company they where licencing it from and changed the focus of development to world of tanks.. big world is best mmo engine out atm I think. but blizzard obviously has a internal one they haven't used yet that's prob just as good.

I don't think you understand how "engines" work
everything you're talking about is extremely implementation dependent

you don't even know what bigworld is. go look it up. its not implementation dependent the engine is literally designed with that in mind obviously world of tanks and other games put cap on it but that's just for gameplay

blizzard puts caps because it literally crashes past that.

It's a 3D game engine and a web technology? That's a meme if ever I heard one

Is anyone else going to give blizzard $50 for the classic demo?

Not for the demo but the streams. I usually watch everything and I had bad luck for a few years when the pirate streams were just shut down fast or was behind like 2-3 minutes

That depends what you mean by "playing".

You could shard the shit out of the world and have 25 people on a map then have tons of maps. But that's lame as fuck.

If you are talking concurrent players interacting in one environment, the game would have to have real simple mechanics. Some fights in Eve Online, one of the only games that has somewhat successful large player battles, have thousands of players interacting with eachother, albeit slowly. In Eve you don't have individual DOTs ticking on each player that the server needs to calculate and propagate to clients and you generally don't need sub-second reaction times so it is at least playable.

It's just players pressing the "fire" command and running some -damage% mods. The big lag spikes came from entering/leaving the shard when the server had to load the player's information, loading 250+ players at once is tough.

You are not going to get anywhere close to this level of scalability unless the game is very simple and can be sharded easily or actions can be processed on multiple threads.

throw numbers and you will notice the limits.
The main limitation is the connection and every player has to receive all what the users around are doing plus send his own data.

lets say he has to send 1kb/s

1000 players 1000kbs ?
ye just some rando numbers, can your server handle that much traffic? yes.

Now some pieces of shit are fucking cheaters and the devs need to implement an anticheat system that has extra cpu cycles on the server just so a fucking piece of shit doesn't kill 1000 people in one single shot.

Fuck users are sending data in an unencrypted environment! lets just encrypt everything
bum contention from a single user goes from 1k to 2k.

O no we have to be smarter on how we send data, lets optimize it and stop sending info abut afk players, from 2k to 1.8k buff we did it!

Fuck! now they complain that some people teleport or skills don't hit the target! we have to develop something that smoothens out players movement. More cpu cycles!

Holy shit now they complain that their character wont move properly! wtf we gave them what they wanted!

Ok ok ok lets calm down and see what we can do with those that lag out so hard, lets implement p2p networks so they can send partial data directly to the users rather than going for the main server. bum! from 1.8k to 1,2k whoa!

O no! now people are exploiting this to ddos each other why! we are working so hard! why!

fuck them all just limit it to 40 players.

basically this, Players are the reason that we wont ever have server with 1000 people at the same time because they will exploit every implementation of the devs to their personal gains

EVE Online is essentially at the forefront of this question. The answer is about 10k-15k on a singular server. EVE found that the server was incapable of handling the mathematical equations required to do game functions in sequence because the server CPU would get flooded. They created a function on the server they call time dilation that slows down activities by a horrifying amount. A gun in that game may cycle every 7-10 seconds will find itself cycling every 30 minutes. Large scale battles are absolute cancer and a few of the pivotal battles in recent years just involved many players getting board and fucking off leaving their characters in the battle for the next 20 hours. 8 hour EQ raids requiring pissbottles is nothing compared to how shitty EVE battles are. Every time EVE increases the threshold of "playable" cap in a singular zone the players fill it immediately.

>mars
Latency is between 4 minutes and 24 minutes.

You might be able to play Hearthstone. If they dramatically change the client. In reality you might be able to watch Twitch streams or send emails back and forth but real time communication isn't really feasible.

Or you can just do server side prediction and not tax players CPUs

deep

tens of thousands per server.

to get in the millions of connections per server you need custom TCP stacks and such, very hard to integrate with a game I would imagine.

Because each player encompasses extra processing power, and requirements of it do not rise linearily with player count.

When you have a cutoff of ~60 players, because lowest game required bandwidth can support it, then scaling to, say 120, will cause more-then-double increase in synchronisation and lag. Specific value depends on the game in question, but it is never linear.

>just stuff more players in lmao

The best, tensest multiplayer matches are usually teams of ~4 vs 4.

With large player counts of 32 vs 32 etc. every individual player's impact on the match becomes so diluted and abstracted that the whole thing becomes a casual clusterfuck. Games like Battlefield just feel aimless in comparison to the tension and teamplay of Counterstrike, Quake etc.

Couldn't you use a clustered server with each unit accepting connections, behind a load balancer?

>In reality you might be able to watch Twitch streams or send emails back and forth but real time communication isn't really feasible.
That feeling when you live in the one timeframe of peak connectivity and through that UNDERSTANDING among humanity.

It's only going to go downhill, once we colonize other planets and can't have real-time interactions with basically all of humanity anymore.

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