How hard is it to code a MMORPG?

It's honestly pretty easy cause the mechanics and graphics are usually dogshit, most of the time you have no physics to speak of (unless maybe basic falling damage calculations), collisions can basically be limited to static bounding boxes on everything, and essentially everything in the game engine is super simplified and dumbed down. The graphics rendering is usually incredibly cookie cutter and never the focus anyway. Netcode is important but gameplay is usually slow enough that it's much much more lenient than, say, what a multiplayer FPS game would require, so that's not even that hard either.
I think the challenge would be optimising server resource usage to make it as easy as possible to support hundreds of players at once.
Anyway this is all assuming you're not reusing some existing engine. I have no idea whether there are good ones available. Obviously stuff like Unity is probably very poorly suited for this. There probably is something, though, which could easily take care of several of the things mentioned above.

Finally there's the actual game design and that can be time consuming since they're expected to have a fuckton of content, giant worldmaps, thousands of loot items, etc. They all need to be designed, and then have their assets created (even without a focus on good graphics, it can still be a lot of work).

This is why you have so many cookie cutter Korean MMOs. It takes some code monkeys and like a few months to a couple of years to churn all that out, complete with utterly uninspired design and graphics that take zero design skills, some waifubait player race models that probably end up having the highest budget of any single component, and you're good to go. The challenge after that is to actually monetize it, especially since it does cost non-trivial amounts to host and maintain.

It makes an unplayable game, cheat2win is the worst possible MMO type

Not difficult, create a basic graphics engine using quaternions and quadratics you are basically just specifying to the computer how it should trace lines. Difficult part is driver compatibility with graphics card. As another user mentioned your biggest problem will be pinging the client side to the server side and vice versa, not that hard to code actually but can be quite expensive. Runescape and Minecraft private servers are where I learned about that stuff but nowadays the autists have fortnite and I don't think that teaches them the same skill set

nope it balances everything. however, just that we are on the same page. what is considered cheating these days.

The biggest obstacle to making an MMO is budget. You hardly ever see indie or Kickstarter MMOs make it to final release or even survive after that. Why do you think all the big playerbase MMOs are all backed by some of the richest game publishers in the world. Blizzard, Tencent, Square Enix, Nexon, and so forth.

>player dupes a rare items and crashes the whole economy
>balances everything

2D once seem to be really easy. Runescape (at the beginning), Haven and Hearth and Realm Of The Mad God where all made by a team of just 2 people.

>coding is the easy part
>Making all the art, story, music and maintenance is what will be difficult
This as well. More and more tools exist for making both MMO and regular multiplayer RPGs but getting art (either 2D or 3D) will be hard since artist is in such a high demand.

>Jow Forums will never make an MMORPG
It hurts bros ;_;

some people have made MMOs on their own
like Dransik

That just makes it a sandbox though. Which can be fun in some games - GTAV online is objectively better when you have infinite money and can just drive around in the latest super-retarded OP vehicle shooting at other people in their own super-retarded OP vehicles, instead of the extremely boring and repetitive missions that need to be grinded to oblivion - but it's not something that suits the MMO model which is supposed to encourage grinding for a sense of accomplishment.

>he puts grinding in his game on purpose to create a fake economy that bubbles and bursts
i would focus more on the mmo part rather than on the rpg part 2bh. what's another problem with cheaters

Pretty much this. MMOs that run on Unreal, Unity, Hero engine, and Cryengine are all dogshit. Making your own engine is the way to go for the long term, you have ultimate control over what features you can add and can make low level optimizations to get your game running better.

Just use a runescape/wow private server as a base and go from there.

Problem is it discourages non-cheaters

Yeah back in the day, not today. Game budgets have exploded since the 7th console gen.

We could honestly probably make a MUD with some effort. After all Jow Forums did make an HTML browser that could almost post on Jow Forums and a working p2p chat client, for example. And it would be technically an MMO and an RPG so

if you make cheating a prime objective then playing the games needs to make you a cheater or you are too stupid to play this game

People dont make MMOs today, WoW killed them

The client of an MMO is nothing special and can run on any game engine
The complicated part is the server and network infrastructure

does grinding really make a rpg and without grinding you don't get one?

The client matters a fuck ton too. Many MMOs have died or merged servers because they run like unoptimized on PC. Prime example is Bless where it runs on Unreal Engine 3 yet a GTX 1080 and Core i7 haswell will still get major dips below 60FPS. Also no third party engine can ever match the fluidity of WoWs movement system.

There's clearly lots of Kickstarter and indie MMOs being developed out there. But like I said before they never make it to final release or die not long after that because they don't make enough money to support it.

A client for an MMO is no different from any other game though
>Also no third party engine can ever match the fluidity of WoWs movement system.
what the fuck is that supposed to mean? it's the most bog-standard movement you can get

Actually that sounds like a hilarious idea - make an MMO where the only way to even get anything done is by cheating, with more desirable results being increasingly obfuscated in the code/memory. Players start with basically no stats, items or much of anything, and have to actively hack the game just to scrape by, and with the game being self-aware about the player's mucking about with 4th wall breaking like Stanley Parable.

SWG wasn't easy but the code is shit in places even after enthusiasts started working on it.

bitbucket.org/theswgsource/
bitbucket.org/stellabellumswg/

Compare FFXIVs client to Tera client. It's night and day in terms of optimization and how well the game performs when 200 people are on screen.

Might get the date at Blizzcon tonight. I smell a shit sandwich coming though, they're gonna cuck somehow by adding a shop or transmog.

Name 1 other MMO with combat and movement as smooth as WoW

Make it text-based. Seriously.

I'm gonna make an mmo that runs only on one single computer (with dedicated gpus) and it will stream the controls/graphics to the players

Tera

I dont play MMOs but if you implement a standard 3D character controller with no input delay it'll feel exactly like world of warcraft so I don't know what they're doing

There are completed MMORPG engines online, you just need to script your game logic on top of it.

that is what I'm thinking about. create something that can be completely fucked up beyond recognition

Wrong. Teras controls and movement are like gears of war.

like the one javascript game that somebody made years ago. I can't remember the website anymore. As far as I remember you were imprisoned or something like that and needed to escape using js hacks

Those premade MMO engines are trash.

And yes this is the full source for Star Wars Galaxies. SWGSource.com is a good place to start messing with it, but just to play there are various servers.

This is true. Can't count how many Unreal Engine 3 and Unity MMOs have failed completely.

Just add more cores

You could also just modify the existing UE engine to suit your needs. However that is probably more expensive in terms of licensing than just doing it from scratch.

The biggest obstacle about MMORPGs is not game mechanics or the engine, it's the amount of players playing your game. And you can't have that without large marketing costs.

I'll make the logo!

I remember that. It was like escape from Dr. Eval or something

nobody wants you to talk sense here

Ah yes, Jow Forums the board with the motto "Buy High Sell Low".

never forget the pubskins that live frugal in their car in the garage of their parents

use azerothcore

The amount of players playing your game is directly proportional to the mechanics and engine. Look at FFXIV 1.0, it had all the worldwide marketing and Final Fantasy brand name behind it yet it still failed in sales and reviews because the Crystal Tools engine was a piece of shit for MMOs that brought a GTX 480 (most powerful GPU at the time) to it's knees and the mechanics were very retarded like capping how much you can level per day in a subscription based MMO or how the UI was server side based so doing something as simple as opening the graphics settings would be dependant on your ping.

you can find the big wow emulators on gitlab

>code
please commit not alive

For RPGs in general, not necessarily in the negative sense of grinding, but some effort should certainly be required to progress. The MMO model is basically a proof-of-work status system, though, meaning that if the "grinding" part is too easy then everyone will be max level and there will be no competition, not incentive to invest a lot of play time. (Think about how easy it is to get a high level Skyrim character decked out in end-game armour, which is achievable in a couple of weeks, compared to the thousands of hours required to get near max in an established MMO.)

In a way there is a parallel to be drawn with a PoW cryptocurrency, where the difficulty adjusts as more people get more work done. In an MMO this takes the shape of content patches, plus they usually start with a very high ceiling already. If Bitcoin didn't have adjustments, the chink petahash miners would be getting millions of BTC, and there'd be no incentive as it would get devalued to fuck. Similarly, if an MMO doesn't have a way to accommodate the grinders that like to spend hundreds and thousands of hours and you can get it done within like 50hr, nobody will play beyond 50hr.

Normal games get around this with interesting gameplay, but that's not really a thing in MMOs - those need a different incentive, which comes in the form of quest rewards. For instance, in any single player game that has a dev console, it takes almost zero effort to skip the entirety of the game - but people still play them, hence the incentive is not the final reward, but the actual gameplay, even if the goal is the intended culmination of the gameplay. Meanwhile, I have literally never seen an MMO where people would willingly forgo instant/free access to end-game gear.

WoW monthly fees is the most reliable money source at Blizzard, even with the playerbase is
>slightly above WoD levels

No need to cuck it too hard, just slap the usual monthly fee price tag on it, maybe make and obligatory $40 purchase then drown in Nostfag tears as they throw their shekels on you.

Just write it in Go(tm)

>I have literally never seen an MMO where people would willingly forgo instant access to end-game gear.

in fact there are people out there that willingly pay for MMO content clears or accounts to skip straight to the end-game. people spend hundreds of US dollars for a single WoW mythic raid carry, people spend thousands for a decked out FFXIV acccount that has everything leveled to 70 with best in slot gear.

that's not hard. UDP packets with straight line pathing prediction. Your inputs only send data to the server. If your connection sucks then fuck you, everyone will run circles around you.

I enjoy SWG obviously...but wish it were more truthful on the shitty game review sites when "emulators" like SWGLegends are using leaked code and not an emu.

That and most of the emus are claiming work they didn't do as their own. If you want to see salt, go look at the SWGtard forums here and there.

Thanks for typing that out. I'll give that some thought and reply later. have some fetish porn teaser in exchange for now

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Designing a complete network protocol and making it extensible while keeping the bloat to a minimum is also easier said than done.

>3dpd
>human

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Likewise you really really need to use DTLS if you use UDP for better latency, or standard TLS over TCP to make it harder to cheat...along with cert pinning.

Check this crap out
bitbucket.org/stellabellumswg/src/src/7e398024d687e7fd6a5238a0a11c4060e5290cee/external/3rd/library/udplibrary/?at=master

not hard to make a generic korean MMO
hard to make a good MMO

show me some good hentai scat porn and maybe you can turn me around, user

Let me guess, you're Chinese?

No, but acutally their mentallity made me think a lot about cheating in general

>bugman ideology
>made me think
NPC detected.

This

>change the max client cap
>run them through the same fucking loop

its a matter of infrastructure and hardware

Patently false.

Try communicating to 10k players in an instance that everyone dropped their main weapon on the ground at the same time. Let's see your solution.

What would happen in that scenario is either lag or crash.
If everyone drops their shit in the same place at the same time the all the actions would still be queued and processed in the same manner that it would had there been just 6 players doing so.
Bandwidth and hardware scaling is the true challenge. This isn't even an opinion, go try it for yourself and host some private servers and try different hardware specs with the same code.