New Technologies Attack the One-World Problem

Hugh Pickens writes "An MIT Technology Review article has new details on the challenges of a 'one world design' in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Most games shard their servers, putting up artificial barriers between friends and family members. Technologies are now being developed to keep lots of players within a single world, some of them based off of the unique PvP-heavy title EVE Online. The best part - the technologies don't just apply to gaming. 'NASDAQ, for example, can be thought of as a very large MMO, supporting very large numbers of 'players' performing billions of transactions daily in a graphically intense environment, all within a single shard. Technologies that solve this problem effectively, says George Dolbier, technical lead for games and interactive entertainment at IBM, will have applications in any industry that requires spotting and reacting to trends, or "anything where behavior is dynamic and you need to move resources around rapidly."'"

One world MMO?

[sanosuke001]

I don't see how that is even feasible. I don't play WoW because it's a horrible game. However, I have tried it. Now, there's what, 8 million subscribers? Let's say 1/4 of them were logged in at once.

First, can a server even handle 2 million simultaneous logins? I bet they could do something, but it would cost a LOT more than splitting them up into managable chunks.

Second, the game world would have to be enormous in order to give people enough room to move around and do their own thing. Just imagine hunting a single boss, 300 people at the same time trying to kill one monster... it'd make me quit.

Now, the game dynamic would have to be changed and yes, that is possible. But at this point in time, I don't think it's physically feasible to run a virtual world the size something like this would have to be in order to fit everyone in at the same time. Zones lag enough as it is. And updating every user's stats? Unless we all have 1000mbit internet connections, I don't think we even have enough bandwidth. And the travel time in-game for that kind of world? You better give everyone instant teleport to any destination or nobody's going to want to move around...

Obligatory Second Life Comment

[cruachan]

Obligatory to mention it, but this is of course what Second Life does, and one of the reasons why it's interesting. With SL all assets are stored online, not on your local PC (preloaded from CD or whatever) and everyone is in the same world. Anyone who witnessed the growing pains of SL over the first part of the year when concurrency went from under 10,000 to 30,000 plus will be more than a little aware that what they had didn't scale, although they do seem to have a handle on it now and conccurency of 50,000 is just about bearable.

Re:No shit, sherlock

[UbuntuDupe]

Also, what is the 'Graphically intense' interface the NASDAQ has? Compared to MMO's it's nothing.

Hell no! Think about what a NASDAQ MMO would be like! I'd buy a bunch of shares in a company with foreign holdings, and then order the third-world factories not to use the regular safety precautions, monitor them, and then sell all my shares when there's an accident before the news hits the market! That would be both graphic *and* intense. I don't think the interface would take much from that experience.

Of course, someone's probably already done that...

Re:Guild Wars has had "one world" for 2+ years

[The Living Fractal]

Tackled the issue my ass.

GW doesn't allow a thousand players to engage in an epic battle across miles of terrain. Let alone a hundred thousand or a million. You get split into identical but differently numbered shards and yes, you can move between them, but if a bunch of people want to meet up and have that huge, epic, battle, it's not possible in GW.

I don't even want to think what the bandwidth requirements per CLIENT would be in a epic battle on the scale of D-Day or something similar with thousands of players moving and performing actions simultaneously.

Let's imagine each client uploads 5kb/sec of action data to the server. If there were 1000 players in the battle doing this simultaneously then each client would need to download 999*5kb/sec of data to say updated in the battle. So, close to 5 megabytes per second. I.E. you'd need to have a 40 megabit internet connection running at it's full capacity and with a good ping time to be able to even stay current with the battle.

Just drop it down to 1k/sec. You'd still need an 8mb connection running at full capacity.

This is why epic, world-sized battles aren't a reality in MMOs. GW cannot do this.

Re:Guild Wars has had "one world" for 2+ years

[Sciros]

I'm not sure that what you're talking about is what I'm talking about, or what the story is talking about. The story I think is mostly about economy and economic transactions and such. GW handles those on a continent-wide level. As long as you're in America, you'll be affected by every "material" transaction in America.

Is the article linked to about creating 1000-man battles? Because server load would be far from the only issue. Exactly right when you say bandwith requirements. There's also the issue of RAM. Even loading into an area with 1000 engaged combatants would take FOREVER on anything other than the beastliest of computer systems.

Fixes one problem but makes more

[AK Marc]

If all of WoW was a single shard, what would the result be? With the existing world size, the population density would be insane. Somewhere around 100x a normal server or so. I've seen AHs with nearly 100 people in them, so how about the same with 10,000 fighting to get to an auctioneer? Or rather than fighting with 2-3 others camping the rare with the drop I need, it'll be 200-300 camping the 24 hour respawn. Or expand the world to a size that gets difficult to meet up with people unless you always get on and off where they are. What the WoW solution would be would to let people move characters around on servers easily. That way your choice of servers wouldn't be a problem when a friend mentions that he's on a different realm. But that would be hard to do now because of character names. And what about items that are hard to get and you not only camp the spawn, but pick certain servers to camp.

I'm not saying that the problem can't be fixed, but it is something that would be hard, if not impossible, to fix in an existing large MMORPG without causing lots of trouble for the users.

Re:Gamers Changing the world...

[GreggBz]

I do know that gamers become very relevant to the rest of the world when they grow up.

As a teenager I spent many, many hours in front of a computer playing games.

Since then, I have never been afraid of computer technology. I am not despaired when challenged by a technical problem, I embrace it. I have always been drawn to learning and becoming better. I am better at problem solving, deciphering UI's and reacting quickly when a crisis arises. These days, as a hobby, I program computer games, which keeps my mind sharp and the logic ticking. Yes, I attribute a great deal of my professional skills, and in fact, my computer mentality, to video games.

You know, I might just say that playing computer games was a better learning experience than playing high school sports.

Other applications as well ...

[ScrewMaster]

"... will have applications in any industry that requires spotting and reacting to trends", or "anything where behavior is dynamic and you need to move resources around rapidly."

Like, say ... a battlefield or even a major military campaign. Eventually war is going to be a matter of software "generals" maneuvering resources and personnel around in order to achieve maximum effect. Something tells me the military may already be far ahead of what the massively-multiplayer folks are doing. Or maybe not: when you think about it, a closed universe interacting with millions of actual human beings is a great place to experiment with this sort of thing, and hey, you even get the players to pay for it.

Re:You're confused...

[Achoi77]

This became popular when the first big MMO (Ultima Online) came onto the scene. In an intro movie of UO, you have some kind of evil wizard casting a spell to destroy the universe/take over the world (I don't remember exactly, it's been a while). Eventually the world gets.. encapsulated by some magic crystal ball that he had. Then came along the mysterious avatar to battle this villan, which during the course of the fight, the crystal ball falls over and shatters.

turns out that the destruction of the crystal ball did not destroy the world/universe/whatever, but instead ended up creating 'reflections' of the world identical to the original. So now all the broken shards of the crystal ball contain a variant of the original world, which brings the avatar to start a new quest: how to bring the shards back together. (it looks like the devs at UO never got to this part :-P)

Problem is...

[omgamibig]

...most worlds are simply to small. Imagine all WoW servers merged. You couldn't even enter a city. The worlds would have to be designed much larger. Could be truely awesome but I guess they just end up as big bleak planes of boring nothingness. Switching servers should be made as easy as possible. Perhaps like FPS, your character is stored on a central server and you simply choose a server, connect and start playing with your friends.

Re:Gamers Changing the world...

[Original Replica]

Oooh look 150 million operations... That would be the combined trading for Dell, Microsoft, IBM, and YHOO. How many stocks are there on the NASDAQ? Hmm, several *thousand* Then you need to add options, futures, and a few other instruments.

I'm sorta curious where you got your numbers. From what I could find with a quick search Nasdaq handles about 550,000 trades per day total. Granted that covers over a billion shares moved each day, but the number of transactions seems to be about one third of EVE Online. On top that the trades seem to be between 5,500 or so listings, moved by 7000+ brokers. That would seem to be easier to streamline than the actions of 30,000 players interacting with however many tens of thousands of EVE environmental items there are. http://h20223.www2.hp.com/NonStopComputing/downloads/Nasdaq.pdf [hp.com]

Re:Gamers Changing the world...

[rfunches]

You're forgetting that real-time dissemination of all those listings in the midst of trading puts even more strain on the system; there are a lot more eyeballs looking at live quotes and trades than there are actual trades, and because countless shares can be traded in less than a second the ability to push that type of real-time data to providers is nothing short of amazing. The amount of open orders the system has to also handle must also tax the system (order not filled = no shares to count as a trade) and the system has to provide the orderbook in three formats: level 1 (national best bid/offer price and size), level 2 (orderbook-style, showing all bids and asks with price, size, time, and MPID) and level 3 (same as level 2 but accessible to market makers). I'd say the NASDAQ is harder to streamline than EVE Online.