Online Worlds Blow my mind
I just read an interesting article about online gaming worlds.
The jist of it for all you non-techie folks is basically that online gaming is very very complex. Even more so that I had first expected. The article explans how Sony created a world server for Everquest (a very popular online game 2-3 years ago). It took about 20 servers all working and connected together to create this virtual world which could hold about 2500 persons.
The current juggernaut of the online gaming world is "World of Warcraft", which is much more sophisticated than Everquest, has no loading zones, and has about 5 million subscribers worldwide. Its estimated that each world server in WOW requires some 50-70 servers and can support only 3000-3500 persons. Given that North America alone has 90 world servers, this means that worldwide including China, Korea, Europe, Asia, Blizzard has over 20,000 servers running their online game.
All I can say is that ... boy am I glad I don't work for Blizzard's IT department. Every single day must be high alert and every patch day must feel like doomsday.
The jist of it for all you non-techie folks is basically that online gaming is very very complex. Even more so that I had first expected. The article explans how Sony created a world server for Everquest (a very popular online game 2-3 years ago). It took about 20 servers all working and connected together to create this virtual world which could hold about 2500 persons.
The current juggernaut of the online gaming world is "World of Warcraft", which is much more sophisticated than Everquest, has no loading zones, and has about 5 million subscribers worldwide. Its estimated that each world server in WOW requires some 50-70 servers and can support only 3000-3500 persons. Given that North America alone has 90 world servers, this means that worldwide including China, Korea, Europe, Asia, Blizzard has over 20,000 servers running their online game.
All I can say is that ... boy am I glad I don't work for Blizzard's IT department. Every single day must be high alert and every patch day must feel like doomsday.
Burning Crusade
Age of Conan
Jade Empire
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