Sharding is the big bad for MMO’s

Back in the days MMO gaming stood out as to how massive the amount of players was which could connect to it at once. In modern day MMO gaming this emphasis has long gone and the only thing which remained massive is the world size. I believe it’s time for a definite change in this!

Something which always bugged me in so called massive multiplayer online games such as Ragnarok Online, World of Warcraft or any of the newer ones is that they just aren’t all that massive when it comes to population. The worlds are getting bigger and bigger, at occasions to the extent in which you actually end up getting lost within the world if it wasn’t for the map games offer. With world sizes proclaimed to be dozens if not hundreds of square miles and yet the bigger it goes the lower the population density gets.

Following the current trend we’ll soon be walking dozens of minutes without even seeing another living soul within the game. Just recently jumpgate evolution as another next-gen MMO announced they will be falling back to sharding. Splitting up the player base since the technology wouldn’t be capable of handling the game within a single shard.

All the fancy graphics, great storylines and whatever more MMOs like to be boasting about with mean little when that massive part is lost within the game. Sharding is a big threat to MMO gaming, it’s something which truly should be kept at an absolute minimum if implanted at all. Having hundreds of shards show up for a single MMO simply shouldn’t be the way to go.

In the upcoming years I really hope improved networking technology and server architecture will be the new focus for MMO gaming. We have reached a point in which graphics in games are on a level so extremely close to realism anyway making it more valuable to focus on population density first for now.

Worlds filled with more players, having not just the capital cities but even the villages function as social hubs and be able to see you’re far from alone in that forest battling those orcs threatening the survival of your race. Tens of thousands make up for the world population, games reaching for over 50k players per shard with minimal latency.

I suppose it’s a nice dream for now, but let’s hope to see that one day MMO’s are more than just huge worlds with fancy graphics, grinding and half-assed storylines with less people in the server than the village I live in.

Further reading:

• To shard or not to shard (2008)
• Next-Gen MMO - Less social interaction? (2008)