MMOG News Roundup

[SirBruce]

There's been a lot of developments lately, and I'm not going to link to every MMOG thingy from the past few weeks.  However, there have been three things that have jumped out at me lately:

Forbes Magazine Examines City of Heroes
http://www.forbes.com/smallbusiness/free_forbes/2004/1004/100.html
An interesting and revealing article about some the the facts behind how City of Heroes runs and how it came to be.  Interesting that they still quote 180K subscribers; it will be interesting to see the official NCSoft numbers later this month.

In the 18 months before the Heroes debut, Cryptic's staff of 35 made the art and story come alive in 480,000 lines of code. The code is separated into 740 computer instruction files that handle everything from dressing up a character in an almost infinite selection of outfits (a total 10 to the 27th power, in fact) to flying through the city, as well as 25,000 graphics files. At peak hours 30,000 automated villains roam each of ten versions of the city. All the possibilities are managed by 600 2-gigahertz chips (from AMD) in ten servers. They can manage four teraflops, equivalent to the world's biggest supercomputer.

Dungeons & Dragons Online Website Launched
http://www.ddo.com/
Not a whole lot of information yet, but the forums are up and the developers are in their early "chatty" stage before everything goes to hell.  They still say they're coming out next year.

It actually makes the job of releasing information about the game more difficult. For Generic_MMORPG, they can write an article about one of their exciting classes – a tough, wilderness warrior, who can specialize in two-weapon combat or missile combat, skilled in herbalism and natural lore! We call him the Ranger! (Ooh! Aah!) Well, for Generic_MMP03, that constitutes a press release. For us, it merits a yawn from our audience, at best.

GamersInfo.Net Interviews David Bowman About Horizons
http://www.gamersinfo.net/index.php?art/id:130
There are already 4 parts to this interview; 5 and 6 have yet to be released.  While a lot of it is just a Horizons advertisement, there's also some good behind-the-scenes information in there as well.  I enjoyed the following passages where David discusses subscriptions for Horizons and, later, Asheron's Call:

GI.n: As far as I'm concerned 15,000 is a successful game...

David Bowman: We've got a lot more than 15,000.

GI.n: Do you know your numbers, can you quote them?

David Bowman: Yeah, I know them. What I will tell you is that when we filed for Chapter 11 we had 20,000 North American customers. It's up to Game Network to share their European numbers if they want to. We had 34,000 people at our peak. We had too little for 8 shards, too much real estate for too few players. Right now with the consolidation, our concentration is where we want it be. This game is best when there's a feeling of a constant flow of people into the world.

[...]

GI.n: I don't imagine you've got a particularly large marketing budget and truthfully, you've never had particularly great or supportive fansites.

David Bowman: Right now we have our existing fans and they deserve our full attention so we're giving it to them.

Let me back up a little on that. When I was with Asheron's Call 1, we had 30,000 subscribers and we were getting hammered. We were never mentioned in the press we were always being compared to Ultima Online and Everquest. So it didn't get its due in the press and it wasn't getting any marketing - you couldn't find it on store shelves. But we went from 30,000 to 114,000 doing exactly what I'm doing here. This is, turning them into evangelists by giving them something that they're excited about and they can tell people they're excited about.

Bruce

[Paelos]

David Bowman needs to get a bigger shovel. My word that was awful.

[Ardent]

But we went from 30,000 to 114,000 doing exactly what I'm doing here. This is, turning them into evangelists by giving them something that they're excited about and they can tell people they're excited about.

There are people who love AC, no doubt about it.

I have yet to hear from the proselytizers for Horizons. I'm curious about just how many "AMENS!" are rising up from the chorus for this game.

[SurfD]

All the possibilities are managed by 600 2-gigahertz chips (from AMD) in ten servers.

Ok, maybe I am a bit behind the times on my PC hardware, but I wasnt aware that it was even remotely possible to put 60 processors on a single server board.  Am i missing something here?

[Margalis]

All the possibilities are managed by 600 2-gigahertz chips (from AMD) in ten servers.

Ok, maybe I am a bit behind the times on my PC hardware, but I wasnt aware that it was even remotely possible to put 60 processors on a single server board.  Am i missing something here?

We have a customer with a 32 processor machine, so 60 is probably possible. In their case they actually pay based on CPUs in use. Like metered CPU usage...

I believe their machine is some sort of HP server.

[kidder]

All the possibilities are managed by 600 2-gigahertz chips (from AMD) in ten servers.

Ok, maybe I am a bit behind the times on my PC hardware, but I wasnt aware that it was even remotely possible to put 60 processors on a single server board.  Am i missing something here?

My guess would be blade servers.  Must be running on unix or linux...or how many processors can windows support?

[HaemishM]

Who says that one server is one machine? The only people I know who were stupid enough to do that were the Shadowbane dev team and look where that got them.

I think by "server" they mean the "shard" sense of the word, in that there are a number of boxes for 1 server. Of course, I have been known to be wrong before.

So they had 20k when they went bankrupt, but no mention of how many they have left in the aftermath. I'm somehow dubious of anyone that would subscribe to an MMOG knowing the MMOG dev company filed for bankruptcy within the last month.

[Krakrok]

Ok, maybe I am a bit behind the times on my PC hardware, but I wasnt aware that it was even remotely possible to put 60 processors on a single server board.  Am i missing something here?

In this sense I'm guessing "1 server" isn't one physical box. All the MMOs use multiple boxes and only "1 server" shows up in the server list. Isn't an EQ "server" something like 60 boxes (or was it 120)? And didn't DAOC launch with 3 physical boxes (one for each realm) and a database box which made up "1 server"? I'd also guess that each continent in Planetside runs on it's own box (as there is a max player limit).

[doubleplus]

There are people who love AC, no doubt about it.

I have yet to hear from the proselytizers for Horizons. I'm curious about just how many "AMENS!" are rising up from the chorus for this game.

From the games I've been playing and the boards I've been lurking, there seems to be very few of them left. Tons of refugees have been making their way over to the newer games out, and seem to have been happier there.

[schmoo]

According to the Horizons bankruptcy documents, a shard consists of 20 'player/world/control servers' and 1 'database server'.  Assuming dual CPU boxes, that's 42 CPUs/shard.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that EQ had something like 20 or 30 boxes/server, but that could be sheer fantasy on my part.  

60 CPUs/server seems about right for COH to me.

[Alkiera]

Counting on one of the fansites for EQ indicates it has 201 normal zones, and 19 instanced zones(some of which are randomly different, but start from the same place.)

The bazaar, I'm pretty sure, is a server all it's own, just due to the insane traffic that one zone gets.

For other zones, I believe there are between 3 and 4 zones per box, as when zones go down due to hardware/network/OS issues, it's generally been those kinds of numbers of zones down.  So call it another 50 boxes for the other static zones.

19 instanced zones, which at least last I checked, were pretty heavily trafficed, but they are smaller than normal zones, and support fewer players... I'd guess there's 1 box for each 'zone', which runs all the instances for that zone, so 19 more.

EQ shares login servers with several other games, namely Planetside (it's how they manage that all-access thing, I guess.  Mostly, it means logging into EQ was nigh impossible the first week of live Planetside) so won't count it, and each shard needs a world server which seems to co-ordinate between the various zone servers, and maintain the authenticity of client connections and character data and stuff.

World server may hold all the character data as well, or that may be an additional machine.  Either way, I'd guess about 75 machines per EQ server, maybe more, but almost definately not less.

--

As far as CoH, 60 CPUs sounds reasonable, there aren't all that many outdoor zones, but they did go hog-wild on instanced content, and if they're really good, their system sets up new instances on less-busy nodes, thus doing some load-balancing.

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As far as Horizons...  Was AC1 ever as buggy as Horizons?

--
Alkiera

[Kageru]

EQ instanced zones are shared out of a common pool I believe. When LDoN first came out they'd frequently hit maximum capacity and that would be reflected on all servers. I've often wondered if they considered instancing some of the less commonly visited static zones, which much spend an immense amount of time empty, but I assume hardware is cheaper than programming time for them.

[Jayce]

They can manage four teraflops, equivalent to the world's biggest supercomputer.

Um.  I realize it's a bit nitpicky, and that Forbes isn't exactly a tech-centric magazine, but the "world's biggest supercomputer" can manage quite a bit more.  Try in the 35-36 area (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/29/supercomputer_ibm/).

And yeah, I think 60 processors on one board, while I suppose it's possible, would have blown past the point of diminishing returns quite awhile back.

[schild]

There are computers that play chess that can handle more than 4 teraflops.

My flux capacitor, while upgraded, can handle many many gigawatts. Doesn't mean it's the most powerful flux capacitor in the world.

[Ironwood]

My Flux capacitor can only handle 1.21 Gigawatts.

[Soukyan]

All this flux capacitor talk is getting me HOT!

[Trippy]

In other MMOG news, I saw this in the September 2004 issue of gamedeveloper magazine:

Anime MMORPG 25 Million Strong

According to Gravity Interactive representative David Kim, Ragnarok Online, an anime-styled MMORPG, recently topped 25 million registered users worldwide with over 780,000 concurrent users globally at any given time. Of those 25 million, nearly a million hail from the U.S. Ragnarok Online's rapid growth can be attributed to its distribution model where, in most cases, Gravity partners with an existing company in the target country that then hosts the game after the initial setup by Gravity.

Those numbers seem a bit...odd...and I didn't see any confirmation of that information on the Gravity Interactive Website. Even if you grant them Korean-style subscription counting could they really have that many players? That's like an order of magnitude larger than Lineage.

[HaemishM]

That doesn't say 25 million SUBSCRIBERS, it says 25 million registered users. It's the same language thing SWG used in its first press release. 25 million people may very well have signed up, made a character and played during its life cycle, but how many of them are paying the fee every month?

[SirBruce]

Still, it is a rather impressive number.  The number of actual "subscriber" types worldwide has to be millions more than Lineage's.  Legen of Mir is also quite huge.

Bruce

[Trippy]

That doesn't say 25 million SUBSCRIBERS, it says 25 million registered users. It's the same language thing SWG used in its first press release. 25 million people may very well have signed up, made a character and played during its life cycle, but how many of them are paying the fee every month?

I guess that's a little more believable if they are counting all the people who have ever registered including all the free trial people who never continued on as paying users.

[Roac]

Ok, maybe I am a bit behind the times on my PC hardware, but I wasnt aware that it was even remotely possible to put 60 processors on a single server board. Am i missing something here?

Some of the systems I manage/develop reside on a Win server that has 2 32x processor capacity that can be sliced into 1-16 logical servers.  Going with all 32 on one logical box, we still have over 95% capability out of all the CPUs.  They're not on one board; instead they're divided into "pods" with 4 CPUs each (each pod, if used, must be populated with 4 CPUs and divided between servers as a unit).  

Motherboard technology isn't that viable with more than 4 CPUs on one card - there's a serious dropoff.  New tricks mean new tools though, and the technology to put that server together is several years old now.  Plus, if you talk about distributed applications, you could count multiple servers as "one" if they're networked together tightly enough.  We do that now with a pair of 4x boxes; parts of a service run on both and cooperate through a private ethernet.  Because it's clusterd, we could have it all run on one box, but you take a performance hit (half your available cpus/mem).  

It's neat.

[Alkiera]

Plus, if you talk about distributed applications, you could count multiple servers as "one" if they're networked together tightly enough.  We do that now with a pair of 4x boxes; parts of a service run on both and cooperate through a private ethernet.  Because it's clusterd, we could have it all run on one box, but you take a performance hit (half your available cpus/mem).  

It's neat.

Beowulf!

We did some stuff like this in some of my Comp. Sci classes... wrote some multi-treaded software, and ran it on a 'machine' made up of 6-10 of the Sun machines we had in the lab, each group had a cluster of them to work with, ran them on a normal 100baseT switched ethernet network.  It was pretty neat seeing what you can get out of many machines working together.

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Alkiera