Did you read the part in the original post about community? In playing CO, I noticed a complete lack of community. I’m not blaming that all on the lack of shards, but I think it is a factor. When you don’t bump into the same people repeatedly, you don’t get a sense of feeling like you are in the same world as specific other people.

Also, when you are all lumped together, only one guild can be #1. Heck, only 10 can be in the top 10. Only one guy can be the “top weaponsmith”, or more realistically, only one small group of people can be the top crafters. When you break the game into servers, you give a lot more people the opportunity to make names for themselves.

So MMOGs must be parceled out via artificial means: shards, instances, phasing, etc. because there’s just not a better way to do it right now.

And on second thought, there are really three things that shards/instances are used for. The third being the apparent assumption that, for the sake of “fairness” or “fun” or whatever, every single player has to be provided with exactly the same content as every other player. Shards/instances make that easy — take X amount of content, duplicate ad nauseum. Everybody’s happy. (Well, except for me — personally, I don’t care or want to be forced to do the exact same stuff everyone else is doing…)

So, for me, the ideal MMOG would have a single world instance, large enough to hold 500,000+ players simultaneously, without crowding; with a variety of areas that support different play styles; and, most importantly, completely dynamic content.

Yeah I know, but I can dream, right? =)

I’m not calling Eve an instanced world. I’m saying that in the end, its pretty similar in a lot of ways. But instead of 10 copies of Zone X, Eve goes with 10 sectors of space that are not really all that unique and definitely not special (and most likely not hand coded). And that’s fine, because for a game like Eve, they don’t need to be.

Basically it comes down to how you define instancing…for me that has always meant multiple copies of the same area in memory. AKA the way WOW, AOC and CO handle most areas. EVE handles the player population issue by having a really really large universe as opposed to instances or multiple shards.

The closest game to that would be Eve Online. If you think about it, Eve basically does the same thing as CO. It is one server, but instead of 10 copies of Millenium City they just have 500 copies of “space, sector (aka instance) #2687″.

Server selection ends up feeling like a huge gamble, with months of time on the line if you choose poorly (most MMOs aren’t too good about allowing server transfers). Yes rulesets are a nice thing, but they don’t mean much if that server ends up underpopulated a few months after launch.

This been said, I do think that having several shards is better for traditional “progression” focused MMOs.

The Guild Wars example takes us back to looking at games that are “world simulators” and games that are well, games.

The MMOs that are more LPC/world simulator style are probably better off in the multi-server setup. That allows more people to be “important” or to take on various leadership roles. It also allows each world to develop its own unique culture.

In the more game-ish MMOs (Guild Wars, Eve, CO, etc.) the one server approach may be better.

Macil: WELCOME! I am glad you are liking what you are reading. Thank you!

Why not just have a central character server (it can be made up of multiple servers to handle load, of course) where all character information is stored, and then multiple independent Realm/Shard/World/Whatever servers where players can bounce in and out of at will? This would need certain logistics — like a defined cap of logged in players (which already happens in every MMO I’ve played in that results in queues) to prevent sudden masses of players logging into a Realm at once, but those are technical details.

I would imagine most players would stick to one server — much like a “home”, where their primary guild/friends/community are located. You could even build incentives for designating a “home” server, but this would not prevent you from visiting other servers whenever you felt like it — whether to visit friends who ended up somewhere else, some cool event going down, a different culture/community, or just a vacation — maybe your primary server is down but you still want to play with a particular character.

On a tangential note, this even opens up the idea of personalized “Realms” that change depending on player actions, offering a different experience or advantage/disadvantage, maybe with specialized “in-game” migration or application procedures. The possibilities are endless, but that is a whole other discussion.

I don’t like server transfer fees, though. A time cooldown for skipping around I can see for traffic and technology’s sake, but fees for something that could be easily automated doesn’t sit well with me.