CRAWL BEFORE THE WALK
CNET has an interesting story titled "World of Warcraft battles server problems". Specifically,
"With 6 million subscribers, each of whom pays $15 a month, Blizzard Entertainment's online game "World of Warcraft" has become a billion-dollar enterprise.
Now comes the hard part: Making sure WoW is always up and running. Some players are angered by ongoing server problems that have led the game to crash without warning while they were playing. Complaints have also surfaced about long lag times and frustrating waits to even play."
The reason this is of interest? Well, WoW represents by far the largest massively multi-player game out there, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers playing concurrently at any given time. And why is that important?
Well, if we're to see the Internet evolve to a 3--D graphical user-interface using Avatars, and virtual worlds as the underlying online "operating sysem", (as discussed in my post "On Virtual Worlds going Mainstream", a few days ago), we'll need to learn all we can about scaling to millions of users being online at the same time.
And it needs to happen reliably and efficiently.
As the CNET article describes it,
"WoW is what is known as a "sharded" online game. That means the game's many players are divided up among a large number of servers, or "shards," because no individual server could handle the full player base. This is common in the online games space."
We're really at the early stages of learning how to scale these kinds of virtual worlds. Here's hoping WoW can work through the server problems.
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