BA Chapter 3

I would like to mention other designs of MMO's that are different than the popular World of Warcraft. First off, World of Warcraft has many different servers in many different regions. Players connect to the server of their choice and interact only with other people connected on the same server.

Guild Wars, a monthly payment free MMO, only allows a player to connect with one “server”, but you can only interact with other players in certain places. A city or village for example. Each city is divided into districts. A district is a copy of the city on a different physical server. So when the population of a district reaches its limit, it will push incoming players to that town into another district.

Eve Online, a sci-fi based MMO, also only allows players to connect to one “server”. Each star-system that the player can visit is a separate process on a server. With some high-load systems being given a server all to themselves and many low-load systems being combined and run on servers together. These "SOL Servers" are tied into EVE's main database server where changes to the game take place. Since players need to move between solar systems, they are connected to proxy servers which keep track of which SOL server the player is on. I had to some research in to the server architecture for this game and found this diagram to help out.