3 ms·

MMORPGs like Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft as far more latency tolerant, because of cooldown based combat systems that are based more on abilit

MMORPGs like Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft as far more latency tolerant, because of cooldown based combat systems that are based more on ability usage and some light (distance\occlusion) positioning. Usually they are not as authoritative as shooters and don't have as many object interactions. So combat abilities and attacks, chat, economic and quest transactions are all run on the server with some minimal prediction, but movement and collision are all client side with minimal checks for cheating (speed\distance and maybe unreachable areas) on the server, instead of full physics and collision. Most MMOs are more like a traditional CRUD web application, with important operations backed by a relational database, while shooters are more like voice or video calls, a stream of packets with out of date state is dropped and ignored. There are of course MMORPGs that break these rules and have more action oriented gameplay or lots of physics and player interaction, but they always make tradeoffs (heavy instancing to limit player interaction is common).

rocqua 9y ago
Planetside 2 (and maybe the original planetside) is a 1000 player per continent, ~250 player per `battle' shooter. It does it pretty well. By 1000 players per continent, I mean they all share a physical space, can walk to eachother etc. By 250 players per battle I mean 250 player fighting inside a structure. All of those players are interacting (gunshots, grenades, vision). At 250 player you start noticing some loading issues that seems to start somewhere around 100 players, but it certainly remains playable.
foobarian 9y ago
Speaking of latency and Lord of The Rings Online, I loved their support for players to play as a band with different instruments, with player supplied scores. By collecting the scores from everyone first the music is merged server-side and is played in sync.

rocqua 9y ago

Planetside 2 (and maybe the original planetside) is a 1000 player per continent, ~250 player per `battle' shooter. It does it pretty well. By 1000 players per continent, I mean they all share a physical space, can walk to eachother etc. By 250 players per battle I mean 250 player fighting inside a structure. All of those players are interacting (gunshots, grenades, vision). At 250 player you start noticing some loading issues that seems to start somewhere around 100 players, but it certainly remains playable.

foobarian 9y ago

Speaking of latency and Lord of The Rings Online, I loved their support for players to play as a band with different instruments, with player supplied scores. By collecting the scores from everyone first the music is merged server-side and is played in sync.