3 ms·

For WoW, at a very high level, instancing and sharding. Players are spread across realms. The zones are so large that by nature players will be spread out lead

For WoW, at a very high level, instancing and sharding. Players are spread across realms. The zones are so large that by nature players will be spread out leading to less interactions. Raids are instanced to just your party. In areas with natural congestion (such as auction houses), things could lag at times. While combat and movement is realtime, it's mostly waiting for timers, so the latency and bandwidth requirements are reduced compared to a first person shooter for example.

jonathanlydall 5y ago
With WoW they would obviously run each continent as an independent “instance”, but for Wrath, they clearly had multiple servers handling Northrend. There were places where mobs would not path over which was where the two “instances” would overlap. WoW later introduced a kind of dynamic overlay of the same open world area from two realms where it was not very populated in the area so that players would be more likely to actually see other players. There was also a feature where you could party up with a friend on a different realm and you would transparently be playing on their server in the open world (with restrictions like not being able to trade with them). I haven’t played WoW since Mysts, so I don’t know how it’s changed since, but WoW was definitely more complicated than just sharding and instancing.
- mysterydip 5y ago
  You're correct, I was referring to vanilla WoW which is all I played. It has definitely evolved since then, thanks for the info!
tialaramex 5y ago
Yeah, WoW's combat is effectively just a MUD, to the extent your position matters it's only very approximate even though the animations look much more precise. The Darkmoon rabbit fight made this extremely obvious, because the mob is tiny (it's just a rabbit, it's a reference to The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) but it's a public fight with potentially dozens of people trying to attack this rabbit at the same time with huge swords and casting spells and stuff, which looks completely ridiculous, but it's a joke so, it's OK that it's silly.

jonathanlydall 5y ago

With WoW they would obviously run each continent as an independent “instance”, but for Wrath, they clearly had multiple servers handling Northrend. There were places where mobs would not path over which was where the two “instances” would overlap. WoW later introduced a kind of dynamic overlay of the same open world area from two realms where it was not very populated in the area so that players would be more likely to actually see other players. There was also a feature where you could party up with a friend on a different realm and you would transparently be playing on their server in the open world (with restrictions like not being able to trade with them). I haven’t played WoW since Mysts, so I don’t know how it’s changed since, but WoW was definitely more complicated than just sharding and instancing.

mysterydip 5y ago
You're correct, I was referring to vanilla WoW which is all I played. It has definitely evolved since then, thanks for the info!

tialaramex 5y ago

Yeah, WoW's combat is effectively just a MUD, to the extent your position matters it's only very approximate even though the animations look much more precise. The Darkmoon rabbit fight made this extremely obvious, because the mob is tiny (it's just a rabbit, it's a reference to The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) but it's a public fight with potentially dozens of people trying to attack this rabbit at the same time with huge swords and casting spells and stuff, which looks completely ridiculous, but it's a joke so, it's OK that it's silly.