The other really nice thing about Guild Wars infrastructure was that they were able to issue patches (at least minor ones) to the game without restarting the re

The other really nice thing about Guild Wars infrastructure was that they were able to issue patches (at least minor ones) to the game without restarting the realm or all the game clients. You would be told "The game has been patched, restart your client to get it", but you can just keep playing. As far as I can tell, they were able to run game instances for two different versions side by side until all of the players of the old version have left. The world of one version would slowly drain of players while the world of the next version filled with them. As someone also working on an online game, Guild Wars was a real inspiration for large amounts of our architecture. While we currently don't have the ability to run the game with a subset of data (though our code base was designed with that in mind for later) it's not far off, and the way our game client can patch itself in to the full game using only it's executable was something that was entirely inspired from Guild Wars. The main problem I see is that I think our base data set would need to be something along the lines of 500 meg before you can play rather than the very small amount GW had as mandatory to get to the menu. This is mainly due to the ability to encounter other players who might decide to use skills or items and we would prefer that they were available rather than having those players in a state where the game looks wrong. Also, while we do have fast patch deployment (about 30 seconds to change between game versions) we don't quite yet have the ability to do it as well as GW did with completely restartless updates. It's something I would really love to do when we get time, and our architecture can totally support it.