Servers that can support 200+ battles are expensive, but the real kicker is that we still use 100bT connections to connect to the internet with. The conversion to fiber should have been made years ago, and would support all forms of media transmission. I have a cable modem and it does work really well, much better than the 56k we used back in the day, but it is time for the next stage in electronic evolution.

Since the gaming industry is lagging behind because they care more about the bottom dollar than the customer, it is up to us to make them give us the quality we want.

Unfortunatly we will not see that change untill communication, computer, and gaming companies see enough profit in our MMOFPS genre to make it worth the effort for a large company.

Servers that can support 200+ battles are expensive, but the real kicker is that we still use 100bT connections to connect to the internet with. The conversion to fiber should have been made years ago, and would support all forms of media transmission.


Small multiplayer matched games only require one randomly selected player to be the host of the match, would you say there is a way to have more than one player contribute towards the host in a persistant environment?

I see alot of games trying to walk around this problem by representing one large area (ie: a city) that doesnt allow attacks or anything else that would overload the server, and than represent the areas needing high bandwidth as instanced area's that lead to other servers.

I suppose right now the bottom line for the MMOFPS is that if you really want a raw MMOFPS you have to either sacrifice good graphics, or sacrifice profit.

Right now most games that have "online" play use one computer as the host and a limited number of players can log into the arena. Most environments provided in this way are "non-persistant" in that no character or environment data is saved when the game is shut down.

Even your largest MMORPG (WOW ect) cuts its games into "shards", basically importing a character from a primary storage server and updating its information on its chosen world. Each shard is usually a bank of servers that provide a persistant environment for a continually updated character to play in. As of yet there is no environment built to give more than a static number of players (even the largest WOW shard can only carry a limited number of players)

There are LAN setups that utilize shared processor speed. The old classic RTS Total Annihalation utilized shared processor speed through some voodoo to create a faster, stronger computer opponent. Also software has been developed to link several computers together to act as one large "virtual" server.

That being said processor power is still best handled by a central server, or group of servers, in the same geographic location. The lag caused by 100bT connections to the internet make shared processor speed in a persistent online environment problimatic at best.

You also have to take into account the fact that the MMOFPS genre is still relatively new and imperfect to the gaming companies all the main problems that Taiko stated about naming something a MMOFPS is the reason company's are shunning away from putting out the bucks to back up the games with the needed hardware.