158
votes
Accepted
How to deal with "Scrooge McDucks" in my fixed-currency-amount game?
Fees & Taxes
One common way to deal with this in real economies is to add a periodic fee that redistributes hoarded wealth back into the community. A few forms this can take:
Wear on gear items ...
- 126k
87
votes
Accepted
Why are so many games not fully voiced?
Because voice acting is more expensive than just the payment for the actors.
It's not just the voice actors you need to hire. First, you need to find voice actors which are suitable for your roles. ...
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86
votes
How to deal with "Scrooge McDucks" in my fixed-currency-amount game?
There is a critical flaw in your system. You assume players will play forever. In the real world, this is the case. "Players" keep "playing" the game until they die, and then their remaining wealth ...
- 117k
66
votes
What's the performance benefit of saving all logged in characters in MMOs in regular intervals?
This is not for performance. This is a failsafe. If the world saves every few minutes, then if something happens to the server and it shuts down everyone will only lose a few minutes' progress.
By ...
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58
votes
Can inflation exist in a fixed price Mmorpg world?
The problem with this system is that it just fights the symptom, not the cause.
Inflation means that money loses value, because players have too much of it. It's not the items which become more ...
- 117k
49
votes
Accepted
How to handle a large number of pickups in a MMO game
By simply only loading those parts of the world into memory which are close to the player. Anything else is suspended to hard drive. When there is a tiny object laying around two kilometers away, then ...
- 117k
35
votes
Accepted
How do online games handle frequent updates?
While web applications tend to store everything in the database immediately, games work a bit differently.
Any information pertaining to the players currently in the game is stored in the RAM of the ...
- 117k
27
votes
Accepted
Can inflation exist in a fixed price Mmorpg world?
Publilius Syrus clearly stated it already in ~100 BC: Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it. Adam Smith explained why: prices represent an intersection of supply and demand curves.
...
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26
votes
Bandwidth cost / hour for one MMORPG player
Your calculation makes a couple mistakes which might change your actual traffic and bandwidth requirements a lot.
Not every information needs to be updated with the same frequency
For example, the ...
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24
votes
How often do big MMORPG update the physics?
I've worked on a couple of game servers, including a suite of them for an MMO.
In general, they don't have physics at all. In the few situations where physics are necessary (jumping, primarily) we ...
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22
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How to handle a large number of pickups in a MMO game
You have two very different things to manage:
The server must manage the entire world, in an authorative manner. For that, communication with N clients (where N is "massive") is necessary.
The client ...
- 1,374
19
votes
How does mmorpg store data?
1000 player may or may not be a problem. It depends on how often you need to update the database. However there is a simple solution: put the database on its own server.
I had a peek at how the ...
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19
votes
Bandwidth cost / hour for one MMORPG player
Note: This answer was written for an earlier version of the question which lacked any details about what the project was actually about.
While it does not answer the new version of the question ...
- 117k
15
votes
Accepted
Storing coordinates of every object in server side in MMOs
Independent of feasibility (yes, depending on scale) there are often better or easier ways.
For instance, in your typical MMO, the server really only needs to know about the coarse navigation map ...
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14
votes
Why are so many games not fully voiced?
One element the other answers have not touched on is size. Sound files are substantially larger than text files. Every single spoken line is that much more data that must be downloaded to the player'...
- 249
14
votes
How to deal with "Scrooge McDucks" in my fixed-currency-amount game?
Background
In the real world, there are (almost) no Scrooge McDucks. Instead rich people invest most of their surplus money, i.e., they lend it to other people.
Suggestion
Let x be the amount of ...
- 245
12
votes
Accepted
Designing MMORPG with secret quests that can remain secret for a while
I'd propose a very easy solution.
Hierarchical Quest Requirements
Basically, your quest prerequisites are:
A state/states the player has to be in ( 10000 reputation with PotatoCows + 10 quests ...
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11
votes
How often do big MMORPG update the physics?
Besides the other good answers given, I want to add the fact that some physics commonly is not driven by the server or even know about by the server and is a common trick to make the world seem more ...
- 2,363
10
votes
Why does editing the client's memory in some MMOs allow them to cheat?
One of the reasons why there are protections is that reading the game state could allow bots to know the state of the game and act accordingly.
For instance, grinding in a MMO: if the "bot" knows ...
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9
votes
What makes MMOs with real-money economies legal?
When you allow players to not just pay you money but also get out money, your game can easily fulfill the definitions of both banking and gambling which are both heavily regulated in many ...
- 117k
9
votes
What makes MMOs with real-money economies legal?
My question is why are there not more games which take this approach
of a game economy tied directly to real money?
I think the answer lies in what a game is. To most people, a game is something ...
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9
votes
Why are so many games not fully voiced?
Time, is the problem. When you try to localize the voices for every language you publish, you would need to spend so much time on voice-over.
Synchronizing animations are another problem. When you ...
- 5,140
9
votes
Lost in Development
The next step would be to secure a budget of several million dollar to hire a team of a few hundred experienced people, because that's what it would take to create the greatest game ever. Do you have ...
- 117k
9
votes
Accepted
How can I reward dungeon masters that take risks?
This system might be more auto-balancing than you think.
Players in MMORPGs will always go to the dungeon which gives them the most reward per hour of playtime. So if a dungeon master creates a ...
- 117k
8
votes
Fair monetization of a MMO with a simulated economy
How can I monetize this game?
Traditionally, there are four methods to monetize an MMO:
Buy the game, play forever. In this model you will get a lot of capital on release, but then you won't have a ...
- 117k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible