The irony of server meshing

[JeffCraig]

It's been a while since I've looked into DU. The last time I played was during the big change with mining claims, etc. Just doing my annual check-in and it seems like not much has changed since then.

 

It looked at player counts and it struck me how ironic the whole concept of DU is now. They spent so much time building this amazing server mesh tech and now the whole game could run on a single server instance 😄 I couldn't help but laugh at the irony of it all.

 

This will probably be my last check-in. To all you other kickstarters out there: so long and thanks for all the fish!

[blundertwink]

19 hours ago, JeffCraig said:

They spent so much time building this amazing server mesh tech and now the whole game could run on a single server instance

 

And it probably is running on one instance lol --- like there's player-run servers for non-MMOs that see more multiplayer traffic than DU. 

 

 Otherwise I have to object to the phrase "amazing server tech" because as we all saw many times, their tech never scaled. The premise of the tech never made sense to begin with, so of course it didn't work even at small scales. 

 

The entire notion of the single shard was amateurish in retrospect. It served no real benefit and if the game had managed to scale, it would have imploded the world even faster.

 

There's a good reason the Enterprise world is moving back to on-prem infra; you can't just throw an MMO ON AWS and expect it to scale without breaking your bank!

 

That very idea is so amateurish it still makes me cringe. A theme-park style MMO would be a different equation, but the only way DU was ever going to work was with about 10 times as much funding, a bespoke game engine, and NQ standing its own metal. 

 

DU is almost lucky that the game's core design was so bad that it didn't attract a mess of people. Even if they were successful in attracting a bunch of players, I think the way they built it guaranteed the game would never work at any scale -- and if they could support it technically, they sure as hell wouldn't have been able to support it financially.