Unhelpful

In an online game, you fiercely battle monster AI and human opponents. In a “persistant state world”, you fiercely battle the development staff.

AC’s dev team tackled an increasingly thorny problem during their latest major update: lag.

The method they used said volumes about their approach to programming for a “live” environment, and the benefits of having a dynamic world. Portal storms still occur, and of course nobody is terribly fond of them - especially people like myself with a high speed connection who don’t get much bandwidth-related lag.

Centers of population are always a problem, be they Arwic’s Mage Shop, Britannia’s west bank, or for that matter Israel’s West Bank. Arwic’s Mage Shop was constantly swarmed by knots of mages practicing their skills, searching for new spells, or doing their calculus homework, which was further complicated by the fact that the mage shop was above the jewelry shop, which is another popular destination. Large guilds having meetings in major cities centers was also contributing to the problem.

Turbine’s response to this was twofold: many urban mage shops were moved away from their former locations to distance them from the commerce centers, and meeting halls were erected to give players a portal-storm-free place to meet.

The comparison to UO is inevitable. OSI’s response to overcrowded banks was to create banks in cities without them (good), and to make certain areas near the bank un-recallable areas (bad, since it increased traffic rather than reducing it).

Being a dynamic world, it’s possible to actually change Dereth, whereas Britnnia is a static, immobile world outside of player housing. Lord British’s castle is going to be there a year from now, no matter what happens, Trinsic is structurally the same even when it’s decorated with flames. In Dereth, a vast bridge exists where none had before, cities have been levelled (if only in Beta) and buildings have been added - very appropriate given that human civilization in Dereth is assumed to be new and growing.

I can’t really fault OSI for using a static world model; nothing like UO had existed on such a wide scale. Sometimes very good ideas (static maps, learn by watching, distributed computing projects) have unexpectedly bad consequences. Turbine clearly learned from the limitations of the static model.

What I can fault OSI for is waiting well over a year to react to the overcrowded bank problem in the first place.

I sure do miss celebrating St. Valentines Day in-game. Honest. [dead link]