Well, to your point, I've been logged into Mor Dhana for the past half hour (after running around in Thanalan doing Beast Tribe quests and doing a quick Castrum run) and my total bytes received is 12,181 kB... hardly something to get worked up over and a scant proportion of my total bandwidth, especially if you divide that by the total amount of time since I logged in. (If we assume two hours, a quick calculation runs that at around 1.69 kB/s... yeah, even a 56k connection could handle that.)
Mind you, FFXIV is indeed not the most taxing game, particularly since they designed it to be able to run on the PS3 of all things, so games with more robust character customization may run more data transmission. As a proportion of server load however, I can only guess at that. All I know is that connectivity is not a big issue here.
To your point, yes, computing resources are limited, of that I have no doubt, but our machines just keep getting more and more powerful over time. It's no coincidence that EVE Online keeps seeing bigger and bigger battles as CCP gets smarter about how they use their hardware and continue to upgrade the servers. The possibility space of what we can do will only improve as our hardware improves. But as for the question of designing a more dynamic MMO world...
That's a question that is beyond our ken, I think.
Mind you, FFXIV is indeed not the most taxing game, particularly since they designed it to be able to run on the PS3 of all things, so games with more robust character customization may run more data transmission. As a proportion of server load however, I can only guess at that. All I know is that connectivity is not a big issue here.
To your point, yes, computing resources are limited, of that I have no doubt, but our machines just keep getting more and more powerful over time. It's no coincidence that EVE Online keeps seeing bigger and bigger battles as CCP gets smarter about how they use their hardware and continue to upgrade the servers. The possibility space of what we can do will only improve as our hardware improves. But as for the question of designing a more dynamic MMO world...
That's a question that is beyond our ken, I think.
