(04-11-2014, 05:21 PM)Zyrusticae Wrote: 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.
Apologies for being out of the loop so long. Â I just moved into a new place and they haven't hooked up the net yet.
FFXIV isn't very taxing, but I'm actually surprised at the low number. Â WoW has blistered a 3 mb/s connection for me before (Ah, the days when my 3 mb/s connection was considered muscular) by dumping about 20 megs of data to instantly choke the bandwidth in Ironforge. Â Pure lists, that. Â However, that makes me think not just that FFXIV isn't the craziest game for data transfers, but that maybe people have gotten a lot smarter about how to move that data. Â It may have something to do with how it's all separated into zones rather than being purely open world.
Still, to that point, you probably wouldn't need much in the way of customization to keep people satisfied. Â At that data load, you can probably get away with quite a bit, especially if it's loaded after the major character data. Â I had to "settle" for a 20 mb/s connection in my area (unfortunately, they haven't upgraded the Pickerington cable network since the Bronze Age) but otherwise I would have been able to push 50 or 100 in other, more developed parts of the city. Â Even if you did pipe a hundred times that data per character, it wouldn't affect the overworld game area. Â And I suppose that's the important part, rather than how fast I see other characters appear in a city.
EVE's battles aren't getting bigger due to technical resources, though, they're starting to get bigger (at least when the Halloween War was kicking off) because all this time that nullsec corps have been reasonably stable, they've been building these massive backlogs of titans and dreads. Â So it just so happens that when the major alliances DO get off their nullbear asses and do something, it tends to blow more resources than before. Â There was a time when having a titan was a big deal, but before I stopped playing even some of the smaller RP corps were getting them off the assembly line.
Luckily, EVE's data steam is almost insignificantly small. Â An Avatar is an Avatar, and pulse lasers are pulse lasers. Â List data for each individual ship is probably a line of code we can type ourselves. Â If positional data wasn't so complicated, I'd imagine they wouldn't even need TiDi. Â It helps that EVE space is often a vast desert, as well. Â They don't have to handle the entirety of their game field because if there's nothing to warp to, there's nothing to worry about.
Really, though, I think that's sort of the problem with us as a gamer culture (if such a thing exists). Â We have a tendency to criticize stuff that doesn't matter and ignore stuff we shouldn't. Â People who play games aren't all stupid or ignorant; I think we have a right to expect that developers can come up with better ideas than we do. Â Yet most of the best ideas in MMORPGs especially came from players who didn't shut up on forums. Â At the very least, I think we should be able to intellectually debate the philosophy behind where we want our games going.
I'm personally just disappointed in the whole endeavor at this point; games are developed using film as a model instead of sculpture or architecture, so they're much more often built as a series of vignettes along a rail than as a space to be inhabited. Â That's the problem with taking a media that can handle persistent action of infinite variety and modeling everything after a two-dimensional media that is temporal in nature.
And yet, inexplicably, everyone that bucks this particular trend in gaming makes the ridiculous choice to not design a game around it. Â It's almost like game companies haven't really looked at the core advantages, disadvantages, and promises of an MMORPG yet. Â Say what you will about FFXIV being mostly a series of short stories told in a row interspersed with random quests you can take elsewhere, Square at least understands the fundamental strength of an MMORPG. Â Most companies haven't even thought about it. Â I have a lot of respect for that, I just wish they'd have done something a bit more original than make a more respectable copy of WoW built out of an older developmental failure.
Sad that I still think it's the second best MMORPG in the field considering that pedigree, but Square understands how to get us our money's worth for the subscription we pay. Â Maybe that's just testament to the weakness of modern design as it is; you can just be good at the pedestrian stuff and still be at the top of your division. Â Most companies can't even handle the basics with grace, so it's not worth bragging about the things they did spend their time on. Â If you can't skate or handle the puck, you can't brag about how well you shoot; you'll only get the benefit if you stand still on the ice in the right place with nothing else trying to stop you.