Huxley & Pings

[Subby]

I am very much excited about Huxley yet I'm also very concerned. Huxley cannot and will not thrive if the pings to the servers are not kept low, say <100ms. This is an incredible challenge for a mmo, this is because historically the servers to players ratio is quite low. FPS games overcome this by having hundreds or thousands of servers all over the world so one can always find a low ping server to play on, and the cost incurred for all that hardware is asborbed by the clans / groups that run their server. Most FPS players find a server that is physically close to them, within their state or perhaps one state over, but no MMO that I am aware of has servers spread out like that. So lets think about what Webzen's choices are to keep pings low, and please help me add to this list... (and by the way I believe that Webzen will HAVE to charge a monthly fee in order to implement any of these options)

1) Lots of indpendent servers spread out over the US (the problem with this option is that most Clans / Guilds (or whatever) are not physically close to eachother and will have to split)

2) Lots of servers that are interconnected with a high speed low latency backbone that appear as one server to us. (probably quite an expensive option, requires that not only the servers be fully functional but also their interconnects. This would probably make the community the happiest as this would reduce the amount of servers they would have to choose from and can play with others not located near them)

3) A smaller amount of servers than option 1 but perhaps more powerful and extremely well optimized (what I'm thinking here is that they could try reducing ping times as much as possible on their end by quickly turning packets around which reduces the overall ping time, though I'm not sure how much it would help. Anyways this would help extend the reach of each server)

4) They decide to use only maybe 6 servers (pings remain high, gameplay becomes unplayable and Huxley fails)

5) Need more ideas from you guys...

[Grind]

Since it's an MMO and we don't really know exactly how all the battlefields will run it's kind of hard for me to say. We don't know if they'll have servers that clans can run themselves