Pay Per Month?

[nubs]

Heh no offense taken

I really doubt it will follow Guild Wars though, they could do that because Guild Wars basically cheats and instances the "online" zone into small sections where only a few people can play at a time. The hubs where people meet each otehr are quite busy but nothing happens there other than chat and trade, so there is no need for lots of bandwith. A game like Huxley requires much more powerful servers and much more bandwith, wich translates to much higher costs and therefore they need the fees in order to make a profit.

[Falcon]

Originally Posted by nubs

Heh no offense taken

I really doubt it will follow Guild Wars though, they could do that because Guild Wars basically cheats and instances the "online" zone into small sections where only a few people can play at a time. The hubs where people meet each otehr are quite busy but nothing happens there other than chat and trade, so there is no need for lots of bandwith. A game like Huxley requires much more powerful servers and much more bandwith, wich translates to much higher costs and therefore they need the fees in order to make a profit.

It still wont need to really be over 15 bucks. Planetside use to have 5 big servers and could run fights that had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in a very small area.

[pb8185]

Guild Wars operates much like Diablos series on Battlenet, when you get a couple people to join your group, you are pretty much running the server for the instance and maybe periodically sending packets to the server, and since it's between 5-10 people, it doesn't require a great connection to accomplish.

Also RPGs and FPSs are very different in terms of how much data gets transmitted. RPGs only have to account for location, skill used, damage taken etc, and does not have to be very accurate, but FPS shooters need to be very accurate and has to constantly transmit location data, aim direction data, projectile data at very high frequencies in order for the fast paced action to be precise.

This is why the cities can hold 5000 people and the battle instances can only hold 200 since while in cities combat data is not neccessary.

[Felix12g]

Servers hold 5000, not cities specifically. The thing, cities are usually more laggy since more is going on, constantly. There's nobody dying to refresh their views and the npc's also keep track of anybody in their vicinity. In a massive fight, people are dying constantly and thinning out the area.

[Ao1xSniperkev]

im definatly with pb here. just because people are dying in "thining out the area" doesnt mean there is less stress on the server. There is so much going on that just a cpl people getting killed and are out for 10 seconds isnt going to help any.

[pb8185]

Right and the server sees NPCs or players for that matter as a (x,y,z) coordinate value with a tag that identifies the individual, not millions of polygons. You're talking about clientside processing power, which depends on your computer. Though I'm sure Webzen has taken this into consideration and you won't be processing all 5000 players at once.

Just because this game is going to have ridiculous looking graphics doesn't mean it's gonna hit the servers harder than a game like Planetside. But it does mean more careful consideration in designing to make sure there will not be a case where 5000 people will be at the same place at the same time and overload someone's computer and crash it. I.E. the Ironforge bridge area in WOW. There will probably be some kind of dynamic detail reduction option that will reduce model quality depending on the amount of stuff going on on your screen at a given time. I think in Guild Wars in cities or noncombat areas model textures are much less detailed than in instance areas.

[Felix12g]

I should have been more clear, I'm not speaking of graphics when I'm talking about loads. AI behavior and other things that keep track of people in an area are what I'm talking about.

When you have people fighting on a battlefield, lets say in a pvp battleground, you don't have much strain besides the usual vectors for players and placement for rendering and targetting as well as the projectile and character information flying back and forth to the server. Vector calculations don't take much so any lag is most likely going to be client side and/or due to normal networking issues (Which is pretty much what Webzen is working on with their proprietary shit) All in all the servers can handle these things easily.

Now on the other hand you've got cities. Cities are filled with both NPCs and players. They've got a hell of alot more detail in the forms of advertisements, textures, buildings, decorations, stalls, vehicles and a whole shitload more. Beside the PCs and NPCs these are all client side worries.

Now, what you've got are NPC interactions and Players. The players don't mean a whole lot besides the load they put on NPCs and the actions they perform and just wasting space. A player may roam around the market district filled with npcs and other players. According to the interviews and other articles the npcs interact with you in different ways depending on your outfit, rank and other things. For instance an outfit's hangout next to some merchants will have those merchants acting different to the outfit, which includes more AI than figuring out vectors to paste a player in a combat situation. On top of this there's a whole bunch of players constantly roaming around, interacting with the npcs, other players and doing who knows what else. Add that to chat channels filled with people, people logging in, leaving etc and you've got a much heavier load.

The difference between a pvp area where there's players respawning and a town filled with persistant players crowding around and you'll have different loads. The servers will hopefully be up to handling the traffic.

[pb8185]

Um, whaaat? Ever tried creating a 16 player server for games like CS or BF or any other fps? You can't do it with anything other than a T1 line or better. Just for 16 people, I know when I had cable (I think around 5mbps download/1 or 2 mbps upload, I couldn't support more than like 12 players or else the server would lag to hell.) What you said for pvp player placement, targetting and projectile calculations is definately a huge strain on the server, and for many of these garden variety fps shooters, it's the only strain since there are no other elements to it (deathmatch).

Cities are more laggy because the developers makes it so. By having less frequent data transfers, which is fine for me. I could care less if it takes a second from when I click the merchant to when he talks to me, but not when it's a second from when I click the fire button to when the bullet flies out.

[Felix12g]

There's a little bit of a difference from trying to host a 9 year old engine like half life for a 12 player server on your home computer and a company running an MMO on server clusters where the servers have 32 cpus in a single box. Vector calculations for an AI are very simple, it's a goddamn distance forumla for the most part with a couple variations to change the origin to calculate the distance/vector. (All of which are done assuming a right triangle, a^2+b^2=c^2 anybody)

Besides, from what it sounds like Webzen isn't changing around the engine very much excluding the changes to make the game look how they want. What they're working on is the net code in order to be able to handle all the people at once.

[KopMcginty]

There is more chance of me being good at Huxley than there is of the game not being pay to play.

That means next to no chance btw! :D

Standard mmo sub is around $15, no reason for Huxley to be any different, at least if Webzen are going to actually support that is. As mentioned, if anything it will be higher due to costs rather than lower.