Applicability of group communication for increased scalability in MMOGs
Knut-Helge Vik, Carsten Griwodz, Pål Halvorsen · 2006
Massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are today the driving factor for the development of distributed interactive applications, and they are increasing in size and complexity. Even a small MMOG supports thousands of players, the biggest support hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. Since they are typically built as strict client-server systems, they suffer from the inherent scalability problem of the architecture. Computing power and bandwidth limitations close to the server limit the possible number of players. Also, the latency of communication between players through the server will be higher than using direct communication. In the paper, we address these issues and investigate improvement options.