The quest to create cohesive MMO worlds

With the increasing popularity of MMOGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Games) and the growing user community, the technologies behind them have to evolve in order to accommodate hordes of players living and interacting in a virtual world. As hundreds of thousands of users conduct raids and battles, powerful computer clusters have to keep track of every move and action users make. As the users keep on coming, companies have to figure out ways of keeping these worlds running smoothly.

While different companies employ different architectures to simulate these virtual environments, all of them are working to develop a solution in which all the players could really share a single virtual world. In case of the popular World of Warcraft, Blizzard uses what they call “shards,” which are copies of the same world running in different machines. Users of WOW, which now total over 9 million, are distributed amongst these shards to…