Originally posted by: skace
So much to reply to, probably not even worth it. First of all, there won't be a numberless mmorpg until 1000 people can play on a server with 30ms latency. Are you telling me the bandwidth is there? I highly doubt it. Did you try raiding in EQ, warring in Shadowbane, RVR in WoW? MOST players in mmorpgs hit latency issues regardless if you realize they are there or not. In fact, the blatant disregard for latency issues in some of these posts lead me to believe half of you don't even play mmorpgs. The fact is that that the infrastructure just isn't there yet to handle this kind of game. Latency and bandwidth aside, the machines processing all the hitboxes would most likely have to be a damned super computer. Every axe / sword swung or magic spell cast would have to have trajectory and hitbox calculations.
Ok back on topic, what warcrow said with clusters would apply here and seriously, if you think money is a problem for a company like blizzard, think again. I'm not talking about doom3 gameplay, more like UT. The best server I play UT on is a single FX53 with 1.5 gig's of ram, plays 32 players with 0 lag for me. Now for 10,000$ or 20,000$ you can prolly buy an 8way opty with 8 - 12 gigs of ram that'll handle 128+ players. Then have servers by zones (aka US East) for the bandwidth issue. Then you dynamically adjust servers in the cluster to account for player movements (aka raids of some sort with 100+ players in a small area).
The cost being too high is BS, mmp's are huge cash cows. you get 10,000 people paying 12$ a month that's 1.44 million a year and that's a small mmp and doesn't include box sales either...