I'm sure some of you are most likely thinking what would someone like me know about server side setup and design for a mmorpg. I actually had some experience running servers. And when it comes down to most mmorpg's they lack proper server side coding.
For example we have some pretty beast servers which are possible with multi-core processors but most mmorpg's are not built multi-thread and don't take advantage of having multi-core processors for processing data. Just imagine if a mmorpg was built from the ground up and could take into account a server with just two server cores. Your talking much more power being able to have more players in a single map and less server crashes because of performance problems.
For the most part I can't really comment too much about servers but there's one feature I have yet to actually see be made possible from an mmorpg and that's the ability to cross server and i mean with success. Tera Online had cross server event's but these caused the server to lag really bad and crash. Could be related to the lack of multi-core processor support or it could be because of how the server was coded. They of course removed the feature with the change of nexus but its one of those features which would have been really interesting to have work properly.
Another thing which I can't stress enough will also be related to keeping the server free from botters and hackers. And being successful in doing this will come down to the way players are delt with. Currently every single mmorpg on the market falls short because they only have the resort of banning someone by IP. The issue with doing this is that more then 80% of all ISP's allow a user to change there IP just by resetting the modem. You can also bot and hack using a proxy with hamachi to get around this as well. So all they need to just get a new proxy and you can download tons of proxies all over the net or pay 5 dollars to get a list of some good ones. So when a game server ban's by IP all they do is force these people to change how they are hacking and botting and they continue to do it again. Deleting the account just makes them make a new account not really any loss for a botter.
So how does one deal with people that bot and hack? Instead of banning by IP the login server during authentication should be recording a persons hardware address such as CPU, harddrive, ram that way if someone needs to be banned from the server the server will ban them based on the serial's of these key componets in their computer that way it would be impossible for them to return to the game unless they changed computers. You might ask why not just record the mac address of a computer since it's easier there's software on the internet to change mac address really easily so this is not a safe address to use for banning people and can be changed just like that of IP addresses.
The reason why you would be so strict to offenders in a mmorpg is take for example World of Warcraft this is a top advertised game but did you know they are actually one of the most known hacked games as well even with the game security known as warden. This is because the more offenders you just slap on the hand by giving them just a delete of account they will just use some of the money they made selling gold to buy a new copy of the game only to start botting and selling gold again. If the very first offender of hacking had his computer banned from playing the game he would have gave up on the idea cause no one wants to buy a new CPU to be able to play a mmorpg. The more strict the punishment people will go to the hacking community and be like guys don't hack cause your computer gets banned from connecting to the server.
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