Internet getting too crowded?

[Van]

I've been thinking about this lately as I play several massive multiplayer online games and see alot of people from the asian pacific rim countries as well as south america and every european country and now some from behind red curtains on rare but occasions and some middle eastern countries. Today Blizzard anounced that it was offering free character moves from several of its heavily populated servers to other less trafficed servers, Im not exactly sure how many they have but the last time I looked I think it was close to 30 - 35 servers hosting around 1,000 players per server of world of warcraft and this doesnt include the other games they host on other servers.

Sony has its everquest games with each having nearly the same amount of servers and Sony also has other popluar games as well. If you do a search for silkroadonline the parent company has several other games that are popular but not as popular as silkroad wich also has about 20 servers or so and they are always full.

The difference between the first two mentioned and the last one is monthly cost wich EQ series and WOW being a pay to play and silk road being a free to play, where it makes money at is an item mall where you can buy ingame items ( effective at cutting out a big portion of the farmers ) so wether a game is free to install and play or not makes little diference in the traffic it gets. I know that this has been primarily about games but I see the increased world wide traffic in other sites that I frequent including the chat site I have been a part of since 95.

 

[Ramy]

Sometimes it seems busy, but not for very long.

 

[kb7oeb]

The internet is the definition of scalability. The things you talked about are over loaded servers, not with the network itself. The threat to the internet is not more users but botnets and other abuses.

 

[mastermesh]

The problem is Blizzard doesn't make their servers big enough to handle all the traffic thrown at them. When I used to play Diablo 2, and Diablo 1 before that, servers were down a lot! It's nothing new. Blizzard just doesn't plunk down as much money as it should to get the bandwidth and server speeds and space they need. You'd think as many people that are paying for WOW they'd have enough money to allocate to the right areas... but I guess sometimes the fat cats want to keep the change in their wallets instead of giving it back to their dedicated players and fans... Maybe Blizzard chose their name because of the freeze that characters get when the servers go down.