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 In an effort
to quell the surly masses of gamers eagerly awaiting Diablo
II (story), Blizzard North
VP, Max Schaefer, posted this
long explanation of the situation on the official
Diablo II Suggestion Board. It deserves to be read in its
entirety, so here it is:
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Subject: The Great "Shard" Post from Blizzard
North.
From: Max Schaefer
Host: Blizzard Entertainment
Date: Wed Oct 13 15:37:08
Hello everyone,
Since there seems to be a great deal of
aprehension about the "shard" issue, I thought this might
be a good time to address it. First of all, we don't call
them "shards." OK, that's not true, we do actually call
them that. But we're trying to think of something a bit
more original. ("Realms?!")
There seems to be quite a bit of misinformation
about our "shard" system. Some of this is because we haven't
talked about it, and some of it is because we haven't finalized
every aspect of it. The fact is that we have to have shards,
and shard-specific characters.
People have to realize something about Diablo
II. You really can't compare it to other games due to the
amount of people who will be playing. We anticipate at least
50,000 users at any given time. That is far more than are
playing any other game simultaneously except maybe for StarCraft,
which isn't client-server. The technical requirements for
handling that kind of number are staggering. The shard system
is therefore necessary to distribute the load and make the
task at least somewhat manageable. The Diablo II multiplayer
architecture is doing things no other game has ever done.
Nevertheless, you will find that shards
are NOT the end of the world. Quite the contrary, you'll
hardly notice them. Consider the following:
1) We intend to have at least 10,000 simultaneous
users PER SHARD! Not 10,000 accounts, but 10,000 simultaneous
players. The number of accounts per shard will probably
approach 100,000. That's more people in your "shard" community
than the total number that play virtually any other game.
Other massive online games have "shards" a small fraction
of this size.
Rather than having many shards all over
the place, we will have fewer than 10 total shards strategically
placed throughout the world.
2) You will be able to create characters
on any shard with available space. You are not limited to
one character.
3) We are working on the technology necessary
to be able to transfer characters from one shard to another.
This is not as easy as you might think, and we don't want
to keep people from playing while we solve this one technical
issue. We hope to be able to add this functionality sometime
following the game's release. We cannot guarantee this,
but we are working on it.
I realize this doesn't answer all the questions
you have, but this is all the information I can give at
this point.
Thank you for your continued interest and
input into this undertaking,
Max Schaefer VP,
Blizzard North
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Addendum: Max popped back on a few hours later with this:
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Subject: Quick Shard Recap.
From: Max Schaefer
Host: Blizzard Entertainment
Date: Wed Oct 13 20:33:51
Hi, I posted earlier with a more detailed
explanation, but here's a re-cap:
*) Shards will have up to 10,000 people
PLAYING SIMULTANEOUSLY. This means there will be over 80,000
accounts (roughly) per shard. You will never see all the
people on your shard; there are too many.
*) You can start a character on ANY shard.
You choose the shard. So you folks in Australia can play
with your friends in China or Germany. Your lag with those
people will be no worse than if we had no shards whatsoever.
*) We are working on a way to transfer characters
between shards. Not gonna happen before release, though.
*) We are offering the ONLY massive client-server
architecture multiplayer game that's FREE after you buy
the game.
*) The reasons for shards are highly technical,
but have to do with cheat-proofing, bandwidth costs, and
reasonable bug-testing times. We are not arbitrarly choosing
to do shards to mess with guilds.
*) We only call them shards because we can't
think of anything better.
Thanks again,
Max Schaefer
VP, Blizzard North
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So it looks like it basically comes down to a technology issue.
The really groundbreaking technology that allowed the original
Diablo to simultaneously link all players around the world
no longer seems feasible with the direction the sequel is now
going. In any game technological concerns must often come before
gameplay bonuses, because if the technology doesn't work... you
just can't play the game. However, there are still several things
to point out about this. First, it will be a shame to limit the
game in this fashion. The ability for novice players to seamlessly
interact with any other player they meet without worry about only
using certain characters will be sorely missed. Additionally,
with separate server communities, there will eventually be inequity
between the game worlds, thereby skewing the proposed world-ranking
system Blizzard has promised. For example, say Server A just happens
to have more players who have found ultra-rare items of great
power than on Server B. Then say several of Server A's best manage
to purchase or acquire most of these for their own use. They would
then be able to greatly advance their characters beyond similarly
skilled players on Server B. Thus characters attaining the highest
rankings may not actually be the most skilled players.
But there are a few points to put this in a different light.
First, Blizzard apparently realizes the drawbacks to the proposed
setup. In fact, they say they are working on technology
to overcome this. Blizzard has a good track record of keeping
true to their goals and to meeting them, and I put a great deal
of faith in them on this issue. Next, I don't think the multiple
server setup will really matter to most players. I for one always
planned on having several characters of various types. Say an
Open Sorceress character for playing at home on my LAN and on
Battle.net, a Closed Amazon and/or Paladin for general online
play, and then maybe a progression of Hardcore characters. There
is no reason not to put each of these on a separate server. In
fact, I doubt that many players will limit themselves to playing
exclusively one character. The way I see it, any halfway serious
player will have a persona on many of the different servers. Lastly,
if the only way to prevent the rampant cheating which plagued
the first game is to make Closed/server-side characters -- and
the only way to have Closed characters is to separate the servers
-- then that's the way it has to be. It may be inconvenient at
first, but once people get comfortable with the game then they'll
stop noticing or Blizzard will have fixed it.
Think I'm confused and dumb? Tell me in the Forum.
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