MMO Understanding

[Daydreamer]

@;19917

Because even the typical MMO’s have limits on how many players can be in one scene.

Hi ,

The number of players in one scene hits the nail on the head. A game isn’t an MMO just because it can group 8 or 16 or 32 players together in one instance; the first M, “massively”, means that players can interact at the same time on a much larger scale, whether portions of the game are instanced or not.

For example, one popular game type today is the MOBA, short for “Multiplayer Online Battle Arena”. The two most popular MOBAs, Dota 2 and League of Legends, each have millions of players online at the same time during peak hours. Millions are on line, and yet the games are not known as MMOBAs (adding the “massively” abbreviation) – they are simply MOBAs, because each game takes place in an instance with a limited number of players.

Here’s another definition, ripped from an Examiner article](http://www.examiner.com/article/mmo-101-what-makes-a-game-massively-multiplayer) on the subject:

Massively

The first key to being massively multi-player is being massive. This component to the MMO formula is difficult to define, and has been under recent scrutiny.

It should be noted, first of all, that “massive” does not indicate the number of active or registered players enjoying a game. A game can be massively multiplayer with 100,000 subscribers or 10,000,000. If subscriber numbers influenced terming an online game as “massively,” then many games would fluctuate based on their active playerbase.

Instead, “massively” refers to the support a game has for multiple players online, in the same world, at once. This is tricky to define, but in general, a massively multiplayer online game should be able to support at least one thousand people simultaneously on a single server. However, many recent games have defined themselves as MMOs with only one-hundred players supported per server, further pushing this boundary to new definition.

So while a gray area certainly exists, there is definitely a distinction to be made between MOGs and MMOGs.

Cheers,
-D