The Game Servers

Holy crap I got a lot more servers up than I thought I could. The MMO museum is really coming together.

Aside from the MMO Museum of course I am working on Geruterra. Trying to play some games that inspire me (the very games I have hosted in the MMO museum, in fact.) and build a clearer image of the systems we want in the demo.

It took me a month now of setting up and testing but I have amassed a lot of MMOs in my museum for people to play. I have to add some things to help simulate economies in a few of these games, for FFXI I modified and updated an old bit of python code to maintain the auction house in my test server. I need to add it to the live server, planned to take a few minutes to do it today. Hopefully have the time for it.

The MMO Museum project is a part of the Cyberwanderers project, an effort to catalog things I feel are interesting and may be in danger of being forgotten, perhaps? It's an archival project to keep a bunch of the "Wild West" eras primarily(but other eras too, this is just a place to start, the archive would hopefully be huge.) of many subjects of interest to me and perhaps other writers?

Right now my monthly server costs are around 100 dollars because I use a lot of old hardware. It is running everything. All my sourcecode management and mirrors, for instance. All the MMO emulators, all the files, the radio, the twitch clone streaming system, the youtube interface, my search engine, everything I host runs from these servers. They may be old but they do a damn fine job.

For those interested in playing the games I am talking about they are mostly detailed in the Armored Mask Forums. I will build a Wiki, that seems the best format for the project but for now I detailed it all in this category.

This has been taking up a lot of my time as some of these servers were quite poorly documented. Others were up in 15 minutes or so with little effort. Most of them have outdated docs, many had outdated libs and dependancies and calls to dependancies that were incorrect due to changes, etc. BUT many of them are solid.

All of the servers aside from WoW and RF are public. WoW for reasons of actiblizz being quite unfriendly chaps and RF is only inaccessible because it has no way to register yet.

There are other servers I would like to get up and running, and I still do have some space for a few more. I was considering very much a RAN online server, City of Heroes and a few others outlined in the aforementioned forum category in a poll.

Geruterra's design has started to materialize and become more solid thanks to the time I spent in these old games messing around. I learned that we lost a lot in the name of making games more broadly accepted. Every version of something we seem to lose another bit, but who decides what we lose and what if they were wrong?

Anyway that's why I am back in the past studying games from the wild west of MMOs up to the point where I started to hate what they became.

I get making your game accessible to more people but sometimes you end up sacrificing a lot. Deus Ex, Elder Scrolls, Bioware games, they all streamlined and lost stuff as they went, this happened to a lot more than just them. It very clearly happened to MMOs.

If you track MMOs up to WoW you get a lot of interesting things, lots of housing systems and interesting character progression systems, combat systems, esoteric builds and what I think is most important... the sense of adventure. The only way I think MMOs will ever be good again is if they manage to completely destroy the current meta and reset back to zero. How does one do that successfully; who can say?

Anyway I am very ORPG centric and will very likely end up building Geruterra into some kind of MMO if left unchecked after we have a few expansion packs under our belt... I try to curb it hosting these servers for now lol.

Anyway, it's my day off and I got some cleaning to do.

Cheers.