Popular massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) typically have millions of players and are played throughout the world. Worldwide revenues for MMORPGs have increased to billions of dollars each year. Unfortunately, the complex architecture of MMORPGs make them hard to maintain, resulting in considerable costs and development risks. For normal operation, MMORPGs have to access huge amounts of diverse data. With increasing numbers of players, managing growing volumes of data in a relational database becomes a big challenge, which cannot be overcome by simply adding new servers. Cloud storage systems are emerging solutions, focusing on providing scalability and high performance for Cloud applications, social media, etc. However, Cloud storage systems are in general not designed for processing transactions or providing high levels of consistency. In this paper, we analyze the existing architecture of MMORPGs, classify data, highlight the design requirements, identify the major research challenges, propose a Cloud-based model for MMORPGs, and present a series of data management solutions.
As outlined for instance by the CAP theorem, achieving consistency guarantees within a 100% available and faulttolerant distributed system is impossible. Nevertheless, in real-life applications actual properties are neither black nor white and the degree of fulfilment of requirements depends on the likelihood of failures and communication parameters of distributed systems. While typical Cloud-based applications weaken consistency in accordance with less strict applications requirements, strong consistency can also be achieved, for instance by tunable consistency. This, however, often comes with a strong degradation of scalability (performance of growing clusters) and availability. Based on a project investigating the usefulness of Cloud DBMS for Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) we describe how strong consistency can be provided for such a scenario, by still proving a high-level of availability and performance suitable for this specific application. For this purpose we implement a lightweight mechanism to detect failures based on timestamps and only react accordingly if required.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) provide a persistent and collaborative world for millions of players. With increasing numbers of players and growing volumes of data, architectures based on conventional RDBMS limit the development of MMORPGs, because issues related to the availability and scalability of the storage system become a big challenge. These properties are typically well supported by Cloud data storage systems, while other typical requirements of MMOPRGs are not or not yet supported, as we will show in this paper. Furthermore, in a current project we assess the usability of Cassandra and possibly extend its functionality for MMORPGs. In this paper, we will classify data based on its management requirements, highlight limitations of the existing architecture and identify potentials and issues of Cassandra in the management of diverse data in MMORPGs.
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