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Animats·

Ultima Online is sharded. Biggest shard is ATL, with maybe 150 players.[1]

Planetside 2 got up to 2000 or so, and may hold the record for a seamless land world MMO.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ultimaonline/comments/tr1r6j/uo_atl...

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Planetside 2 has them on on huge map, but as soon as more player are nearer in one area the system got problems too. Lags, Jumps and wrong running clocks (different speeds an the map). They shard within a server. But PS2 Networking is really good and optimized, better as most current games, and Planetside 1 + 2 (and parts of the Engine) are 20 years old. Most new games are overwhelmed with 64 Players. PS2 can handle 200 on small areas without any problem.

Planetside 2 does not have good network code, it's very inaccurate and prone to cheating, I mean when you run at 20hz everything is possible. It's really not a good example of modern "netcode".

Shards in UO are called that way because of the lore (gem shattered into shards), and each shard is just a regional server completely isolated from other shards. So they are not very different from Minecraft or Planetside servers. Sharding in other games split the user base based on active load. This is not the case with UO.

On the other hand 150 isn't that many, and many games that do shard their world can also handle 150 players per shard.

I think you misunderstand the comment about 150 players. It's not the max. UO is simply not that popular nowadays. Back in the day there were thousands of players online per shard.

Edit: And there are apparently private shards that still have that player count per shard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36490436

UO Outlands (by far the most active current UO free shard) hovers around 2500-3000 characters online nightly (1500-1800 unique IPs).

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