05-23-2008, 04:25 PM
Quote:The database hit is not in load but in size. Having one account spread across servers means information is required to tie the one account to multiple servers. In fact, I believe this is handled by another server (what is often referred to as the world server?), an added expense and possible failure point. And, as has already been pointed out, the limit has nothing to do with knowing how many accounts there are on a server. If an account has 1 or 1000 toons, it is not only easy to find that they are one account, but it has nothing to do with overpopulation. Overpopulation is having too many toons that can be played at one time. Unless you have some kind of unknown hack, only one toon per account can be played so overpopulation is too many accounts.
Chances are that information and log-ins are trickled from the "world server" as you refer to it (or the log-in server). What this means is that no matter how many people log into Stormrage at the exact same time the data going to the Stormrage server will never exceed a certain amount. This limits the chances of particular servers going down and it means that they can centralize their expenses on one focal point - the log-in server(s).
The limit cap on characters per server is artificial in such a way that blizzard has created a cap on how much they want to invest in each individual server and it allows them to know exactly how much each server can handle, when to create new servers, when to offer transfers and to which servers. By doing this they can create a controlable system so that the resources dedicated to Stormrage are the same as any other server and the central areas they need to focus on fast scalability are the log-in servers. If they did not have this in place than at any given time they would have to worry about scalability issues on any of the individual game servers.