One of the trends cropping up in the MMO industry in recent years is the Neverwinter Nights custom shard phenomenon. Games like Star Citizen, Shroud of the Avatar, Shards Online, and even Smed’s Hero’s Song promise some form of large core servers for an MMO experience, but they also offer some form of small-server experience. Don’t want to deal with Legolas999 and killstealers and noobs and general chat spammers? You can set up your own custom shard and invite just the people you want, playing by exactly the rules you want.
The downside, of course, is that a lot of the work (and drama) of running a server is offloaded from the company onto you, and smaller communities are more at risk of going under if even a small portion of the playerbase moves on.
Which do you prefer?
Do you prefer massive MMO servers or smaller custom MMO communities?
- Massive MMO servers run by studios (32%, 74 Votes)
- Smaller custom MMO communities and shards (16%, 38 Votes)
- Why not both? (47%, 109 Votes)
- Neither. I got lost somehow and found myself on an MMO website. (5%, 11 Votes)
Total Voters: 232
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