Scalability issues
World of Warcraft’s patch 3.3 came out and as expected people had problems with instance servers on patch day because of the huge overload.
Now to talk about a suggestion made in the comments at Tobold’s MMORPG blog that advised moving server hosting to a cloud, so that different games could make use of the resources for a patch day and wouldn’t need to pay for the resources other times so that they’d be available for other companies.
To be honest I don’t see that happening any time soon with the way games are built and designed right now. It would be way too expensive to start redesigning the way servers interact with each other, when the system they have right now is working – not excellently, but pretty well nonetheless. However it might happen in a few years at least for a company that hosts multiple MMOs (NCSoft comes to mind) and perhaps 6-8 years for such a service to pop up allowing different companies to share those server and network resources? It is definitely something to look forward to in terms of improving the gameplay experience.
