User blog:G-man./Breaking it Down

Why will POR fail? Just let me tell you all in this wonderful blog.

Funding
The POR staff, from what I've seen, haven't considered funding yet. SWGEmu, a Star Wars Galaxies emulator, has these server specifications:



Since Pirates Online was a smaller game, we can cut down the main server's RAM to 48 GB, but for emulating an MMORPG the rest should stay the same. The average server of that size will cost about $1,033.00 a month. For a professional website and database, we can assume that POR will need the same specifications, since it needs to hold a website, and all account information, contact information, e-mails, and more. The average cost for that server is $201.15 a month. Just like SWGEmu, POR will need a test server to test new content and other things of the sort. Since I couldn't find the exact cost of a server with the same specifications of Test Center: Nova, I found a server with almost the same specifications. The cost of that server was $149 a month. POR will also have to pay for e-mail hosting, so I'm going to take Google's prices and plug it in. That's $5 a month per user. I'll just say that there will be 10 staff members that need custom e-mail addresses, so that's $50 a month. Add all of those numbers together and we get a whopping $1',433'.15 A MONTH. How will they pay for it? I'm certain that donations will not amount to that number, and I'm almost certain that POR will not charge a monthly fee for membership. That money would have to come out of pocket, and who has that much money to waste?

Of course, they've decided to host a server themselves with custom built PCs. First off, that's a TERRIBLE idea. Home internet connections cannot handle the power needed to run an MMORPG, not to mention that the computers' specifications, when linked, can't handle an MMORPG. So they're going to have a Gigabit connection? I'm going to assume they're talking about bandwith, and that's not good. If they were renting serverspace that would add another $1,000 to the total cost, so doing that from home? Yeah no.

Staff
Aside from that they haven't considered funding, the POR staff just can't handle an MMORPG emulator. They're inexperienced in building and maintaining MMORPGs, and couldn't even keep their wiki safe from invaders. I've witnessed the staff arguing with each other and disagreeing multiple times, if they can't work together then POR will certainly fail. People from a closed MMORPG coming together to create an emulator just doesn't work, as they usually do not have the skill required to create one, and from what I've seen they certainly don't have the skill.

Amount of Work
Creating an emulator takes an immense amount of work, SWGEmu has been working at their emulator for years and is only in the alpha stage. Every day a new alpha update is released for POR? No no no. POR is nowhere near alpha, the game is nowhere near playable. They're currently developing the core elements of the game, if I could even say that. They're doing it all wrong. Creating the islands and avatars first seems like it would be the best choice, but it isn't. You need to get the real core elements of the game working, the core coding. Figuring out how the game engine will run it all, getting the server files and source code working, that's what you need to do. They're only creating the islands and avatars first so that everybody has something pretty to look at so they won't forget about POR. POR right now is basically creating a singleplayer game, as none of their coding is linking instances together. The only thing that mentions serverside multiplayer is this:

http://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/c2V3qqniUD

That right there doesn't show anything! It's just a program running in CMD that says that somebody connected. I don't even know if it's connected to the game that he's running, since there is nothing in the game that shows that it's connected to this "server". Also, if this was a real server, it's run from his computer, meaning that his computer is connected to itself, and that is only if it's a real server, which I highly doubt. Actually, the more that I look at it, the more that I am sure that it isn't one. As he moves around and talks in the game, no information is being sent to the server, as visible in CMD running in the background. I see another program open in CMD, I have no clue what that is, but it's showing coordinates and something about a light sloop. You could assume that the coordinates are the ones that are sent to the server as a result of him walking around, but there was nothing about a light sloop in the game so that's definitely not it. There's a lot more to creating an emulator than just putting everything back together. They have to rewrite every line of code that was in Disney's servers, and it seems that they haven't done any of that. All they've done is taken the phase files apart, and put them back together in Python and Panda3D.

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So basically, they're not close to alpha yet, have no funding, and their staff aren't able to create and maintain an MMORPG. $201.15$201.15$201.15