Honestly, I just restarting playing World of Warcraft, and even tho there have been amazing tech improvements to Blizzard's engine and servers, there is so much simple stuff lacking.
I would honestly say it's likely better for game server developers to be taking ideas from web development.
When it comes to CRDT's everyone keeps talking about text-editing, honestly one of the hardest problems for a CRDT to solve. Text is entirely unstructured, requires extremely high precision on the merge of any conflict.
With a video game instead, players already used to "rewind and replay" merges, they are already used to having a "miss" when it should have been a "hit", and they roll with it because while that is friction it's a game and precision isn't that important. I'll say differently, precision is already not what game servers provide.
At the end of the day, game servers are "just" low-latency chat applications with "bots" that process the messages. I'd love to see the game server written by the maintainers of WhatsApp / Messenger / Slack / etc. That would be a truly scalable game!
P.S. If you think "chat is so simple, can't compare it to a game server". Please just think through the design for FB's / Discord's display widget that shows "currently active friends".
I would honestly say it's likely better for game server developers to be taking ideas from web development.
When it comes to CRDT's everyone keeps talking about text-editing, honestly one of the hardest problems for a CRDT to solve. Text is entirely unstructured, requires extremely high precision on the merge of any conflict.
With a video game instead, players already used to "rewind and replay" merges, they are already used to having a "miss" when it should have been a "hit", and they roll with it because while that is friction it's a game and precision isn't that important. I'll say differently, precision is already not what game servers provide.
At the end of the day, game servers are "just" low-latency chat applications with "bots" that process the messages. I'd love to see the game server written by the maintainers of WhatsApp / Messenger / Slack / etc. That would be a truly scalable game!
P.S. If you think "chat is so simple, can't compare it to a game server". Please just think through the design for FB's / Discord's display widget that shows "currently active friends".