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This is the (belated) second part to my earlier article about how (and why) MMOs using sharding.

New Eden, with systems sized (and colored) based on the number of pilots in system in the last 24 hours.

More than any other MMO company, CCP has tried to turn the challenges of single-sharded-ness into game mechanics. EVE has never been a world where you go to experience the “content” of a beautifully designed and imagined world. In EVE, the content is the players, and players seek each other out to have new experiences and tell new stories.

These design decisions create a very different kind of world than he franchise model of World of Warcraft. First of all, it means you can automatically play with all your friends. There’s no negotiation of which particular version of the world you want to meet up in, and no having to pick between your high school friends and college friends, who play in different places.

There are global implications for single-sharding, too. You’re playing with people from around the world. In my most recent fleet op, I could easily hear Australian, Indian, British, Eastern European, and many varieties of American accents. There are parts of the EVE world that are known to not speak English; Russian is probably the most dominant non-English language. Time zones are also really important. In a single-sharded world, there are always people playing, and war is a 24 hour affair. Most corporations try to have players in all the major time zone blocks (EU / US / AUS, traditionally), so if something bad happens, there are people around to deal with it.

Number of simultaneously connected users by hour (GMT)

The nature of news and celebrity in EVE is also quite different as a result of single-sharding. Famous players and organizations are famous throughout EVE, not just in their small shard. When there are big political events like GoonSwarm disbanding, they’re more than just stories for most players – they have a big impact on a huge number of players. In contrast, news in World of Warcraft is primarily about changes to the world itself, not things that players in the world actually did. Indeed, there are few things players can do to change their shard in a meaningful way. Even if there were, there are many fewer people would care about what had changed.

Although this model has lots of exciting implications, it’s hardly all sunshine and puppies. Instancing and sharding tend to provide a more consistent and structured experience for people. We’ve talked recently about the clash between so-called carebears and pirates. In a sharded model, you could easily separate those populations onto different servers where the rules about when you can attack people are different. World of Warcraft distinguishes its shard as “Player versus Player” (PvP) or “Player versus Environment” (PvE). If you want to be protected from other players, just pick a PvE shard and you’ll be able to do quests to your hearts content.

Same goes for instancing; if you’re in a dungeon in World of Warcraft, you’re completely insulated from the outside world. Only the players you’ve explicitly invited can be there. In EVE, being in a mission area provides only slight protection. There are lots of ways for unfriendly players to cause trouble for you in your mission.

This is no accident. The richness of EVE’s world depends on the interplay between all these different kinds of players and play styles. The complicated social relationship between pirates and miners and 0.0 pilots is part of what makes EVE so wonderful. The culture is rich and huge and you can engage with it from a variety of different perspectives as your character ages. But a lot of this wouldn’t be possible with a sharded model. I think it’s a property of good game design that the mechanics fit together in complimentary ways. EVE’s choice of single-sharding is a great example of that – it has a big impact on how all the rest of the game mechanics work, from mining, production, and mission running to 0.0 alliance warfare.