Hi i\'m here as i was researching for insperation for my own mmorpg (its not as ambitius as this, more of a seriese of technical demos at the moment.
In my mind the greatest mmrpg ever was Phantasy Star Online (DC Original). The whole atmosphere online was ace!!, People hellped each other out, resurected each other and were nice. And then one thing led to another, bing band bumpht! The hacker types came, and first they mad items that where realy powerfull, then they started stealing stuff, and then the final nail in the coffin, they made an item that can kill people, thus ruining the whole dynamic of the game.
So, what is the morral of the story... Make sure you keep EVERYTHING under your thumb, if they can fake being somone else, they will, if they can PK somehow, they will, and whatever you do, DON\'T TRUST ANYTHING A CLIENT TELLS YOU!!!
If your game client says the sky is blue, make the serve gnomes get out of their boxes and get them lookin out of the window to see!!
Please keep the whole game seriusly secure. PGP the connection and bring the game down, to one frame an hour if you have to....
And also, haveing no server for a while is realy going to kill your community!!
Good luck...
Also about segmenting the server... Do an octree thing with game space, if it gets to slow going one section of your tree, segment it and hand some of the bits to another server, when they are less busy they set a ReIntegrateable Flag, and when you have 8 RIFs you merge them, lods of trafic on your internal network, a lot less on the external one, also abstracting the client from the actual segment server, via a connection server (or multiple CCS), will allow this whole twidgel to happen withour haveig to complicate your client or have it maintain multiple connections. Infact your Client Abstraction Layer will alow you to have the blocks mirrored, withour any aditional outside trafic!
For all this though, you realy need a single location, low power server farm. Doing this early on in your code will allow for future expantion, if the world gets expanded or if the gme goes comertial (at least the windows client, hence get money, while keeping the hardcore element!).
