Patrick Wyatt (worked at blizzard on WC, starcraft, battle.net, then on guild wars) blogged a bit about the design of some of these games: http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/scaling-guild-wars-for-massi...

Worth a read

Less tech-oriented and more design-oriented, Alexander Brazie has blogged a lot about various design decisions he and his team made at the time in WoW.

https://alexanderbrazie.blogspot.co.uk

>'I'm fascinated by this stuff.'

Same, I'd be most interested in seeing how WoW was initially built to mitigate the lag that plagued MMOs at the time. Handling that well was key in my decision to play the game at all since it was critical for PvP play.

>'How does EVE online work by the way?'

Here's a pair of older articles from my bookmarks about engineering of EVE.

1: http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/planning-for-war-how-...

2: http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/09/28/eve-evolved-eve-onli...

IIRC the demand at launch STILL overwhelmed their setup. This is a system that has evolved over the last ten years.

>'I'm fascinated by this stuff.' Yeah, it's a world apart from your standard web site / services model.

Unless it's changed since I last played EVE, the EVE servers all reset every night so EVE is down for a reasonable time each day. In WoW the equivalent happens only once per week.

The WoW 'cross realm' zones are also the "instanced" zones so while they are cross realm they actually hold much less data and people than the single-realm parts. Even the 'cross realm' areas are still restricted to a "battle group" of realms of 5-6(?) realms.

Daily downtime is 11.00 to 11.30 UTC, usually less than this (10-15 minutes most days).

I share your level of enthusiasm with this. I've done a bit of work on a project with ZeniMax concerning the virtual environment for ESO's servers. Let's just say that the magnitude and scale of their server rooms is enormous, and they build virtual environments on top of enormous scale to increase thresholds.

EVE, I believe, doles solar systems out to different servers (and shuffles them around depending on load). This results in slowdowns for enormous battles - they're too big for one server to process in real-time, so ticks get further apart.

The effect described in the pdf linked at https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Grid_Manipulation suggests that eve does something more complicated than that.

EVE Online:

-server code still in python (single threaded)

-one cpu thread per solar system

-during big battles with >2000 people server slows down time(tickerate) and makes game unplayable

oh so yeah I'm not missing anything...