It’s not a question of one team being able to engineer better than the other. Fundamentally the problem the two teams are solving are different (as Matt already hinted in his answer).

In terms of content, WoW is solving an easy problem where the content set is known in advance and can therefore be distributed to clients a priori.

SL is working on an unknown content set and therefore has a much more difficult problem to solve. Comparing WoW and SL bandwidth usage is an apples to oranges comparison.

My understanding of Eve’s performance issues has to do with loads in several systems. The scalability of Eve has been overstated. They do a clever job on the low-end (placing multiple systems on a single server), but not so good on the high end (splitting a single system into multiple servers). I do have a bit more info on my blog from some conversations with some Eve folk.

Reverse-engineering of a protocol should not mean it is unsecure (the code is on the client and so will be compromised eventually). I was simply commenting that they have designed a very efficient protocol from a performance perspective. Security, is, as always, another discussion.

I’d point to Eve Online as a “scaleable” single-world game which has been having general lag problems whoch have been getting slowly worse for several years because the infrastructure can’t handle the playerbase.

Also, San Fran? They have to get people to move to Iceland!

PlayNoEvil,

Also bear in mind that B.net’s simple minded network protocol was also extremely easy to reverse engineer, something which plagues Wow to this day. Yes, it’s an economy of scale, but it does mean that there are quite a few hacks developed which should never have worked in the first place.

This is also seen by SL’s inability to add more private islands quickly - after all, these should just be additional SL servers that should be pretty standard now.

The existing Denial of Service attacks against SL have been pretty serious and, unfortunately, routine (so much so that neither Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture nor I cover them regularly anymore - it just isn’t interesting). SL has avoided a publicity backlash related to these outages, so far.

Linden Lab seems to focus on the use of the FBI for its response to these events. There has not been much indication of a strengthening of its technical infrastructure to resist attacks or effectively identify the culprits.

It is actually surprising that no one has created a politically provocative Denial of Service attack with a clever visual element. Such an attack, especially if it could be played in video on the news, would get a huge amount of press.

Escort services and furries in SL are a huge portion of its economy - something that doesn’t get any attention at all in the mainstream press.

Hope this helps.

Also, while there are certainly thousands of farmers in China, simple laws of supply and demand dictate that they cannot make up a major portion of the 7 figure Chinese WoW-playing population. At most, 5-10%, and even that seems on the high side to me.