Smuggler you still got a little bit of brown on your nose... yeah... right there. :P
From what I can tell it looks like maybe waay back in the days of alpha they might've been thinking about making this game compatible with user-operated servers, kind of like NWN. I mean, the whole structure of how the login/world/zone servers interconnect, and the fact that you only have to change a single easily-edited text file on your machine and voila, you're connecting to a whole different set of servers. Even the list of servers is sent dynamically to the client in the login response packet -- they could've just hard-coded the names of their servers in and put a new EXE on the patcher whenever they decided to open a new server.
I'm sure the EQ developers at Sony (the ones actually sitting down and designing the artwork and programming the server code and so on) are marveling at how much has been accomplished here. Especially given these guys aren't getting paid to do it!
I'm sure the EQ execs at Sony (the ones who probably have never even seen a line of code, never responded to a single petition, and MAYBE have interacted with the EQ servers to the extent necessary to extract a billing revenue report) believe these guys should be in "federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison."
|