Yesterday I was forwarded a link about retirement of a long-time player from World of Warcraft. While that in itself might be interesting, the really juicy bit was the way he went out: with a mighty 'crash' from the server. Scalability issues, or something...

Much of my last year has been spent reading about distributed virtual environment scalability. As it turns out, perhaps it shouldn't have been. A lot of research papers I've read begins like this: "DVE's consume loads of bandwidth, and there...