Growing up I used to play aqworlds and it was super common in my online friend group at the time for everyone to host their own private servers on their own websites, once I got into the fediverse and webhosting again, I was reminded of it and it got me thinking how cool it would be to have a browser 2d mmo where people hosted their own servers.
Is there a game that implements activityhub at all? Like where server chat can be read and sent from something like mastodon.
I realize this is a stretch and something like this doesn’t make sense or exist, just curious.
Not really AFAIK. It’s a hard thing to create because … how do you stop people from just saying they have max levels and joining any other server with max levels (?)
You can do the private server thing but the federation of them is where things get messy because different operators could set different rates of gain on different materials and have different standards on what’s considered cheating.
If you don’t have that shared state… Arguably any game where you can host your own servers can be a federated mmo.
You just make it so you have an account you can use in different servers, but each server still has its own characters.
Why have an account at all…?
Because you can take it server to server. If you try and play an mmo on private servers, you have to make an account on each server. You could see what people have done on other servers, even though they haven’t leveled up on all servers.
I think the way to make it work is to have each instance represent a “world” and you only have stats and equipment within a world. Then when you cross over to another instance you are now subject to that instance’s ruleset.
It wouldn’t be so much a federated MMO but more like a large variety of games connected geographically (in the virtual sense).
At that point, it wouldn’t be much different from games that simply allow anyone to host their own servers
One method could be to have a replay system, public state snapshots, and publicly logged inputs. Servers could randomly audit federated peers by replaying small segments of their logs, and defederate/broadcast that there is a problem if the end state doesn’t match. This would require them to be running the same code and not use arbitrary mods, but different settings would still be possible.