This highlights the need to have high-performance, cost-efficient, and adaptive development methods and tools that can enable MMOG backends to achieve a high level of QoE. While achieving such high performance relies on having access to raw computing power, MMOGs must also employ a “ cost-efficient design” . To achieve this, they must be able to handle these resource-demanding tasks quickly and thus offer low-latency gameplay . Moreover, MMOG backends are categorized as soft real-time applications and must deliver a satisfactory Quality of Experience (QoE) in a market of ever-increasing competition. In addition, hugely successful MMOGs with persistent worlds such as World of Warcraft have faced problems in managing such a high influx of players and had to break them down into more manageable units, with “ each server a community of about 20,000 players” . Despite increases in computing power in recent years, even Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs) cannot support more than several hundred simultaneous players. These techniques limit the number of concurrent players to cope with the high resource demand. Firstly, MMOGs are traditionally configured to run in sessions or rooms, utilizing zones to divide gameplay requirements among peers in a network . To cope with such high resource demands, developers and researchers have employed several technologies and approaches. This requirement imposes several constraints which have inhibited their migration to the cloud. On the other hand, resource-demanding applications such as backends of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are traditionally characterized by the need to rapidly synchronize and update their state. For the most part, the logic behind the services provided by such applications can be easily migrated to either a private or public cloud. The services provided by such applications are often optimized for throughput and parallel execution, which makes them easy to scale due to a limited need for synchronization when accessing resources . Most enterprise applications must be scalable to accommodate increasing numbers of customers while maintaining a good quality of experience and economies of scale. The ever-increasing drive to migrate services to the cloud stems not only from its relative cost-effectiveness, but also from the ability to innovate and optimize business processes, especially those related to mobile and web technologies . Especially for businesses, the cost-effectiveness of this technology distinguishes it among other options and has made cloud computing a popular option for hosting enterprise applications, especially at the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) layer . The unprecedented availability of computing power provided by cloud computing technology has led to a drive towards its adoption by organizations and individuals alike . Coupled with the advantages of high-level computing layers such as Platform, Backend, and Function-as-a-Service, we argue that our framework accelerates the development of high-performance, scalable MMOGs, that leverage the resources of commodity cloud platforms. We find that MMOGs developed using this framework: (a) can support a very high number of simultaneous players under a given latency threshold, (b) elastically scale both in terms of runtime and state, and (c) significantly reduce the amount of effort required to develop them. We evaluate this framework by conducting simulations based on several case-study MMOGs to benchmark its performance and scalability, and compare the development effort needed, and quality of the code produced with other approaches. We present Athlos, a framework that allows game developers to leverage our methodology to rapidly prototype MMOG backends that can run on any type of cloud environment. In this paper, we describe a set of models, methods, and tools for developing scalable MMOG backends and hosting them on commodity cloud platforms. Despite some advancements, the development and deployment of MMOG backends on commodity clouds and high-level computing layers continues to face several obstacles, including a non-standardized development methodology, lack of provisions for scalability, and the need for abstractions and tools to support the development process. The development of resource-intensive, distributed, real-time applications like Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) backends entails a variety of challenges, some of which have been extensively studied.
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