Launching a multiplayer game with persistent worlds requires careful planning to ensure a smooth and stable experience for players. Whether it’s a survival game with player-hosted worlds or a server-driven sandbox environment, having a solid server infrastructure is key. Here’s a checklist to help you prepare your servers for launch day, avoiding common issues like crashes, lag, and performance bottlenecks.
However, before we get into the details, here are two essential settings to keep in mind. These are key to making sure everything runs smoothly on our side: IP/Port Binding and a Maximum Player Setting. Why? It must be possible to bind IPs and Ports to host multiple game servers on a single machine and many server hosts ─ like us, GPORTAL ─ need the ability to set the maximum number of players since we sell game servers by slot.
Having these fundamentals out of the way, let’s talk about the most important issues you run across when developing, launching and supporting a hosted multiplayer game and how to effectively deal with them. Any video game server provider worth his salt will naturally walk you trough this and has already plans in motion before the integration even starts.
1. Stress Testing for Persistent Worlds
In games with open-world or persistent environments, stress testing is extremely important. You’ll want to simulate real-world scenarios where players are continuously interacting with the environment, building structures, and engaging with one another. This will help you identify how many concurrent users a server can handle before performance degrades.
Pro Tip: Be sure to test scenarios that mimic peak activity, such as large-scale player raids or resource-heavy actions, as these can put additional strain on your servers.
2. Redundancy Planning for Persistent Game States
Since persistent worlds are always active—even when players aren’t online—it’s critical to have a strong redundancy plan in place. If a server crashes, all progress should be saved, and the game world should be able to continue running smoothly on backup systems. Ensure that server data is continuously synced across multiple backups so no data is lost in case of failure.
Pro Tip: Set up automated backups to occur frequently, especially during periods of high player activity, to minimize the risk of rollback or data loss.
3. Failover Solutions for Ongoing Environments
Failover systems are crucial in open-world environments where players expect a continuous experience. If one server goes down, your failover solution should automatically route players to another server without disrupting their gameplay. In games where player progress and the world state matter, ensuring a seamless transition is key.
Pro Tip: Regularly test your failover systems to ensure they can handle a server crash without causing significant downtime or loss of player progress.
4. Real-Time World Synchronization
Unlike session-based games, open-world environments often rely on real-time updates across multiple participants. Players might be building, exploring, or interacting with the game world simultaneously, which puts a heavy load on server synchronization so optimizing how your server processes these interactions is key to minimizing lag and desync issues.
Pro Tip: Use server-side optimization techniques such as zoning (dividing the game world into separate areas handled by different servers) to ensure smooth performance, even when many players are active at once.
5. Server Capacity and Scalability
For large, persistent-world multiplayer games, ensuring you have the right server capacity from the start is critical but the ability to scale up your server infrastructure as more players join is equally important. Open-world games often have unpredictable player growth, especially if your game goes viral, so having a scalable server setup is essential.
Pro Tip: Start with a flexible hosting solution that allows you to quickly add resources or spin up additional servers as needed. Cloud-based hosting can be particularly useful in this scenario, allowing you to scale dynamically based on real-time player demand.
6. Monitoring Server Performance in Real-Time
In a persistent-world multiplayer game, server performance directly impacts the player experience. We all know that lag or downtime can be especially frustrating when we (the players) are deeply invested in our progress. Use monitoring tools to track server performance, including CPU usage, memory load, and bandwidth consumption, to catch issues before they escalate.
Pro Tip: Set up automated alerts for potential server issues, such as unusual spikes in resource usage, so you and your hoster can address problems proactively before players are affected.
7. Balancing Server Load
In multiplayer games with large, open worlds, it’s common for certain areas or features to attract more players, leading to uneven server load. Load balancing ensures that no single server becomes overwhelmed, even when players cluster around popular areas or game features.
Pro Tip: Implement load balancing tools that distribute player activity evenly across your servers. This ensures a smooth experience for players, even during peak hours or major in-game events.
8. Server Persistence and Data Security
Because persistent games rely on continuous data—such as player inventory, world structures, and player progress—it’s important to maintain strict data security. In the event of a server failure, player progress and world state should remain intact therefor regular backups and data encryption should be part of your server management strategy.
Pro Tip: Schedule frequent, automatic backups and ensure that all player data is securely stored and retrievable in case of server issues. Prioritize security to protect player data from corruption or loss.
9. Community Management and Private Servers
Many open-world multiplayer games benefit from community-hosted or private servers, where players can create their own environments. Offering the ability for players to host their own servers or providing dedicated server hosting options can extend the life of your game and foster more engaged communities.
Pro Tip: Provide easy-to-use tools for players to host their own servers, and offer official hosting options to ensure high-quality experiences. This can also help distribute the server load and allow players to customize their gameplay environments. We at GPORTAL offer a widely customizable interface, offering players every tool they need, on a whim.
Finally, here a some points to consider for releasing your game, which have been proven true over the last couple of years. They are by no means mandatory but are strongly recommended for a smooth experience on all sides:
Separate your Steam AppID for Client and Server. If you don’t, every time there’s a game update, players would have to download the full client instead of just a few MB for the game server files.
Automatic Savegame Handling. Custom command lines for creating and loading savegames tend to cause confusion and are therefor NOT recommended. Instead, the server should handle this automatically: if a savegame exists, load it. Otherwise create one.
Admin and Server Passwords. Clients need the ability to set their servers to private or administer as they wish.
This list should keep you vigilant for the the tasks ahead. Are you developing a multiplayer game right now and need further input? Don’t hesitate to reach out. Either way, we wish you the best of luck for your successful launch.
