A Merge.

[johane]

Originally Posted by fathernitwit

on this note, I have dreamed of a "character transfer service" to allow rings of servers to permit players to move between servers. Using public key encryption to verify the authenticity of character "saves" from other servers, a server op would be able to "trust" another server, allowing people to transfer chars between them. This could also let people "back up" their characters.

anyways, theres a lot of work to be done to make it happen, but I am willing to provide design and guidance to make this happen if there are any willing and able PHP developers out there.

What you're proposing is actually very damn close to a distributed server. If you added some kind of mechanisms for server ops to set policies regarding item movement, no-droppedness and "returning home laden with riches", you could have a fairly transparent means for different servers to host different zones or groups of zones, allowing servers that arn't kick-ass machines to "co-operatively" cover the entire game world. What would be quite cool is the potenmtial for subtle differences caused by slightly different databases - you could find that the "super-worlds" so contructed would be much richer game worlds being less "cookie cutter".

I don't believe that a PHP implementation would do it justice though - I see it being server-to-server via a trusted intermediary as key/policy escrow (would that be loginserver?).