Large Realm list

Realm problems have come up a few times today, and I can't even begin to imagine how many times Ive seen it in the past, but there has to be a better solution than "wowstatus.net". The whole WoW community is spread so far apart that nothing ever really gets accomplished.

EQemu has an interesting way of running their private servers, and there is no reason why this couldn't work for mangos clients.

Here is the way EQemu runs it.
Client side:
You go to the website and register for the forums. This creates a username and password for you. You set your login realm to be their site in your client, and you now have access to hundreds of private servers that come up instantly in your list of available servers.

Server side:
You configure your server to connect to EQemu's user database, open your firewall port and end of story. Clients can now see your server.

The way it would need to be done for MaNGOS:

Mangos runs off of two programs, a realm server and a world server. If the realm server is up and running, clients can long in and see what realms are there, but will not be able to connect to the game server.

If for example you had a PC where a realm server was setup, you could technically add IP addresses of all the people that owned a server.

As long as those said people added your realm as the realm for logging into (in the mangos config script) then in theory you should be able to make a similar list of available hosts.

People could connect to a website at the central location, register their username and password, and then be able to connect to that realmd.exe using that username and password.

The nice thing about the way MaNGOS is setup is that the 2 databases don't really talk to one another. Info isn't passed back and forth between the two except on character creation.

The characters are linked to the "Account" which I see no reason why that database has to be on the same computer as long as the mangos.conf file is setup to recognise that the loginserver is the proposed central realmd sql and not the one on your PC.

Once the users are connected, again in theory, they would be able to see worlds that are both available and unavailable depending on the status of the server. Since the server is in the realm SQL table, it shows up regardless of wether the server is up or not.

The good news is that this central servers task should end when the clients connect to the host. Using minimal bandwidth in the process.

The Drawbacks:
1. There isn't even one version of WoW servers let alone one universal version of MaNGOS. It would have to be set up to only accept one version of server, and in turn one client version.
2. Each person would have to register for the service, and would have to be added to the realm manually because of the way the realmd.config file works.

Otherwise I see no reason why this wouldn't work out.

realmlist woud be too big....there are way fewer eq emu servers than wowservers....

another idea is to make a custom server browsre app which connects to a masterlist which provides you with live stats of all auhservers running... Each authsrever has a script running that every x interval sendsinfo about itself and all realms on its network with playercount, servertype, xprate etc etc to the masterlist....then using the serverbrowser, a player can sort his servers, store his details etc...makes it so much easier instead of having a 27miles long realmlist.

Another thing I realized is that GM tags are accont tags not character tags. That means that anyone who is registered as a GM is now a GM on any server in the realmlist.

But to address your issue with it, you could limit the number of people on a realm.

Since there are so many different versions, the number of people that would be able to register for the service would limit themselves. But yea, it would create a very long list of servers.

The alternative is to group together some servers in like a "Node" fashion of people that don't mind others being registered on their server as GM's or Admins.

It is a giant trust leap I know.