It's gotten pretty good (finally good enough that you can observe it in the game's macroeconomics), but if you're any good as a programmer then it's no work whatsoever to build something which can bypass it indefinitely.

It's a trade-off, especially for longer paths, especially when you count the cost of server RAM cache misses.

The algorithm is very cheap to run for a client (linear first, then diagonal to target, stitch together as many of these as it takes in the fewest number of hops), as they have full map data downloaded. For 2k concurrent players on mid range 2004 hardware (you have to remember they had kind of old school tech even for the time, though I'd love to be proven wrong on this), and with all the other interactions that needed to run before the next game cycle, I think they probably decided it was better to be clientside.

It's also possible they could have made it work, and it would have been a technical win, but just didn't need to since they had an MVP.

Validating that a path on a grid doesn't move through impassable objects is definitely much cheaper than running a pathfinding algorithm, especially on 2004 hardware. You'd have to make those checks as well in order to run the pathfinding.

It is. Code snippets in the article are JavaScript as well, while only ever mentioning Java in the article

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The other comments hit the big ones (didn't have to download, had a free tier, didn't have significant irreversible character choices, had meaningful solo or quasi-social activities, etc), but I think a major contributing factor was it appearing on miniclip.

It was free to play when that wasn’t a popular financial model for games at the time. The memberships were also much cheaper than WoW and accepted different payment methods that would be more available to minors at the time.

As a kid, I didn't have a computer that could run WoW, nor would I have been able to convince my parents to pay for the subscription. I suspect most of the popularity was from kids in a similar situation, probably playing it on library computers when they should've been studying.

MapleStory was also quite popular back then for similar reasons.

Besides what everyone else said, it was a pre-WoW style sandbox MMO with a lot of freedom at the time. Those have their own appeal.

It's free and you could play it in the school library, for one. Also it came out a few years before WoW.

in addition to what others said...

2004 runescape, now "old school runescape", which is actually successor 2001 Runescape "Classic", were both playable in a browser.

and my (parent's) PC couldn't even install, let alone run WoW. despite me trying with all my might.

so I'm sure I wasn't alone.

it was absolutely magical to me.

Oh Britannia, how you were so amazing before the Tramel/Felucia split.

Ultima and Tibia are the references you are looking for.

What you linked is nowhere near the same genre or remotely the same concept, nice try though

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You edited good boy, however to call Tibia an Ultima emulator is even more ignorant (and arrogant the way you did it).

I played this game in the 90s/00s but thankfully outside HN it blew up into a mega sensation and everyone who knows Tibia will know that calling it a mere Ultima emulator massively sells it short on the saga and era that was possibly the most beautiful and thorough MMORPG to ever exist.

HackerNews is boring. The people here are stupid. All the “high levels” here are ignorant retards. You have the worst community here. I literally cannot believe this site is important at all - Idiocracy is upon us