Very easy. Do you not know about private servers? Also, in what world would 50k people play on a private server. WoW private servers don't even reach that. People can run private servers from their home PC's, but thats not whats being done here. He's renting server space and running it on that, which most would probably do. Please my man, don't post such misleading stuff.
He's not misleading, and this is a pet peeve of mine; the rampant assumption that anyone could just snag a copy of the code and be off and running. I know several of the Paragon Studio devs, and because I'm geeky like this and at the time worked in a datacenter, I took every opportunity I could to grill them on the game's infrastructure while it was up and running. The computing muscle required to run City of Heroes was significant.
First of all, a lot of the code was spaghetti-ish, prone to breaking if you didn't have it tweaked just right. Just getting the thing running on ANY servers was, according to people who were professionally paid to do so, not easy.
Second of all, it's not like you just plopped coh.exe on a server and double-clicked the icon and voila, you can now log in. City of Heroes wasn't
a server. Even a City of Heroes "server" (e.g. Infinity) wasn't
a server. It was at least, to the best of my recollection:
- An account/authentication server
- Multiple chat server executables
- A market server
- A Paragon Store (microtransaction) server
- A crapton of mapservers
- Multiple DB servers
- An instance, possibly multiple instances, of MS SQL Server
- Probably other stuff I'm forgetting since these conversations took place seven years ago
All of this stuff required specific versions of software and libraries to run correctly, so you couldn't just click OK when Windows prompted you to update or upgrade. And all of this was spread across multiple physical high-end enterprise-scale boxes that had to have hardly-ever-looked-at configuration parameters and registry settings tweaked just-so to run.
Now, I get that the traffic on a private server may not be as heavy as on the live game servers, but it's not like just because it's a private server, now you don't need a market server, or you can do without a chat server, or that you don't have to have the exactly correct version of some database library installed. Even a base-level config for a single shard required a LOT of resources.
Having said all of that, I have no idea what progress SCoRE has made in simplifying this setup, or even if they've managed to make any progress towards it. Maybe one of the reasons they've kept it secret so long is so that when it is released, people can actually
use it. Keep in mind that everything I described above is just to run the executables. If you actually want to tweak the code base, you get into a whole 'nother level of configuration hell in getting Visual Studio set up just right to be able to actually compile the thing.
At any rate, please don't propagate the misconception that the thing isn't a pain in the ass to run. Barring some next-level miraculous re-coding of how all of these tiny puzzle pieces without pictures or edges to guide them to give clues fit together, this thing was--and probably still is--a very, VERY demanding beast.