Axie and Ragnarok - Is history repeating?

Since my last post about MMOs and Axie market, I started thinking about other similarities that I have noticed. Join me and Grandpapi Luntian as we go and explore the past of Ragnarok, how it relates to the present, and what we can learn from it.

In 2003, pRO (Philippine Ragnarok Online) opened its servers and became the first widespread MMORPG in the Philippines. The game only had one server at the time, called the Chaos server. Chaos is the main character of the Ragnarok Manhwa and it was also an accurate description of what it was like playing on the server.

There was just too many players. Thousands of gamers wanted to play and the server couldn’t handle it. Lag was constant. Players crowded popular areas. Some maps even stopped functioning entirely, trapping the characters that were inside them.

This reminded me of what it was like playing Axie Infinity in 2021 at it’s peak. The player base spiked in a way that Sky Mavis couldn’t have anticipated and it caused the game to be unplayable. I couldn’t even finish my 20 energy. Complaints filled the Axie Discord and memes started surfacing. Too many people just wanted to play, just like in the Chaos server of pRO.

However, this is where the story starts to diverge. The pRO solution was to scale horizontally while Sky Mavis chose to scale vertically. Ragnarok servers back then can have 4k-5k players at a time. Their solution was to release a new server and players can start fresh with a new character on the Loki server. And it worked. I moved to the Loki server because I couldn’t deal with the constant lag in Chaos. The player population lowered to 3k in Chaos and 2k in Loki. To accomodate the growth of the playerbase, additional servers were released.

Meanwhile, Sky Mavis chose to scale vertically. They were able to increase the capacity on Axie servers to be able to handle 1 million DAU at the peak of the bull in 2021. Of course, these are 2 different games, almost 2 decades apart. Their tech stacks are not comparable but what can be compared is their influence to the gaming landscape on my home country, the Philippines.

Axie is doing what Ragnarok did 20 years ago. Axie and Web3 is mirroring the behavior of MMORPGs 20 years ago. We can look at events then to have an idea of how people and the market will move. We can treat it like a map. Will Web3 continue to mirror the same trends that MMORPGs 20 years ago? Either way, we are personally witnessing history occurring.