As a gamer in World of Warcraft, the excitement of playing with other individuals around the world and never leaving the comfort of home can be exciting. To do this it requires a client, server and network in between. The client is your computer. The server is the machine that you connect to when you play. World of Warcraft has over 5 million clients. As the client logs into the server and begins play, the actions of the input devices used such as voice, mouse and keyboard are converted into ones and zeroes ( binary) as that is the only way that information in understood in both a computer and network. Due to so many clients MMORPGs require lots of servers. The world server is where the game takes place. Sometimes, a world server is really several servers .Other servers that MMORPGs require are, a login server allows players to log in to the game and access the game world, chat server relays all the text players use to communicate with one another, voice server does the same for voice traffic and a web server allows players to access their account information. (Wilson, 1998-2013)
Game play is essentially an interaction between the client and the server. The data generated by your actions must then be put in some standard format, Your data will go through several switches, routers, gateways and other machines on the internet before it reaches its destination. You might be running Windows on your machine, but these other machines that route your data to its destination are probably running their own operating systems. For these reasons, the data generated by your program must be converted to some neutral format that is understood by all the machines that will handle it along the way. The data must be broken down into chunks called packets. Each packet must contain some basic information, which is added to it by software on your computer. This information would include the name and internet addresses of the source and recipient. It also includes extra information which is used for error-checking. Some packets are lost in transit. Others reach their destination but are garbled in transit. For this reason, there must be some way to verify the integrity of a packet at the other end. This is usually done through extra information appended to the packet, and there is software on your computer that generates this extra error checking information. When the packets are received the data is converted into electronic signals or binary numbers of ones and zeroes and then converted to the information that you see on your screen. This receiving server also sends an acknowledgement back to the client. This continues through gameplay until the connection in terminated by logging out of game.
Wilson, T. V. (1998-2013). How MMORPGs Work. Retrieved December 17, 2013, from How Stuff Works: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/mmorpg5.htm