Could TGE Work With A Master Server?

#1 I imagine if all you plan to do is store points, awards, time played, buddy list, ect. Then 1 dedicated server should be enough for you. Unless you pull in millions of people. But even then a MySQL server can hold it's own.

There's several resources around on the website that can help you at adding in mySQL support to the server side of torque. You might even find a resource or two of what you are trying to do with rewards and such (don't quote me on that though, but I do recall seeing one or two around somewhere here.)

You might want to do some MySQL tuning to the MySQL server to get the best results. But I generally think it can handle what you want it to do.

#2 Even if I have a million players, it's the game server making most of the calls to the master server instead of having the 30 clients update the score, which would be a security risk. The closest think I can think of, in terms of data transfer, is a forum, such as this one. I mean one post alone would be equivalent to 2 or 3 players data wise.

I'm wondering. I have a web server from Hostmonster.com with a dedicated IP. It's not a dedicated box I don't think but do you think it's possible to run the stats server off that?

My group has a very tight budget and $200 a month for a dedicated box is just out of the question.

It's probably not the best idea to use a web server as stats server but my only other option is to save the player stats to a local encrypted database, then once we build a good user base and can afford a dedicated server, we'd have an update that when the player logs into the server for the first time they can create their account and their stats would automatically be merged with the server.

#3 I think any hosted server would work starting out. At some point you will start to reach the limits since I am sure any shared hosting provider shares there database server among multiple customers. But still its going to take alot of servers sending calls to reach that point.