Tick-based game

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All or part of this article may be confusing or unclear.
Please help clarify the article. Suggestions may be on the talk page. (November 2007)

A tick-based game is a game that is played using 'ticks', or units of time. Predominantly found in browser based MMORPGs, a tick can be any measurement of real time, from seconds to days or even months.^{[citation needed]}

Not to be confused with a game round, a tick is the iterated tide upon which all important actions in a game take place.

Tick-based games differ from turn-based game in that a tick will always happen after the same while whereas a turn can be stored and used later. This difference may seem insignificant at first, but it's a vital commodity to most MMORPGs. It means that players cannot store up large amounts of turns to perform in one go.

The most common tick period is one hour.^{[citation needed]} This means that each and every hour, certain important functions and actions take place for everyone playing the game (i.e. update the amount of cash a player has, how much power is being generated by power-plants or a characters' level, etc). Anything faster than 10 minutes is generally considered a speed round or chaos round, which puts more strain on the server hosting the game, but is considered more fun for the players.^{[citation needed]}