Tick-based game

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.Fact|date=November 2007

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 amount of time while in turn based games a turn will end only when the player has made all the moves his wish. 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.Fact|date=November 2007 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, and puts much more strain on the server hosting the game.

ee also

*Turn-based strategy
*Turn-based tactics