why LOL? im not an expert.
Because it has been said a thousand times on this and every game programming forum:
An MMORPG is
the most difficult and engineering intensive type of game you could ever possibly make. And if you don't even know what technology to use... that's a big LOL.
To actually answer you - yes, you'll use mysql to store most of the data. But if you want it to scale at all you're going to need to figure out how to shard it across lots of servers, use some kind of caching for faster access to frequently accessed data, decide how you're going to update character position and the like without throttling your database, and more. OOOOH boy it's so much fun.
As far as I understand you need something like this:
- A client in some kind of application programming language (ex Java)
- A server in some kind of application programming language (ex Java) for storing temporary data, returning information quickly enough, etc. and doing DB access and all that
- Potentially a web server of some kind (ex Rails, PHP) to handle some of the longer term state stuff that you can make web requests for
- MySQL running for long-term storage
- Memcached or something like that running for frequently accessed values
- A lot of know-how
- Not being you
