Third Party smartfox, photon, and badumna oh my!

So, my team aims to make a MMO, (No flaming please!) and I am having trouble deciding which server/client architecture to use. We started off using smartfox, and got a little ways with that, but we felt restricted by the 20 user limit. Then we found badumna, and thought it would be perfect. I've heard bad things abut its security, and I agree, as I can see a lot of issues where someone could hack the service with the P2P networking. However, security is not the main focus right now, and the 200 user limit seems to give us as much freedom as we want because we would be catering to a smaller, specific group of people. I proceeded to download it, but I am having issues with it. (I believe that it has not been tested on snow leopard, and that is one of the problems). I have also saw that there is not as much documentation and explanation as I would like. I have also considered photon, but I don't really like the fact that the server is scripted in C# as I like java more. So, no we are in a undecided position. Smartfox seems reliable, but it can be restricting. Badumna seems almost too good to be true, and photon might be a option also, but I want to research it a bit more. We are just a small MMO team looking for guidance. We don't want to one-up runescape or wow, support millions of users, or get rich from subscription fees. If you have any suggestions on which engine to use, or a new one that I have not heard of, please PM me or post below. Thanks!

 

there is also Beamserver2 which is free and has no user limits, it's a socket server on which you need to write your own logic.

 

That looks really nice. I like how they leave most of the stuff up to, and of course, the unlimited user and free factor.

 

only one problem is that you need policy file validation in 3.0 and i couldn't find out if Beamserver supports it. Still waiting on feedback from them.
But yes, the base is there, you can build anything on top.