Quote Originally Posted by Adrestia View Post
I could go into a much longer diatribe on interactive services at scale but that would take even _more_ words. If you’ve been in the MMO space for long you should know that EVE Online hosts 120,000+ concurrent users in a single-sharded service. Not “total subscribed accounts” or “active” over some broadly defined period of time. Concurrent. You can find some reader-friendly articles explaining the basics of the (10 year old) tech online.
In fairness, one cannot really compare EVE Online to most other MMOs. The technical side - as any of those reader-friendly articles explains - is an issue, yes, but there's an interrelated and critical content design factor as well. EVE Online was built with the viewpoint that players are the content. XIV, WoW, and most other MMOs are not - their content is presented to us by the development team in the form of stories, scripted fights, etc., all of which take place in a physical world that SE manually constructs for us. This physical world makes single shards unwieldy, because there's only so much space into which physical avatars can be placed. Could you imagine the visual clutter if every world-shard was combined for XIV? Just finding a Market Board to click in the Crystarium would be a nightmare. It's no different than why FPS titles limit the number of people in a given online match, rather than allowing for a global free-for-all on a single piece of land.

This also means the elasticity you're talking about really isn't something SE could achieve, because shards can't simply be spun up at will without consequences. Unlike a collection of movies on Netflix, worlds may start from the same stock template, but then they change in a way that has to remain persistent - people buy houses, goods are listed on the market board, etc. So one shard rapidly becomes distinct from all the others. That's not an architectural flaw; it's a feature. As a result, while there would be a couple of benefits to a more modern architecture - the removal of logical data center separation, for instance - it likely wouldn't really help with server congestion issues at the launch of an expansion.