Pop cap

[Alhanelem]

Nope. Can be fixed and managed with hardware and proper coding. Check out the server architecture for Eve On-Line, which IMO, is one of the best, most powerful and most stable game server I have ever played on.

In January of this year, Eve had over 3000 players in one solar system (aka - zone) for a massive fleet battle (some nut mis-clicked). Lets face it, any other MMO server out there would melt into a quivering pile of whiney goo when placed under that kind of load.

Nope. It can't just be fixed and managed with "the proper coding." Don't talk out your behind when you don't know what you're talking about (or please post the code that would fix the problem). I love it when people talk about things like coding without demonstrating any actual knowledge of the problem. It's possible to code a program to launch a missile to detonate on the head of a pin halfway across the globe. It doesn't mean that it's feasible or realistic to implement in a short time.

It's not that it can't be fixed, it's that it's not a simple problem that can be fixed in a day or at the snap of a finger. It is in fact very likely that this measure is in place to allow them to make improvements without making people's game experience a living hell in the meantime. Would you rather A) have the servers crash or B) be slightly inconvenienced on rare occasions and avoid having the server crash?


Your example of EVE is poor, because while yes, you can have giant space fights with ridiculous numbers of players in one area, it handles this by sending updates much less frequently to the players- When battles get that huge in the game, everything grinds to a halt- it's about as easy to accomplish something as if you couldn't enter that part of space while the battle was going on. Imagine Titan with 30 second lag spikes instead of 3. Yes, it is possible to make the servers not crash with huge numbers of people, but that doesn't mean the game experience is going to be more optimal than with the solution they implemented.

In the case of this game, that's not really a good method to solve the problem.

It takes an extraordinary circumstance to hit the population cap- and it's a circumstance that generally only lasts a short time. I'll take the minor inconvenience over the solutions other MMOs have used.