Pop cap

[BotenAnna]

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.

EvE has had this exact problem for years, actually, and for a long time basically could only have one area be housed on one physical server at the most, so even when they had some fancy stuff to hotswap the physical hardware based on demand, they still had upper limits to how much could be handled in one area. Jita, the large trading hub (something like Mor Dhona in current FFXIV but even more populated) ran on one ridiculously powered server, and under certain conditions ran into problems because even that hit its limits. Quite infamously, the first large battles (especially after Goonswarm was established) were huge messes of lag, server crashes, and disconnections and incredibly anticlimatic. The thing where it slows down time (let's be clear--this means that they made lag a part of the game design) and that they can throw more than one piece of physical hardware at one area (at least I think they have finally done that) is a really really recent addition, and it took CCP a long time and a lot of hard work by some of the best network and system engineers in the MMO industry, which whether you love or hate EvE (I actually am more in the "hate" category myself) has some incredibly impressive netcode and systems design.

tl;dr just because EvE did it doesn't mean it's trivial. Remember they basically made this game, especially the netcode and server infrastructure, from the ground up in 3 years at best. No AAA MMO has done this, ever.