Quote Originally Posted by Buckles View Post
Versus how many can it show now? During Odin or just strolling through Rev toll people pop out of thin air 10ft in front of me on a crowded (every) day...
In v1, it was just over 40 (total, for all mobs, NPCs and PCs). The game can do 100 now.

The places you mention easily have several hundred. Even assuming infinite graphics capability, the game has to load in textures and models for each (gigs of RAM or lots of disk thrashing), plus deal with limits of bandwidth (sending gear/position/action info x 100), and server power (determine highest priority 100 for up to 1000 players (zone maximum)). As someone else mentioned, they use grids and/or sub-zones to keep the resource usage reasonable.

As for WoW and textures, I have never played, but from images everything structurally looks chunky (extremely low polygon count). There are tradeoffs. To excel in one thing they need to scale back in others.