Timothy Lochner

Interesting to see @sailtheatlas going with the server architecture they went with. Only other game I've seen do the "seamless server grid" thing was @vanguardsoh. I worked on V:SoH. Cut my teeth on it. Not sure I would recommend it to other games.

When V:SOH launched (in 2007!) it was boasting huge worlds too. Thousands of players per server. Each *zone* however, could handle a hundred or so. Interesting that 11 years later, the server capacities are about the same for Atlas.

So many gameplay problems are O(n^2) or worse. 100 players is 10k updates a frame, for example, but 40% more players is 2x the load. 100 is a good round number. It’s easy to optimize until you hit it then stop.

Eh, I'm not sure I buy it. On @planetside2 their max server capacity was something like 1200, setting a Guinness record. And that's *one* process. The number chosen aside, I think there are better ways to distribute work than "geographically".

I’m not saying more isn’t doable, just laying out the difficulties of the challenge and why I think 100 is a bit of a magic number. An O(n^2) problem has to do 144x the work going from 100 players to 1200. It’s doable, but not trivial.