What will the criteria be for these instances? How will the system know who I want to engage in a battle with? [...] Furthermore, will players not participating in a battle be able to see other battles? If there is a limit of 100 places what will prevent players who are hovering by from entering other battles?asked by ReaLMaDz
TL;DRTagging a ship tells the system you want to fight it, but there will be no single shared real-time star-system instance; players are dynamically placed in limited-slot instances by allegiance, interest and skill.
Well if you tag the ships, the system will know you want a fight with them and will enable that.
But I should clear one thing up - there is not going to be one instance of a massive star system that all players exist in in real-time 3D. No one can do this - not even Eve, which has a lower fidelity of data needed for the ship positions / actions.
Players will also not have the ability to specify an exact random location in space. They can navigate to known locations, or tag a ship they want to track or ambush (say you're in orbit around a planet, or you spot the pilot down on the planet).
The game will try its best to put friends and other ships of interest in the same dynamic instance - every space area - say orbiting a planet, an asteroid field, an ambush point etc. has only so many slots for live players - it is dynamically dropping people in and out of these instances based on their allegiances, specified interest / factions and skill level