I was just wondering what number you're aiming at in regards to people/ships occupying the same system or small area in a system? Obviously space battles are going to be a big thing, especially when trying to control a certain area or object.asked by El Duderino

From our standpoint, we're not quite sure how many we'll be able to get in the same server instance. We'd like to be able to get between 50 and 100 if we possibly could do that, but we're still a ways off right now. I mean right now we have much above 12 players in Arena Commander and we're starting to have some performance issue, but there's a lot of optimization that we need to do to address, to fix, and... we're also sort of working on some of the back-end net code with things called like "dead reckoning" and stuff that will greatly reduce the amount of data. So it will make all of this easier to have a large amount of players in the system. But it's probably not likely to be more than about 50 to 100 in any one area instance. Now in the actual star system itself, it's sort of built in a way that it can handle tens of thousands of players in that star system - it's just not tens of thousands of players would all be able to see each other at the same time. They would just be stacked in different instances, and then we put you in, like in your local area, sort of based on who your friends are, who your enemies are, what your game preferences are, and it's sort of dynamically putting you in and out of instances as you fly around. So to you it should mostly feel like you're in a big universe and you run across a lot of people, because you literally, if you're flying from one planet to another planet, you may move in and out of 4 or 5 different instances. And so potentially means that you could be... outside of the NPCs... you potentially could be seeing 200-300 players when you're doing that (if it was a really busy populated area).So I think our system hopefully would work quite well. Most certainly will not be any equivalent of the Eve several-thousand-players-all-in-one-big-space-battle, just because with the detail and fidelity that we have on our ships we just can't simulate that many... I mean none of the computers that we have - even our most fastest expensive one with the most ridiculous graphics chip could handle it and kinda what we're doing. Although, you never know what happens in the future. I'm not promising thousands, but we're definitely gonna utilize every single iota of power that we can go, and as much bandwidth we can take that's reasonable for everyone to make the game the best experience possible.