Talk to me about server meshing. What is it and how important is it?

Basically, in a nutshell, server meshing is going to give us the ability to put everybody in one instance. Right now we have a server which basically controls... we have about 50 people in one area. And that's about as high as we can go. We'll be able to get a bit higher once we do some optimizations, but otherwise you get into problems with, not so much latency, but the servers get so slow that it causes problems to get everything out. So the server meshing means that we will be able to dynamically have servers control anything from a room to a system, depending on how many people are in there. So you can imagine, once we optimize it and a server can actually control a few hundred people, and we know that a few hundred people have all decided to go to a bar, then we can have one server where all it cares about is the few hundred people in the bar. That's it. And that means that you suddenly get this big feeling of, oh, we're all pushed in here, but the server's controlling that. As soon as you walk out of the bar, it transfers to another server, which is controlling the alleyway outside or whatever. And that's the way we basically get everybody in one place. And then they talk up to a system server, which then talks up to a big old database server and so forth, which then scales back. And so they go, oh, there's 200 people over here, let's put like five servers on that. Oh, there's only one person out here, just one server for the whole system. And then it dynamically just scales how many servers control things depending on how many people are in there, and they basically use the power jointly to try and get people in there. So that's kind of how the server meshing stuff works. And obviously there's levels of this. So that's where you want to go to. It's this beautiful dynamic system. It basically brings servers on and offline depending on how many people there are. It's very neat. It's very efficient. But at first, the first iteration will be... at the moment we're in the planning phase right now, and the work will start soon afterwards, and we'll be working on it this year. And obviously, like I said before, this is one of the things that we're not going to talk about a date for until we're closer. But the idea would be that once we have the first iteration, we now have the servers talking to each other. They're not dynamic, but we have, oh, a server is going to manage this area of space, a server will manage this area of space, a server will do this planet, a server will do this location. And then all of a sudden, when you've done that, you can get a bunch more people in. And so the first test for me, and we'll be involving a lot of people, Evocati and PTU, is you start with that stuff. So the first one is more rigid. It's servers passing people to each other when they go through zones. That way we get loads more into an instance. That will be the first one we play. And at that point, I think people start having a pretty damn good experience, because we're not talking 50 people, you're going to be talking hundreds of people playing together in areas, or in one instance, and systems passing back and forth. And then the dynamic side will be built on top of that as well.