Will this allow us to increase the player count in the short term? We have server OCS; can we have more players in one server?

In theory, it definitely should. I think we're at the point now to where we haven't yet done sufficient testing that we would basically want to definitively say one way or the other. That's certainly what we're thinking we're going to want to be, we're certainly going to be doing tests and seeing how far we can push it. It is possible that as you completely remove one bottleneck, you expose some other things that also need to be dealt with, and whether those would be egregious enough in terms of a problem, or whether you'd be able to quickly patch them up and deal with them and push it out with 3.8 with a player count, or whether some of that stuff would have to move to 3.9, that part we don't yet know. But that's definitely where we're headed.

Yeah, and to explain why that profiling is so important and the real reasoning behind it is that there's going to be a sweet spot for us where it makes a lot of sense to actually have that exact player count, because it has a little bit to do with how players play, where they're going to be positioned within the server. But conceptually you could end up in a state that we've got, let's say, 200 players that are in every single location, every single object container, and it's actually all loaded in the end. But it really depends on how the players are playing. But we will find a sweet spot in here, because there is an edge where we go too far, that it's actually not helping us as much. But I think even in that case, we're still going to be better.

But that's a perfect example of where SOCS is really a building block towards the future in terms of, yes, if you actually had a perfect distribution of players, then you could wind up eliminating much, if not necessarily all, of the benefit of SOCS. The server mesh would eventually fix this by simply going, oh, well, you're over in this area, we're going to mate you to a server that only covers items in that area. And therefore the long-term path will deal with that very elegantly.