[loramin]

Originally Posted by soronil [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You have to realize that to the server, the physical size of the zone is really of no consequence, it's operating on the coordinates. The game looks much different to the eyes of a human through the client, than it does to the server hardware running the server software.
if you have 2 fights happening, one at 0,0 and one at 100 100, that's the same to the server as the second one being at 10000, 10000.

The extra stress comes in when you have 100 entities interacting with each other, instead of spread out into say 10 different engagements. more calculation needed I suspect

So it's a function of how many entities it has to make calculations for, with complexity increasing for each entitiy-entity interaction

That was a great "ELI5" of the issue!

(It's a Reddit term: literally short for "explain it like I'm five", but more generally it just means providing a great "layman" explanation of something)