A lot of arguments are coming about what people want in a game and not from the technical / feasibility aspect of the game.
It is about population density guys. If you have 100000 sq. ft on real estate you're going to have to consider population density.
Take any zone in EQ - and then consider how many 'zones' there are at launch. Let's throw a number out - how about 50 actively used hunting zones (disregard cities, etc) - 1 for every level (and i think that's very generous)
So, let's look at a 'normal zone' and I'll use fudged numbers for this because it's easy and I don't want to get into 'specifics'.
How many people can that zone service without feeling frustrated and/or bored. Looking at zones like unrest, mistmoore, lguk, solb - i feel 'crowded' starts at 30-40 people.
So, the game world could be populated with some 1500-2000 people and feel 'full to brimming' so to speak. This is fine assuming normal distribution... but.. there won't always be normal distribution.
During the initial stages there will be a surge through these zones. Say you have 1500-2000 people in these zones at the start and say they're confined to only 10 to start off with - now we're talking 150-200 people in said zones. Way overfull.
There will be a time where it tapers, but then we will hit high end stagnation - much like we have today. Even today when we have 700 people online, all of seb is camped. Imagine this with a live server. We're talking 150-200 people in those zones again assuming they don't reroll out of frustration or go to another game.
So what is the solution to this problem?
1) Instance zones - multiple copies of a zone that allow you to spread out and keep numbers low
2) Larger zones - Increase your virtual real estate with static content == more work for the developers to appease the masses. More zones, bigger zones, doesn't matter, the more people on the server you want, the more real estate you have to provide
3) Smaller servers - Cap population to something realistic - at any given time about 20% of a population is online in a server. Cap it to 5k to have roughly on average 1k people online, with peaks higher and lower than this. WoW's top subscription was 11 million, which would lead to about 1000 servers assuming everybody played on a singular server.
We have a problem with scale of population and the density it provided. People are saying they want a game that appeals to a niche market -- the niche market doesn't make money. The game will be mainstream. Only one of these options costs less money and less resources, and that's (1). That's why I think EQN will have instancing, and why most MMOs have instancing. You increase your virtual real estate without additional work beyond instancing code. This isn't a matter of how you want your game - the way you want it is the way it is on p99 - and this server barely supports 1k concurrent users.
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