They've been taking some of the nodes down to see how the servers respond. They've had 1k people on a single machine from the cluster of 40. My maths isnt great, but simple scaling would suggest they can manage 40k people at a stretch. More realistic scaling acounting for some exponentials would suggest maybe 20k people online at once with the current setup.
Everyone starts bitching about lag as soon as it pops up, forgetting about the smooth sailing that might have been there only 5 hours ago. Between beta testers and goldfish, I'm still betting on goldfish for the better longterm memory of good things.

Does any of the other MMOGs really have a market system like Eve's? I really doubt they're anything like as fully featured in that respect, and very few of them are planned to be based mainly off player production of items.

What the heck though. I'm not a fan on mining. I've been complaining about it for a while. One day I'll make a game that makes mining in space fun.

People that work for companies and go out to write bad things about the products of the competition on lots of public boards exist. Aparently it's called viral marketting, but it would be really interesting to see someone do a good expose on it.

since I'm rambling and it's early morning while I work and think about somthing:

- And what separates it from UO/EQ/AC/AC2/DoAC/AO/E&B etc?

Player numbers in one world for one.
Painful death. Hey, I like the consequences.
The market. afaik, none of the others have buy and sell orders with ranges and all sorts of other things. Heck, most of them don't have courier missions either, even if they're buggy as hell at the moment.
The security system + factions. Eve's far more dynamic.
Flaming Space Skulls. ... oh no I lie, EnB has those.

Personally, despite problems, I'm buying into Eve. For one, I enjoy a lot of the social things I have going on with it, I also think that the developers already have a feature set in the game that's larger than most other games, there's a few things I trust them to bring in before release (if only a few) that will improve some areas of the game, but most of all I continue to see a vast number of possiblilities for growth and improvement over the coming months (and I'm fairly forgiving for the first few weeks of an MMOG).

It doesn't even bother me that some people don't like Eve. I've seen far worse flaming over other games, and all these online forums are soapboxes for one man and his talking dog. There's very few threads about any game that don't seem to turn into flamewars now.

I'll make my final judgement if release was premature a a few days after release. I'm still inclined to think that another 2 or 3 months would have helped a great deal, especially with some features that a lot of people wanted for release and with publicity. I think it's a good game now, and I think it will be a better game in 2/3 months, but everyone's free to disagree until I rule the world.

This comment was edited on Apr 24, 01:22.