[Malorn]

I think my next epic thread will be about scaling across servers and continents.

That's a big picture issue IMO. When you have prime time when populations are at their peak, best case all three empires are nearly maxed out on every continent, but what happens as more continents are added or as the populations change throughout the day and over time?

Locking is one way of narrowing content down to the appropriate size given the population. That was one nice benefit of locks - it helped focus the battles to a handful of continents to keep the population there. In PS2 they're going to use the mission system to encourage people to fight on a few places as the population gets low.

One disappointing thing was that they plan on having traditional "servers" in PS2 instead of having one unified world with lots of continents/planets to do battle on. I had hoped that PS2 was going to be like EVE where there is one universe where all players share but the conflict is localized. Then as more continents come along they can expand the universe. With only 3 continents to start the only way to do that would be to have duplicates of the continents, possibly with different starting positions (there's 6 possible configurations for the footholds for each continent). Then as new continents come along they can replace the duplicates with fresh continent.

This is a topic that seems most interesting to me at this time. It's a massive perpetual war, but how does it scale?