Originally Posted by Stardouser
This is why I think they need to try to have all the fighting on one large supercontinent; because small continents are easily locked. And I know one of the objections to a supercontinent is the fear that people will concentrate in too large of numbers, but surely that can be avoided.
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They could also, instead of having one supercontinent, put the continents physically close together and allow flying between them. It should take 10 minutes or so to fly that far, but that would be OK, because the enemy would have no idea where you're going to come from if that's the case.
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The problem with a supercontinent isn't *only* that people will concentrate in numbers that exceed targets and break stability.
It's also that creating seams between the servers on the back-end is very difficult.
Standard MMORPGs that take a seamless world approach do this by basically not putting anything of interest along those seams, so you don't notice the NPC pop-in as you cross over. You see the NPCs and data for the slice of the continent you're on, then you cross over, and suddenly you can't see those NPCs anymore, but now you can see NPCs on the new slice. If you don't stick NPCs that hang around within view distance of this, you don't have to worry about NPCs appearing and disappearing. Similarly, I've never seen an MMO that didn't "leash" NPCs when you crossed these boundaries.
FPSes will make it even worse, because instead of allowing a limited amount of cross-talk for the rare case where other players or NPCs approach a seam while you're near it, and you need to "see into" a new slice; with an FPS, you need to be getting updates about stuff on the other side just as often, and there can't be any lag, and you even need to do HIT DETECTION across that boundary.
That's the reason we've got 3 8km x 8km continents instead of one 14km x 14 km mega-continent.