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Scripts and Scaling In Online Games
CowboyRobot writes "Jim Waldo of Sun Microsystems has written an article titled Scaling In Games & Virtual Worlds, saying that they 'should be perfect vehicles to show the performance gains possible with multicore chips and groups of cooperating servers. Games and virtual worlds are embarrassingly parallel, in that most of what goes on in them is independent of the other things that are happening. Of the hundreds of thousands of players who are active in World of Warcraft at any one time, only a very small number will be interacting with any particular player.' A group of researchers at Cornell wrote a related piece about improving game development and performance through better scripting."
The people who are planning big (i.e 500+) battles petition the developers with the predicted location before hand, and they move that region onto more powerful hardware that can handle the load.
I recall playing a game called Goonzu, and people would stand on event NPCs so that no one else could do the event. Sure, they couldn't do the event because they were preventing others from doing it, but they simply didn't care.
There would probably be ways to stop them, like if they decided to play as 'villains' (read: douches), it would be possible to kill them, treating them as bad guys. So, while everyone plants something and has to wait a few days for the foliage to come back, or their pets get set free to become monsters again or some such, you can go 'kill' the bad guy that did this in the first place. By being killed, they would have to make a new character. So, they would have to start over as a little nublet, level up, skill up, whatever, and then they could go be obnoxious again. If they really have that much energy to go and hinder people's growth for a few days, it would at least give everyone a fun event of 'chase down the jerk and get revenge'.