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On the Feasibility of Single-Server MMOs
GameSetWatch takes a look at the issues involved in creating an MMO that does not split its users among many different servers. They suggest that running a single "shard" is the next step in the evolution of MMOs, since it better allows player choices to have a meaningful impact on the game world; supporting different outcomes across multiple shards is a technical nightmare. They estimate, from the hip, that the cost to develop the technology required to support a massive amount of players (i.e. far more than EVE Online) on a single server to be roughly $100 million. Another recommendation is the strong reliance on procedural and user-generated content creation to fill a necessarily enormous game world.
EVE's problem isn't really Lag. That is what everyone calls it, but that isn't accurate. EVE's problem is their architecture wasn't build with the scale of play they encourage today in mind.
In EVE a solar system is a discrete "zone", there are many thousands of solar systems. Each one is assigned a node on the server (blades actually) and that node may and probably does host more than one solar system. They have had limited success in beefing up big fights by moving solar systems with expected fights to a node by itself. Thereby offering as much power as their architecture will allow. However, they can only do this at "down time" which is one hour daily, so if a big fight breaks out in the middle of the day, there is no chance of it going well. Most of the REALLY big fights happen in systems that often have very low average traffic, so they are assigned to a shared node. Then for 8 hours, that system has 400 people in it, and the node is past it's limits very quickly. If they had coded the game so that a single solar system could use more than one node at a time, they could brute force the problem away entirely. But that isn't possible the way it's built.
Even so, the EVE cluster is/was on the top 500 list of super computers. You can't say it's not for lack of trying.
Why yes, I WAS an EVE player. From Beta till about a year ago. I finally gave up after countless fleet encounters were destroyed by CCP's clever, but impotent load balancing. The breaking point was when I realized that even when we had a dedicated node for every solar system in our territory, we still couldn't have a full out fleet battle without crashing the node. I'd have been happy to get half our fleet into combat, but we couldn't even do that. Granted, we had 800 ships or so and our opposition had at least 1000. I've yet to see any game that can put nearly 2000 players on a battlefield and still function.
CCP does get credit though for effort. 3 years ago you'd be LUCKY to pull off a 200 man fight. Now you can put 500 or so into a system and get your fight on without major game breaking things happening. It won't be silky smooth, but you can get it done. Ironically, 3 years ago a 200 ship fleet fight was a rare and wondrous spectacle. While a year ago, I could assemble a 200 pilot fleet in 20 minutes. So what was a major event is now a typical saturday night. The servers got better, a lot better, but they aren't keeping up with the players.