There are only 4 servers and that is it currently.
There is 1 single NA-East server, 1 single NA-West server, 1 single Oceanus server, and 1 single EU server.
There are not multiple servers within that at all, just 4 servers currently.
When they get publishers, and more funding when there is something playable, their team will grow bigger, the servers are supposed to hold 120k players/npcs per server.
So, that sounds like fewer than 100 thousand players will be able to be in the game at any one time assuming there are 20 thousand NPC's. (I don't know how many NPC's there will be so I'm pulling this number out of thin air fully expecting it to not be accurate at all.)
How would they alter the servers after the fact to accommodate more players since the entire world from the perspective of a single character will be built on a single server? I'm no engineer, but adding more servers on top of an already established server sounds complicated. It's like opening the door to a house in the swamp after a rainstorm, a whole lot of bugs are gonna come right in.
I'm not trying to be critical, I'm just trying to wrap my head around the actual logistics of what would technically need to be done to succeed at such a massive undertaking.
Each server equals a continent with several kingdoms and each continent will be adequately populated with (virtual) people. Players will control some of these people (player characters, PCs) but when they log out the people will remain on the server (offline player characters,OPCs). So the population of a server doesn't depend on the number of (active or inactive) players but rather on the size of the continent (and maybe a little on birth rates etc.)
If this limit will be reached on a server there are two options. There will either be added a new continent apart from the starting continent on the same server or there might be a new additional server eventually. I assume the first will be the prioritized solution as long as player numbers don't exceed several million on one server...
Oh I see. So basically they get around the issue by having everything persist. Interesting. I knew it was a persistent world, but I didn't realize that would also be how they get around server challenges. Thanks.