1. There is currently no cap, the estimate for pc AND npc players is over 100K I believe.

2. Currently, the idea is the servers are subdivided so that it doesn't overload, I'm sure someone can explain this better. Basically everything, as an example, "chunk loaded" like minecraft, you'll only load what you see, as you explore you'll "delete" the prior data and download the new data as you go.

3. We're in Pre-alpha available only to devs friends and family, so that would be a no.

1. As far as I remember the only mentioned guess was "several hundreds of thousands if not millions". As the continents are huge even in this case it might be rare that you are seeing another player while you take a walk in the woods. As for most games the community hubs are the problematic regions as handling thousands of players who are not seeing each other is easier than having one hundred players doing something at the same spot. Most likely this will be also in CoE the case and the number of visible players will be limited to e.g. 48 and if there are more players in the region they will be active in a second instance. I would guess during exposition there will be some preset battles of different size and by processing the collected data they will decide the max number of visible players.

2. I think no one of us knows that and I would guess also SBS will not tell us. One reason for this could be because this might go up or down with every adjustment they do. Another reason might be that most players don't care. ;)

3. Again something we players do not know...but I guess not. Currently there is just internal testing of company, family and friends. Possibly this years...maybe next year the first players might be able to do some testing on their own but stress testing is in most cases something devs are doing just before release to take a last look if all is working or if they have to set up some additional hardware if not...but most of the time the real stress test is the release day. ;)

This is a dead thread necro’d by a spam bot. I’d report ariachris56 myself, but the button refuses to work for me. I’d appreciate, if someone else would be so kind to report it.

Will multiple instances of the same area even be possible? Each character will only be able to be in one instance. If there are multiple instances then there might be zero gate guards in one, 1 of the 50 in another, and 49 in a third. Same with a shovel and any other unique item. If I'm not in the right instance, maybe my house or my bed might be in a different instance, since everything is unique and destructible.

I recall reading that servers might become locked, however, giving someone a npc code to spark into allows them to bypass the server lock. A bypass-able server lock implies a soft player cap.

Its not instances that I'm talking about that was described. You'd be on the same as all the rest, it would be subdivided more depending on the area. They won't have instances like WoW, that is a horrible system.