Before y'all grab your pitchforks and torches, it's important to understand what I mean by this. CIG is COMPLETELY capable of making a beautiful game that pushes the boundaries of modern hardware. Getting server meshing to work and be as seamless as it is should be a moment of triumph for CIG, as is finally getting another star system out the door, albeit in a broken state. We have amazingly detailed ships, excellent major landing areas, and a fun game when the servers decide to behave. They also have shown they have talent working on stuff in the background they give us glimpses of time and again, sometimes missing the mark or never releasing, but it shows they have a grasp on the game. However... Star Citizen cannot and will never be a MMO based on the current design of the game, and it is far too late for a total redesign. It can absolutely be a MMO-lite, but the dream of a MMO will never be a reality. There are a few reasons for this: The Game Space is Too Small I know, some of you will try and whip out numbers about how long it would take to walk a moon or that all the backers on a moon wouldn't see each other if we all had bases there, but that isn't the point. To pick a single example, let's look at major landing zones, and in particular Loreville. Loreville, like the other landing zones and stations, is fucked. Sure, it may have habs to fit a hundred players or so, but having a hundred players trying to leave the habs at any given point? Not even close. A single elevator is all that we get, and players control it which means if you are a big enough asshole, you can prevent those hundred players from leaving the habs. Furthermore, I know that hangars are instanced for now, but there is still a queue to leave. During the PTU for 3.4.3 and everyone's excitement for the Polaris, it took upwards for 30 minutes to leave Area 18, and there were A LOT of people crewing up, not everyone was taking their own ship because they wanted the novelty of seeing a capital ship in action. There still aren't even close to enough hangars to support a population of 100-300 players at Loreville at any given time. The trains are too small, the hallways too small, the overall area and landscape is too restrictive, and there aren't enough terminals in shops or other areas for that many players to be around. That isn't even talking about the griefing people to with body blocking in safe zones that make it so much worse. Add to the fact that it has an insanely slow cargo generation time for goods, elevators are far too small and feel designed for 1-4 people instead of 8+ at a time, and it's clear that Loreville, and every other landing zone for that matter, isn't capable of handling that many players. Even instancing it, you can't fit more than 100 players in an instance before things start to get super fucky and don't work right. With only THREE elevators for hangars, you can bet there will be much more than three people trying to get to their ships. Early on, we saw some things that seemed interesting from the very first Social Module we got to experience with an extremely limited Area 18 to explore. With the Job Well, which made sense on a MMO scale to provide a shitload of terminals for players to access at any time to take jobs or trade, things were instead moved to the Mobiglas. I vastly preferred the Job Well model, but regardless, the point stands that nothing can handle large quantities of players. Even during IAE when you could reasonably condense players to a location based on an event, it was hell at Microtech. Even if CIG triples or quadruples the amount of hangars you can land at BEFORE instancing them, I doubt that would truly be adequate for the numbers they want to reach with the miracles of "server meshing". This is the primary reason why so many MMOs have such cartoonishly weird scaling. Trying to make it all to a realistic scale just doesn't work unless you put in a serious amount of effort into making things truly massive enough to handle the strain of hundreds of players running around everywhere on a single station or at a landing zone. CIG is absolutely capable of making some kick ass visuals and make you feel that scale is there, but when CZ's have very few entry points, only two elevators exist for habs, there aren't nearly enough medical rooms at any location to handle the amount of dead that WILL happen, and relying on moving through realistic spaces when body blocking and large volumes of players exist, they need to understand scale. To make it even worse is if CIG decides to bump up the numbers at every station and ever landing zone by giving it a shard,, because forcing that many players to always be there will be a massive disaster. The game hasn't been designed with this in mind. I don't know if this is because CIG wanted to get things shipped and used current server numbers without waiting for server meshing, or if they did it because they didn't know if server meshing would be a thing, whatever the reason behind this is, CIG can't go back and redesign every single landing zone and station to meet actual MMO standards. Elite Dangerous gets away with it because there are a lot of private partys that play instead of online, and you are spread across a real scale Milky Way instead of a single star system with a couple points of interest. This now brings me to my next point.... Star Citizen is Niche I'm positive many people have heard and said this over the years. Star Citizen is not for everyone. In fact, because the strange direction of various systems, like the FPS side of things being made like an eSport instead of like the sim it should be, it will reach even less players. You are more than welcome to look at the amount of backers that have made accounts, however if you discount the number of free fly only accounts and large number of alt accounts, the real number is lower. Worse still, Star Citizen is NOT a popular game. Star Citizen probably won't break the top ten most played games, and concurrent numbers will be significantly less. Speaking of concurrent players, let's look at a few things to understand where Star Citizen will actually sit. Rust is currently number 10 on the steam charts with 92,165 players. Banana is number 9 on steam charts at 112,182 players. Elite Dangerous has 4,044 players playing right now, and the ALL TIME peak players since release was 27,568 concurrent players. No Man's Sky has 8,168 players right now, and the ALL TIME peak was 212,321 and that was after extreme levels of hype followed by great disappointment. DCS World has 858 players right now, and the ALL TIME peak was 3,328. It has been on a slight upward trend but is going back down now. The point is, Star Citizen won't hit those stupid high numbers. It won't. It can't. The reality is the time it takes to do things and how punishing death is will put off a majority of people from the game. Not having SOMETHING to appease the PVE crowd, be it a safe harbor like in EVE Online with High Sec or whatever, will also bring the numbers right into the gutter. You may be sitting there thinking that isn't such a bad thing, but considering how CIG needs recurrent spending post launch, which they said wouldn't involve ships (I don't believe that for a second), they need to appeal to a broader base. It doesn't matter how many unique logins CIG brags about, a majority of those are people that check the game out for a brief second, see its still broken, and leave. Some are people logging in with alts to do something while their main or other alt is in jail or whatever. The point is, Star Citizen will never hit concurrent players beyond even No Man's Sky. It is a large, obtuse, sprawling survival space game with permadeath and gear loss. You can't get more niche than that. Some of you bought because that's exactly what you want, and that's awesome you have that dream, but parts of that need to die so that the game can actually see life. Networking Doesn't Survive Enemy Contact The last point I'll bring up, with plenty more I could talk about, is the networking. Even if CIG manages to make every room, corridor, and so forth it's own server, it isn't enough. You can't have even a Javelin, which needs close to a hundred crew, be operated by purely players. The amount of network traffic that generates, even if you splice the ship up into micro servers, is immense. There sheer amount of traffic involved in doing such a thing with a hundred players would quickly screw over large numbers of players with upload/download limits because of how much data has to be constantly streamed in. More to the point, games aren't built to handle that. Even something as basic as EVE with point and click action, they need time dilation to make massive battles work. How will battle between two Javelins and all the support craft play out? That could be upwards of 500 players creating packets that have to be synced across all the clients in that space. If someone in another room changes out a fuse, or someone plugs an air hole, that is data that has to be transmitted to the game server and then to each client to maintain order and functionality. It would be one thing with 100 players duking it out each in their own ship, but as we get to the point of starting to need servers per ship, network transfer rates will go up significantly. It will also heavily fuck with CIG's accounting because they need to spin up servers based on what a player is flying or how many players are in an area. The cost from that is astronomical, and CIG isn't able to absorb that in any way. At the end of the day, CIG is extremely talented. No doubt about that in the slightest. They have shown they are capable in almost every aspect. I say almost, primarily because they haven't designed the game with scale in mind from the start. No matter how you slice it, CIG will have to limit instances to lower player counts, or redesign EVERYTHING to fit a MMO.