it's working with number scales, that frankly haven't been touched since PS1, and time scales similar to that you'd see in COD or BF

the reason is that geometric growth takes hold and quickly sends the data that needs to be sent sky high.

for example,

if you have 3 people in a game, the first client needs to have 2 connections, and the second client needs 1 new connection update

when you add a 4th person, you don't add the need for 1 more connection, you add the need for 3.

this means that by the time you get to a 64 player game, you are looking at 2,016 potential connections for the server to keep track of per server tick.

when you have 100 people in a hex (a 48/48 fight and two random VS infils) you have over DOUBLE that at 4,950 connections per server tick. note that the game actually runs pretty damn well under these conditions too.

where things start to break down is when SSGO and AOG decide to zerg the shit out of each other, and you have a 96+/96+ fight. assuming that we are looking at a small zerg of 200 people total in the fight, there are 19,900 potential connections that the server needs to handle PER TICK. that is almost 10 full 64 man servers. 300 people? 44,850 connections per tick.

and when we take things to the red line of #RecordSmash where the TR and NC shoved EVERYONE into one hex at the closing bell you get an astounding 74,305 connections that must be sent out per tick... out of the 669,903 total potential interactions jaeger was dealing with.

and that's not even counting the amount of bullets, explosions, grenades, and vehicles that the server is dealing with at any give moment either.

now it's worth noting that the servers need not handle all this at once. if you are more than 300 m away from somebody, you don't need to exist yet, as far as that client is concerned. so that means that these numbers are all theoretical maximums. it also fits with what /u/promptcriticalsoe has said about the servers being able to handle 5 48/48 fights a lot easier than 2 100+ man zerg balls smashing into each other.. it's also worth noting that this is ENTIRELY a different ball of wax compared to raiding in your typical MMO.

for things like a WOW or RIFT raid:

1. you aren't aiming your skills at all, you're rolling dice and using tab target to say where things are going. the bullet paths don't need to be simulated at all.
   1. most of the information is already on the client and the server. instead of checking for a hit and a headshot, your client is saying "i cast x skill on y target"
   2. it's very easy to hide lag and desync, since most actions are simulated clientside
   3. the TTK's are on the orders of seconds, as opposed to planetside where we have guns in the .1 second headshot ttk range.
   4. time is safely mutable. EVE takes this to the extreme, but if a 1 second 'round' in your traditional MMO takes 1.5 or 2 seconds nobody is really going to notice, and honestly the few who do are not going to care that much. for planetside you can't slow down someone's run speed because when you start doing that in a shooter, the game starts to feel bad, instead of the crisp feeling you always want out of a shooter.

TL:DR The forgelight engine has the balls to try and tackle a situation where you have the worst demands of a FPS and of an MMO. The fact that /u/promptcriticalsoe doesn't have to walk into the server room and put the entire thing out of it's misery after AOD ops night is an amazing technical feat. It's not perfect, but it's damned impressive nonetheless.