What would be really nice would be a single server type of set up.
Where instances with no players or very few players dont need to have resources allocated to them.
High population areas would then get more resources.
The resources aren't on Frontier's end. When you jump into a system, and nobody else is there, it's your computer that's acting as the "server". If someone else jumps in, your computer and their computer talk P2P to share information about the instance.
Thus the 32-limit, that's how many players your computer will be acting as a server to at once.
Now comes the science bit...
Let's say you and your friends, all live locally to you, jump into a system and blockade the station. You're going to have a pretty decent ping time (the round-trip time for a packet of data from you, the server, to them and back to you).
Let's say that's 35ms.
Let's also say your computers are clipping along at 60fps, aka a frame every 17ms.
Your friend presses fire on their joystick, that will take up to 17ms to be processed by their computer and placed on the network, and then another 17ms (half the ping) to get to you, and another 17ms for your computer to process that and send it out to another of your friends, 17ms to get to them, and 17ms for their computer to update that.
That's 87ms for the fire to move from one player to another.
For the reply to come back, that's another 87ms.
So when your friend presses fire, their computer doesn't get the confirmation all the other player computers have agreed that something was fired for 174ms.
Just under 1/6th of a second. Imagine playing a game at 6 FPS ... that's what the network code is really doing.
And that's with you all playing in the same geographical region.
Let's add another player into the mix, one in Cambridge, UK. That's 5,323 miles from my house. Conveniently I have lots of friends there, so can ping a server and figure out a RTT.
It's 160ms.
So now let's plug those numbers in, from the time your friend presses fire on the joystick, to the time that the Cambridge player receives that, and the time it takes for the response from their computer to get all the way back.
One way is 17ms processing + 17ms half-ping to you + 17ms processing + 80ms half-ping to them + 17ms processing
So 150ms to get all the way over the atlantic, then another 150ms back.
300ms. Or a 1/3rd of a second. Fancy playing a game at 3 FPS?
Some very clever networking programming can reduce that nightmareish scenario down a bit, but you're still dealing with a fundamental speed-of-light problem.
You just can't get a packet from the US West Coast to the UK faster than 150ms.
And that's the other reason instances are there, so I can play a game with friends in my local area and be able to have responsive gameplay even while someone in the UK is doing something else in that system.
