How many people can be in the same system instance at the same time?

[Darque]

The following quote from the newsletter made me wonder. I had assumed thousands could be in the same system, but it appears we are worried about more than 4 people in a team. Does anyone have an idea what the real number could be? I think I have seen more than 4 humans in an instance but I am unsure...
"The team settled on the four-person cap for wings to make certain there can always be more players in a given system than just a single wing. “But at the same time,” Lead Designer Sandro Sammarco says, “a wing of four still represents a significant increase of capability over a lone vessel provided players cooperate effectively.”

 

[Rhywden]

32 is the limit.

 

[Devil's Refugee]

32.

But reading into that statement, and maybe I'm looking for something that isn't there, it looks like they may even limit the amount of Wings in the same instance to allow a mix of grouped and single players. So even forming a multi-Wing party may not guarantee you'll be in the same instance if they're artificially balancing the player mix.

 

[Dannyc]

Is that 32 in one instance (ie dropping into 1 station - I've never seen more than 5 even at major hubs at peak times) or is it 32 in one system and it then treats that as divisions when it comes to stations

 

[VR Mr Teatime]

Copied from another post I made a while back, as "instances" or islands in Elite Dangerous seems to be one of the most misunderstood concepts on this forum:
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The best way of visualising instances is to think of a Venn diagram with the circles centred on every players ship and extending out to a certain range. The circle/bubble/island moves with each ship. The most overlaps between circles (and hence players in a multiplayer instance) is currently 32 even though there could be 1,000's of ships in your vicinity, so you only ever get to see a max of 31 other players. More 32 player instances are created as required and can in theory be anywhere in the 400 billion star systems, as we have almost limitless freedom on where we can go.
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The matchmaking code when players come into each other vicinity works out which 32 player instance you should be in dependant on a number of real world networking factors, but essentially boils down to the health of your connection in relation to the other players in the instance you could potentially join. This code from what I see runs in supercruise and normal flight.
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The other aspect to bear in mind is the persistent elements, matchmaking and control of some objects is handled on a client server basis to the AWS servers that FDev run.
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Another myth is that there are "rooms" for each system. There are not in essence as you can supercruise potentially between stars, its just that the assets in the new solar system do not load in until hyperspace is activated (I'm assuming that they could be loaded in without hyperspace in theory, but its a fringe use case so not handled that way). Another reason is IIRC from one of the devs when I was asking about floating point precision errors, the main x,y,z origin point is the main star in the system, so that would have to be loaded and asset positions worked out in relation to it, during hyperspace (as well as the galaxy render skybox).
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Hope that helps.