Comment Re:Easy fix (Score 2, Informative) 308
If money and sheer 'raw performance' could solve the problem, I'd bet that they would have already done that. The (salary of the engineers + server downtime + crashses (resulting in bad reputation) + etc.) are much more expensive than the hardware cost.
The problem in this situation is that they are trying to put too many people inside a small region.
For example, if you develop some kind of chat server, which can have 10 people inside a single room, and assuming that each person types one message per second, you have 10 messages per second on the room for 10 people, resulting in 100 messages transmitted per second. Make that 1000, and you have 1,000,000 messages to broadcast per second.
The problem is that, all that data has to get out of your server farm. Even worse, is that the required bandwidth grows square-proportional of the number of users on the battlefield. Now, add the 'computing load distribution' when the computation (and the interaction between the users) also grows square-proportional of the number of users. Things will get ugly quickly. That's why most MMOs put queues and user caps on individual 'servers' or 'instances' or whatever, because potentially everything inside the region need to interact with each other.
Actually, I heard that EVE online had done a tremendous job scaling the size of battlefields up to remarkable sizes. Well, at least they are trying.