If you look at the developer blogs for EVE Online, you'll have endless reading about massive scale multiplayer servers. Possibly the most technically impressive massively multiplayer experience
EvE is one of the worst architecture for an MMO, there is almost nothing to do and yet they need to slow down the simulation loop when there are too many players. I mean when you gameserver is based on Python what else can you do?
I think despite an unfortunate underlying architecture (which has especially bitten them in terms of development speed), they've achieved an impressive density. No other game I know of supports as many other players 'on screen' as EVE. The number of players you can have in a single fight is similar to the max number of online players on the larger WoW realmns
They also call servers not being able to keep up and thus the gameloop slowing down "tidi" (time dilation). Like yeah, that's just what happens when a gameserver can't keep up.
Well no, TIDI had to be added in. It's purposefully slowing down in-game ticks.
Normally your requests would just be dropped if it had to process everything within a 1s tick. Now all reload times etc get slowed down by a huge factor depending on load.
Exactly. It was not something that happened automatically (not would it in almost any architecture). Instead the game would either cease to function properly or players would get disconnected or the server would crash, usually all of those in roughly that order. With TiDi at least things can happen, albeit at a frustratingly glacial pace.