That's a fair point and one of the most consistent criticisms of CIG. Right now servers are limited to 50 players at a time. If you look at reddit or the CIG forums you'll see a lot of people talking about the goal of 'server meshing'. This is really just offloading as much work as possible into their own services, so the server side application doesn't fall over under load. Server meshing is the outcome of this work, which lets them scale up to larger populations more easily.
They've been working on this for a long time now and trying to communicate the technical challenges and complexity of converting a monolithic game server into a bunch of microservices in k8s doesn't really go over well with their target demographic. Gamers aren't really known for being able to maintain a well balanced and nuanced discussion and CIG has been burned a number of times, so we don't really see them communicate much news about this until something is actually done and noted in the patch notes.
Once this work is done, in theory, the server side engine should scale up fairly well. I'm sure that they'll end up with some regional sharding, but you can't escape physics and high latency space battles are a lot less fun.
They've been working on this for a long time now and trying to communicate the technical challenges and complexity of converting a monolithic game server into a bunch of microservices in k8s doesn't really go over well with their target demographic. Gamers aren't really known for being able to maintain a well balanced and nuanced discussion and CIG has been burned a number of times, so we don't really see them communicate much news about this until something is actually done and noted in the patch notes.
Once this work is done, in theory, the server side engine should scale up fairly well. I'm sure that they'll end up with some regional sharding, but you can't escape physics and high latency space battles are a lot less fun.