[whartung]

But why is this so performance bound, particularly for just a couple of users?

I mean, sure, if you're hosting 1000 of your closest friends, I can see the potential issues. But for you, and a small party, it shouldn't be that awful.

Large groups, close together, are the largest load factor on a server like this because of the explosion of interrelated event broadcasting. "Oops, Lulzmage just cast Blizzard on a pack of 10 toons in the midst of a two 40 man raids attacking Orgrimmar." WoW has never handled them well, and it's fundamentally why they rarely do "world events" anymore, even with the modern sharding tech.

But a hundred folks across Kalimdor killing boars one on one, eh, not that big a deal.

[jwells89]

All this is true, but naturally the projects that can scale are going to be getting the majority of dev attention since those can be used for large scale private server projects like Nostralius. There’s not nearly as strong of a “market” for servers intended for small friend groups.

[TylerE]

Even on a tiny instance, that efficiency could be the difference between needing a $5/month server and a $50/month server. (or being able to run it on something like a Rasp Pi vs a server-grade computer)