[Goronmon]

I have no idea whether more recent games have solved these problems.

Most games solve this problem with completely separate servers and population caps. I know in Guild Wars 2 they actually stop displaying players past a certain number to improve performance. This works fine in calm areas like cities, but in PvP it causes issues with being killed by "invisible" groups that the game fails to load in time.

I may be remembering incorrectly, but last I remember reading CCP was basically in uncharted territory on the tech front as far as EVE Online is concerned. No other game developer has even tried to tackle this problem at the level they have, and I can't think of many applications in the world that could comparable in scale and complexity to what the EVE servers have to deal with.

Edit: To summarize, even being 10 years old, no game has come close to matching it in this context.

[xenophanes]

Guild Wars 2 is stupid about this. At least on release, they stopped displaying ENEMIES FIRST. So if you're in a big enough group, a couple enemies can walk up and none of you can see them b/c you hit the limit from displaying allies, but they can still see some of you guys and kill you while invisible.

If they prioritized displaying just party members (parties only go up to 5 people) and maybe people on your friends list, and then enemies, it would have worked better.

[saraid216]

They supposedly just fixed this in the patch yesterday. As a player who gets owned by unrendered thieves, I'm not convinced. -_- (OTOH, I'm also pretty bad at PvP anyways, so whatever.)