The population isn’t being limited due to technological constraints. It’s being limited due to environmental concerns.
There is only so much playable area, there are only so many resource nodes, and only so many mobs active.
If you put too many people on it becomes very difficult to gather, fight mobs, etc. it also has an effect on the economy as a whole. Too many people in one server whose landmass was never designed for it will cause overcrowding issues.
The “landmass” was designed for a certain number of active players. I think it was around 3500 or something in vanilla.
Sure you can layer and shard but that goes against the long term goal of keeping the vanilla experience. In vanilla you could always see that guy dueling outside IF and you saw the same people all the time. This is a big part of community development and cohesion. With layering/sharding you don’t see the same people much. That’s how live is and it’s awful. Most people you see you won’t see again, even on your own “server”.
Their goal (originally) is to get rid of layers asap once people spread out and before phase 2. If you overpopulate you either can’t get rid of the layers or there will be way too many people for the environment. Both are very bad.
I don’t understand why people can’t see this.
Look at the big picture people.
Now I am seeing that they increased capacity which means there is a good chance we won’t see layers removed ever.
Good job whiners, you might have just destroyed one of the main reasons vanilla had such a great community. Too damn lazy to move to a different realm. I’m honestly not surprised though.