Well at the risk of annoying folks further I'll mention that I've laid out the cost argument earlier. All those servers may very well be "all those cores".
I must have missed that part. How does that work? You can make it so the multi tiered system would run off 1 server? Either way that only would solve the money issue. The lack of player issue is the bigger beast.
Virtualization can create as many virtual servers as needed. As I've mentioned before, I have a machine in my office with 128 cores and 1/2TB of RAM. That could be configured so that several virtual servers could share that pool of cores/memory as needed. I assume that Daybreak has similar hardware in their data center. The division of people may very well be a fatal flaw in this idea. I have assumed minimal interaction between people at different stages of progression. But keeping later expansion loot from trivializing the earlier encounters may very well be worth it.
