As an astute observer of the MMOG scene since the days of Everquest's release, I've noticed a very distinct trend in MMOG development in regards to server population and subscriber numbers. I'll go ahead and call it the Theory of Assheaded Incrementation, simply because all good theories need a name that has very little to do with their content. In the early days, every server in EQ was meant to house about 1200 users concurrently connected. Whenever server populations grew to such heights that the server began to get laggy, they would do a server split, allowing users to move all of their characters from one server to a new server. With the release of the first expansion, this number was nudged upwards to 1500. Then 1700, 2000 and so on. The release of subsequent games in the MMOG genre tried to push this number even further, squeezing more people onto fewer servers, or squeezing more people onto more servers. I suppose the idea was that the more people available on a server, the better the chance of finding a group, creating a server-specific community (which is really nothing more than a lot of little sub-communities who sometimes intersect), and generally not feeling alone in the world. The pinnacle of this concept was to have been realized with the now-cancelled ULTRA MMOG (because we needed one more goddamn adjective attached) Wish. Wish's stated goal and only defining feature was to house all players on one server, with the capability of having more than 100,000 concurrent users with no lag. How's that negative ping code working out there?