I’m liking it! Should be pretty simple set up transition portals I would assume? I.E. Player A walks into a portal and it spins up the instance. Players B-E take their time and eventually walk through the portal and see player A standing there angry at them. Sorta how WoW does it I guess. Splitting up game play events like this shouldn’t tax the core worlds as much and it gives players unique experiences to their group.
Over the past few days I’ve thought a lot of how to minimize server requirements and keep game play interesting. Going off what Bruno has stated I can say that ARK servers are required to be pretty hefty for 100 players, but at the same time a lot of the overall world is dynamic. Trees, rocks, sticks, AI, player housing and so on. I think stuff like this is what drives up the memory cost to what it is. If your world is more on the static side I think you’d be able to squeeze a lot more out of it since the server doesn’t have to keep tabs on them other then collision. This means to do something like ARK, Rust, H1Z1 or the like where everything is interactive you’d obviously sacrifice overall world player count for game play mechanics.
Ideally my world is pretty static except for players and AI, but the combat system is trace based. But as a back up I’ve been toying with a more traditional system with math checks for distance and angles then apply damage. This as well would reduce what the server has to keep track of but you lose out on other game play mechanics as well because the server has to keep EVERYTHING in memory. You could reduce cost by forcing players into a listen type setup but you really open up pandoras box that way.
At the end of the day, you basically have to pro/con gameplay vs server metal. Can you really afford what you want to do? The simpler the game play the less of a server burden. But as well people also need to take into consideration with any dedicated/hosted type server project how latency will effect the game play. A dedicated server isn’t something you can just plop onto a CDN and call it a day. As with any online game people will try and play it no matter the region its hosted so be prepared.