I mentioned this 8 years ago, but I had an idea....
So, why not expand our systems, by having several servers?
How it would work.
You have Server A (Liberty House) Jump gate to Server B (Kusari)
When you jump your player is suspended in jump animation as the server copies your data to server B then deletes it from Server A. After complete you'll be kicked; but when you join server B you'll end up where you would have.
We could make sub parts of every house system ect ect. And maybe even have more newer systems that we don't have to delete because they're untraveled.
We have more than 30 unused systems that are in the game but not accessible other than by blindjumping. I think those need to be filled first before there is an actual need to shard the server.
8 years ago we didn't have a maximum player population of 60 during weekdays.
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Server sharding is something we looked into back when peak was 200/200 and lasted for eight hours straight, and while the crazy stuff we can do with Freelancer on the server side has definitely gotten more and more intense, it's still a seriously difficult thing to try accomplishing with FLServer.
Maybe if we were at 200/200 for a third of the day again I'd take a good hard look at it, but while server pop is on the rise, it's still nowhere near that. We don't usually even crest 100 at peak anymore.