And now I know why the game limits group sizes so small

WoW, Lineage 1/2, DAoC, AoC (When not inside keeps, sieges murdered frame stability worse than the open zones), Planetside, FoM, I could probably go list another dozen more - Hell lets go ahead and say "Ultima Online" too, you know, that game that came out a decade and a half ago?

Reading comprehension my friend...

If you have 4 gigs of ram you benefit from swapping to 64 bit os, you will benefit nothing from 16 gigs of ram under 32 bit os. Because of physical adressing, as I said. It does not help to link a hastily googled explanation when you do not understand what it explains.

pvp in ilum ? good joke

/sigh, the portion I quoted clearly explains. Since the vidram is reallocated at the beginning of your address space, it eats ram. The increased address space in 64 bit OSes doesn't help, because its not overwriting addresses at the end.

And this is all happening in the BIOS. I actually watch my BIOS recount my RAM differently when I do a full length POST, the the tune of 1gig(the ram being taken over by my vid card). I have dealt with this on countless customer computers over the years, and seen vid card drivers try and handle it in various wonky ways to keep you from seeing it happen(my favorite was the one that reported normal RAM and Vidram combined to windows, with an nvidia card).

I have spent hours arguing with actual developers about this before it was proved to me, because as you believe, it is counter-intuitive.

To explain a little of the basic engineering, all system reserved addresses are mapped to the beginning of your memory space to make sure the space actually exists. That memory space starts at 0, is first allocated to RAM(because thats what it is) and then RE-allocated to the system resources that need it. This means every piece of hardware you have in your system eat a bit of ram, but you would never notice it if it weren't for vidcards and their large amounts of special ram.

I hope you can understand this, and that I speak from experience, and education.

And if you can't take my word for it, try using a 2 gig card in a 1 gig computer with a 64 bit OS

edit: and I am using win7 64bit ultimate.

This ist just WRONG. You would think developers and engineers are stupid if it really worked like this. Here is how Microsoft explains this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...8VS.85%29.aspx

To put it in simple words: devices use address space where real RAM sits. To make sure this RAM is still usable, the BIOS maps it to higher addresses. Nothing is lost, eaten, or anything else. It is only lost if you have more RAM than your 32 bit system can use.

WoW, AoC, WAR, EvE, Rift, Aion. . .

Basically ANY mmo with decent pvp supports 40v40 battles in open world areas. Hell, WAR supported over 500 people per side with framerates staying above 30 for me (though that could cause the server to crash if they all decided to go through the same door at once). But saying that supporting 40v40 battles is rare for an mmo is just silly. ANY other mmo supports 80 players fighting in a relatively small area.

This game simply has horrible optimization. You see this everwhere, excessive sharding, horrible GTN and ridiculously long weekly maintenance.

If you think aion can handle massive pvp then you never played it when it came out. it lagged out where you would hit the button and wait for your skill to go. Aion still runs 32 bit because they broke their 64 bit one.

Lets rephrase their comment.

What game within 2weeks of their launch was able to run 100v100 pvp without lag/drop in fps?

From personal experience WAR and Rift where both able to handle the numbers in the OP, Rift lagged out a bit with higher populations (mostly just not having everyone fully loaded for a while).

Yup. When I read that the game cannot handle large groups anywhere, it explained a lot for me regarding PvP issues I am seeing. And you are right, it bodes poorly for the future, because if their basic engine is limited, it cannot be fixed.

Relax, people used to intentionally crash the WOW servers by flooding a zone, and this went on for months after vanilla launch. They ultimately fixed it with server hardware upgrades. BW will fix this as well.

Every single MMO that has ever launched has had issues, they will get resolved. Be patient, let BW do their work. Things can't get fixed all at once over night. If you can't wait, just unsub and come back when the things you want fixed are fixed. Otherwise, be patient.