Odd for the developer to be asking the players this, I know. But there's only so many of us on staff, and we've not been able to make a dent in multiplayer's performance with three or four of us at once. The game itself doesn't bound how many players can join a server at once, but I assure you there is a definite cap somewhere. We just don't have any idea where.
Since some folks have been running servers (mainly Toll), I wanted to find out what your experiences with that have been. The game is pretty lightweight in the processing arena, so I feel safe in claiming "2-16 players" as something that an average server should be able to run. Especially on a LAN. But I wanted to check and make sure that wasn't counter to what any of you were experiencing, and frankly I think that 16 might be well undershooting it.
From purely a RAM perspective, Keith and I were figuring that if there were about 30-50 players on a server that would be the comfortable maximum (though we could be wrong and it could be higher). From a processing perspective, on your average gaming-rig-class machine I don't see why that wouldn't be feasible either. From a networking perspective, the game is reasonably latency tolerant thanks to its hybrid model, so I really don't know what the comfortable answer is on an Internet server versus a LAN.
And this is why we're asking the question. Last thing I want to do is claim that we support X number of players when in fact the experience stinks when that many players are on the server. Right now 2-16 seems like a safe range to say, but we're honestly shooting in the dark and it seems a little stupid to promise something we've not tested. But with that in mind, we'd be saying 2-4 players co-op, which is obviously vastly undershooting it.
