Cancel your WoW account. Get into EVE-Online. Now.

Spaceships > Epic mounts.

Capital ship fleet warfare > Raids.

5 year multi race skill training queue > Killing rats for exp.

I want to tell you about the EVE server. Not the game, just the server.

The EVE server... (there is only one EVE server...) is a single, completely interconnected cluster of blade servers, each blade hosting one of a thousand different solar systems. Each blade simulates a solar system in its entirety, including marketplaces, space stations, ship pilotage, and combat. Travel between systems is handled as a serialization of ship state, followed by a database transfer to a neighboring system simulation process.

There is no instancing in EVE. EVE has had a peak concurrent user count of over 42,000 simultaneously connected players, in one self-consistent universe, hosted on a single clustered server. Each of those 42,000 pilots can interact with any of the other 41,999 pilots. They can shoot each other, buy things from the market from each other, negotiate alliance politics with each other, through this massive seamless server cluster.

With a company that makes a server like that, do I really need to explain that the game itself is a nerd's dream?