Wow, okay, Ignacius, you're making several assumptions and mistakes here.
First of all, the reason EVE doesn't have Walking In Stations yet is PURELY a content issue. They were going to focus on creating working multiplayer stations but the playerbase vehemently disagreed with their direction and forced them to change course to working on spaceships again.
Secondly, the lack of ship customization is almost entirely because the ship models are OLD. Many ship models haven't been touched since Trinity released in 2007. They've done a shader pass over them all specifically so they can start adding more variety to the ships through shaders (allowing for more variety in coloration and the like). It's also worth noting that the v3 shader project introduced entirely new ship models to ship variants, where before they were simply modified textures. Again, this is a content issue, not a client-server issue.
Thirdly, the only time you actually stress the servers is when you initially load a new (unloaded) player model. After that your requests are no different from any other multiplayer game. Blade & Soul, as an example, has no issues rendering so many different player models on the connection side - it is ENTIRELY up to your PC to be able to render a large number of player models at a decent FPS.
Finally, you are gravely overestimating the amount of data each PC model requires to be sent over the internet. Each individual character's data can be measured in bytes, NOT kilobytes and certainly not megabytes. How do I know this? My saved character data for PSO2 - yes, with ALL of its options and everything - measures 364 bytes for each individual. 364! It's just a list of numbers! They don't even need to list which option is which, they parse that out when they read the file and it's literally done in an instant. Do you really think the morphing is killing servers or PCs? All they're doing for those is applying offsets and modifiers to bones, nothing more. Simple numbers. Easy math. No, the most taxing part is simply loading the assets in memory... and on the PC, we have nothing if not LOADS of extra memory. Especially if you have a proper 64-bit client!
In fact, the assets are the only thing worth noting here - individual armor models and weapon models all add up, far, FAR more than the simple list of numbers and values that make up any decent game's character customization. (And if you're going to try and argue that we should have less variety in armor and weapons in our games, you're going to have a bad time, I have to say.) Under no circumstances could you reasonably argue that we should prioritize things other than character creation under the pretense that it is performance-intensive.
And you definitely can't blame it for unimaginative AI or anything along those lines... because that's completely unrelated. Character creation is really, really easy to do compared to advanced AI... and there is zero - let me repeat that, ZERO - overlap between these fields. Character creation is just simple math, modifiers and offsets and lots and lots of artwork. AI is an entire field of constant high-end research, and it won't be a solved problem for a VERY long time - not the least of which is because modeling an actual intelligence requires more computing power than we can reasonably spare in our PCs. Even single-player games have a difficult time with this, and you're criticizing MMOs, somehow, for "prioritizing" character creation over one of the most difficult problems in all of science and engineering?
Yeah, no. The more I look at this argument the more insane it seems. It just doesn't follow.
First of all, the reason EVE doesn't have Walking In Stations yet is PURELY a content issue. They were going to focus on creating working multiplayer stations but the playerbase vehemently disagreed with their direction and forced them to change course to working on spaceships again.
Secondly, the lack of ship customization is almost entirely because the ship models are OLD. Many ship models haven't been touched since Trinity released in 2007. They've done a shader pass over them all specifically so they can start adding more variety to the ships through shaders (allowing for more variety in coloration and the like). It's also worth noting that the v3 shader project introduced entirely new ship models to ship variants, where before they were simply modified textures. Again, this is a content issue, not a client-server issue.
Thirdly, the only time you actually stress the servers is when you initially load a new (unloaded) player model. After that your requests are no different from any other multiplayer game. Blade & Soul, as an example, has no issues rendering so many different player models on the connection side - it is ENTIRELY up to your PC to be able to render a large number of player models at a decent FPS.
Finally, you are gravely overestimating the amount of data each PC model requires to be sent over the internet. Each individual character's data can be measured in bytes, NOT kilobytes and certainly not megabytes. How do I know this? My saved character data for PSO2 - yes, with ALL of its options and everything - measures 364 bytes for each individual. 364! It's just a list of numbers! They don't even need to list which option is which, they parse that out when they read the file and it's literally done in an instant. Do you really think the morphing is killing servers or PCs? All they're doing for those is applying offsets and modifiers to bones, nothing more. Simple numbers. Easy math. No, the most taxing part is simply loading the assets in memory... and on the PC, we have nothing if not LOADS of extra memory. Especially if you have a proper 64-bit client!
In fact, the assets are the only thing worth noting here - individual armor models and weapon models all add up, far, FAR more than the simple list of numbers and values that make up any decent game's character customization. (And if you're going to try and argue that we should have less variety in armor and weapons in our games, you're going to have a bad time, I have to say.) Under no circumstances could you reasonably argue that we should prioritize things other than character creation under the pretense that it is performance-intensive.
And you definitely can't blame it for unimaginative AI or anything along those lines... because that's completely unrelated. Character creation is really, really easy to do compared to advanced AI... and there is zero - let me repeat that, ZERO - overlap between these fields. Character creation is just simple math, modifiers and offsets and lots and lots of artwork. AI is an entire field of constant high-end research, and it won't be a solved problem for a VERY long time - not the least of which is because modeling an actual intelligence requires more computing power than we can reasonably spare in our PCs. Even single-player games have a difficult time with this, and you're criticizing MMOs, somehow, for "prioritizing" character creation over one of the most difficult problems in all of science and engineering?
Yeah, no. The more I look at this argument the more insane it seems. It just doesn't follow.