Dr. Whammy
Executive Constructologist of the United Star Axis
As I said before; it's a player behavior issue.If servers had more customization for settings on the number of allowed docked entities, this would help quite a bit. It's not realistic, but then again mass limits aren't realistic either.
But essentially, servers have higher mass limits generally because the population demands it. For example, when I was part of the reboot of Light vs Dark, I can't tell you how many players said they would not play on our server if we set our limit to 200k. To be realistic about what was acceptable to players at the time, we had to set our limits higher. Many players were very upset about the cap being limited to "only 1m mass," but it was an acceptable compromise. Our plans are to gradually reduce the mass limit on our server (probably from 1m to 500k) and also reduce the mining bonuses by half. We can't just do it overnight though because that would lead to insane economy imbalances for players that are already established. We have to wait for the next server reset. And then we have to make sure that the lowered limits won't do away with too many ships, leading to players having spaz attacks due to all the time lost on their larger ship builds. There is no way around it though, lowering limits is probably going to cost us some players. I am hoping though that it will help keep the players that stay. But lowering the mass limit is, in itself, just not good enough. Server admins need more controls.
Acknowledging that players "demand" it, doesn't change the fact that it's detrimental to multi-player as a whole and inconsiderate to the players who are actively trying to reduce their own impact on lag.
"Demand" is kind of a funny word to use in a situation like this. Players want multi-player, PVP and unrestricted building. What exactly are they going to do if all server admins were to suddenly crack down and set limits on size and entity count? ...play single player? I doubt it.
Do you remember my impact on lag when I was on LvD? Do you remember what happened when I spawned in my 100x torpedo launcher? How about Star industries' giant lag base that paralyzed the server when the Light side attacked it? That's what happens when you allow players to build beyond what the server can support.
It's unfortunate but no matter how we spin it, StarMade simply isn't ready for the kind of building people want to do in multi-player. We have no choice but to either scale back or wait on Schine to optimise further.