On moving the game to a beefier server: “This is the machine that systems get reinforced on when players request that. Unfortunately, the same thing above applies – anyone in the system when the move happens gets disconnected. Because of this, it’s basically never done,”
It seems like a fairly small addition to the game logic to allow the game to freeze for a few seconds and be forcibly moved to another server. Is this kind of scenario so rare that it's not worth the trouble, or am I missing something else?
The problem (I believe) is that they don't have a way to 'freeze' and transfer a running game. Think of it like any program -- it is easy to "save your work" and load the file on another computer. It's much harder to exactly save the state of all parts of a running program and transfer that to another computer. Each user is represented by a stackless python program, these are hard to shut down and move.
As you say, it could probably be done, but it would be a lot of work, which wouldn't get used very often.
The other problem is that they would have to 'pause' the entire game while the physical move was in progress, otherwise players would still be able to move around in the rest of the game world (other than the cluster of stars they took offline to move them). As I understand it, this is already sort of a problem with the Time Dilation mechanic they currently use; time moves at 10% normal within the fight, giving people outside the slowed-down star systems time to deploy forces at 10x speed relative to the fight.
It seems like a fairly small addition to the game logic to allow the game to freeze for a few seconds and be forcibly moved to another server. Is this kind of scenario so rare that it's not worth the trouble, or am I missing something else?