Google is failing me

[Aliquid]

I'm curious as to what the largest virtual gathering is on record. i.e. the most people in the same online environment at the same time, interacting live. So, an MMO, or something like that, but it has to be people in a virtual environment interacting with each other (not just passive observers of a concert or something).

Problem is when I google this, I just get a bunch of info on the most subscribers, or users of a game... or promotions for virtual meeting software. Not the most people in the same setting at one time.

Anybody better at knowing what search terms to type in? (I don't play MMOs, so I don't know the lingo)

[theNater]

Well, I tried "largest number of players logged in simultaneously" and got a 2013 article about World of Tanks taking a Guinness Record for having 190,541 players logged in to a single server at once. I don't know if "on the same server" counts as a "gathering", but adding Guinness to the search showed a record of 1,158 players taking place in a single battle in PlanetSide. Are either of those useful to you?

I also tried "largest number of concurrent players" and that gave me how many people were logged in to Steam at once(18 million), but again, I don't know if that counts as a "gathering".

[Algeh]

I think the key will be how you operationalize "interacting with each other". Does just being all on the same server or instance count, or do you need a level of actual interaction? If so, what level? Did everyone have to actually interact with everyone else, or just theoretically be able to do so? Does sending a chat message to the group in general count as "interacting"? What about a emote gesture visible in line-of-sight? And so on.

You can then look at user limits per server or area for various things to try to get an idea, but first you need to firm up what "interact" means so you know what you're looking for.

I would guess that EVE Online would probably be a good place to look for potential records once you have an idea what you're looking for firmed up, since my understanding is that it doesn't split into different players in different shards/servers/instances/whatever the cool kids are calling it these days so you can get a massive amount of players participating in the same battle at times. (I do not play MMOs myself.)

As an aside, this: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=6185 is a really old (2009) but clearly-written article that talks about why MMOs tend to not scale past a certain player size per instance. It wouldn't surprise me if it's still pretty relevant even though it's old.

[NotASpiderSwarm]

Seconding Eve. There's writeups of their biggest battles that talk about the scale, but I've generally only heard of it in terms of real-world dollars worth of ships destroyed, not number of participants, so I can't point to anything specific.

[Brother Oni]

According to various metrics, EVE's highest number of players logged into the Tranquility cluster at any one time is 63170 players.

The way EVE is set up, everywhere in the world, except China, logs into the same 'server'.

The largest battle recorded seems to be the 'Bloodbath of B-R5RB' with 7548 characters involved overall and a maximum of 2670 in the system (essentially on the battlefield) at any one time.

Unlike World of Tanks (which is capped at 15v15), all those players can interact with each other, for a given definition of 'interact' - back when I played, CCP (developers of EVE Online) used to deal with large battles by limiting the frame rate, so it ended much like a Powerpoint presentation.

Edit: My mistake, largest battle in terms of players involved rather than monetary losses is the Battle of 9-4RP2 with over 6100 players in system at any one time.

[DeTess]

I'll third Eve Online, if you define it as 'largest gathering of players where every player hast the option of shooting at interacting with every other player at the same time'.

Maybe some of those pokemon go gatherings might count as well, I don't know how large those get, and if they fit your definition.

[J-H]

Yeah, I was going to guess Eve. I don't want to play it, but it sure makes for some good stories.