I agree with Harkonen 100% this is kind of what I was saying, CIG is giving the suggestion/impression that were going to be able to play with roughly a thousand people he doesn't say when or if its even possible except for "years down the road" I don't mind 200 vs 200, 300, 400 etc... but if CIG cant manage more than 100 people in a single encounter there is going to be quite a uproar in the gaming community imo, this doesn't constitute an MMO but rather a single player or co-op RPG certainly on a larger scale but I wouldn't call it massive, you could then argue Diablo is an MMO because millions play it and you can interact with all of them just not on a large scale simultaniously.
Comparing battlefield and star citizen is like nuts and watermelons imo the two are so different not only in design but scale also, the graphics requirements of just a handful of ships in SC far outweighs any graphical achievement of any first person shooter, id argue one ship alone in SC has 1000x more detail and requirements than that but I understand your point.
Anyone who played Dark Age of Camelot knows what large scale battles are they may have created it there could be as many as 600 players in a given area and the server lag told you if an army was coming and this game was released in 2001 this is almost 15 years old but a good read
"Entertainment(R), developer and publisher of the massively-multiplayer online
role-playing game "Dark Age of Camelot(R)," today announced that the game’s
Realm vs. Realm (RvR) clustering patch resulted in one of the largest battles
ever seen in an MMORPG. Last night, players participated in a massive RvR combat
session where more than 1,500 characters simultaneously fought one another on a
single battlefield. RvR is Mythic’s unique implementation of Player vs. Player (PvP)
combat, and this unprecedented RvR session was made possible through the new
server clustering technology, which was launched on several "Dark Age of
Camelot" servers on February 8."
Granted again the graphics and CPU requirements are vastly different and this is why even today this could not be achieved but back then who would have thought that was even possible.