I can understand WoW, because it's sharded and works as a playground for your friends without needing a huge amount of people. Also the game changed so much and

I can understand WoW, because it's sharded and works as a playground for your friends without needing a huge amount of people. Also the game changed so much and people wanted to still experience the older version (something Blizzard recognized) The most compelling parts of EVE require a pretty high threshold and density of users. Using mods or restricting the number of systems could be interesting though. At any rate, if you're looking at it for you and your friends, then it's def an achievable goal - The hardest parts about the eve server is the architecture to support such a huge number of people, and it's much simpler without that restriction.