Hopefully the new Android client will lead to a massive influx of new players. So...what happens if that comes to pass. Specifically, I was trying to think of any possible issues the devs might not have considered, so they can have some extra ideas of what they might be or how to deal with them.
I have seen Inc mention things like server scaling/load/etc, so I think he has some ideas for dealing with that, but what about other stuff? For example, what if we have to deal with channel 100 being flooded with for profit resellers (ie gold farmers) who make up alts so fast you can't /ignore them? I suppose you could leave /100 but then what? What channel would you join to chat up with ppl?
Say there are 100 people live in one sector engaged in one humongeous furball. How on earth can you find the guys you want to shoot in that "U" menu? Does targetless barf beyond a certain # of ships?

"Say there are 100 people live in one sector engaged in one humongous furball."

That would require 100 people willing to shoot at each other, I truly hope that happens someday.

Not sure about all of this... But targetless (mostly) ignores ships past the list-max limit set in /targetless, additionally it scales to sector load so if there are many ships refreshes just happen less often. If you've taken any large skirmish (border or hive) missions you'll get a good feel for how it would handle under heavier loads. Player ships are treated no different from npc ships by targetless (other then showing up in the player tab total).

That said, targetless is NOT part of vendetta so it's not really the devs responsibility (and though it is mine, it's more a voluntary responsibility ;) ). Add that I have a feeling plugins will not work on droid pads (various reasons I guess at this, control interface + downloading/installing plugins to a subfolder of vo on a droid might cause trouble [especially to the average droid use]). Pretty much a non-issue unless the devs decided to let me integrate targetless into the UI code, which I would not even volunteer for unless I rewrote some large sections of it to be less resource intensive [soon(tm)].

That's my 2cents on the matter. The rest (server scaling, gold farmers, etc) I could go into but chose not to, have fun :)

Regarding 100 noise, worst case somebody could whip together a white-list plugin, where everybody not on the list is automatically ignored. That would at least give the regulars a peaceful way to communicate. That would only be good for a temporary solution though. Longer term, if it were really that bad, we'd need some kind of spam filter, so that random newbies or obscure people could communicate with us.

But hopefully it won't get that bad. It might get really noisy, but perhaps most of the noise will be legit. And if as the playerbase gets large we begin shifting the off topic stuff into other channels, it could work out okay without any new stuff.

I'm fairly sure it's trivial for the devs to change the channel chat spam delay from 1/3 of a second to several seconds, if needed.

I wonder how convenient it would be to chat on an Android in-game anyway.

there does seem to be channels other then 100 and they are largely unsed.....

Looking forward to having a ton of newbs around....

I know nothing about scaling servers and plugins, but i remember (possibly falsely) that the devs talked about universal chat being scaled down. So people in Sedina can't chat with people in Deneb over a universal channel. Group and Guild would still work, but then again, this might have just been a suggestion at some point that I am confusing with dev cannon.

If last night is any indication, there may be a change already surfacing from the influx of new people: it seems the overwhelming majority of them are choosing Itan as their nationality.
While this is not an actual "problem", it does mean the Serco guys and nation war activities are going to be pretty heavily impacted (I can just see the weekly NW results now "Itan continued its winning streak of 95 consecutive wins as CrazySpence led the 9000 member strong blue legion to victory over 3 UIT, 5 Serco and 7 gray combatants.")

OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD WHAT IF ALIENS EAT MY CAT!?!?!?!?
STELLA, I LOVE YOU!

Ideally if there were a large influx of players, I would hope the devs would remove global chat entirely.

At the nation selection screen, detailing the current active population for each nation in terms of high medium and low could help to balance things. Most people looking for PvP tend to go for the nation with the lowest pop.

Look at today's nation war. UIT and Serco both presented formidable forces, but eight Itani were left afterward.

We do have thousands of channels... I expect people would eventually use them.

I worry about this as much as I worry about Inc hire another 4 programmers to provide content... Indeed, it would be excellent if such problems occur!

I am an IT specialist, and from what I've read so far about VO's engine, it is higly scalable due clusterization. They allways can add another server, or use an abandoned laptop as a temporary server, or hire more bandwidth, or even another ISP for redundancy and load balancing, but only when and IF enough new players overload their servers/service/network.

We had lots of players in sector with tons of bots for the anniversary event last November and the game server seemed to handle that just fine.
As for chat, yeah people will have to spread it out a bit.

Can't wait! :D