Example:

13370rc has selected skin01 for his character. When he is approaching your character's view, your client will ask the server for information about the character(armor, name, skin, etc), and it will return skin01 for the skin.

You've got an amazing computer, and are running the game on ultra. Your client retrieves the ultra resolution version of skin of 13370rc, which happens to be 4096x4096, and it looks amazing.

P00rN00b101 is also nearby. His client sends the same request, only he is dirt poor and is playing from his library, on the lowest settings. When the server returns skin01, his client retrieves the low resolution version of the skin, which is a measly 128x128, and looks like crap.

In both cases, the server does the exact same amount of work. The only difference is what resolution texture the client displays, and all of that work is done on your computer. All the server does is retrieve information.

I like your humorous usernames. But yes. I see. That makes sense. And that's why there are multiple servers, so there is no overflow.

More or less. I'm interested to see how Zenimax will handle their servers. In WoW, for example, a realm is composed of multiple physical servers, each one that handles its own in-game continent/expansion area for that realm, with a surplus of other servers within that datacenter that handle multiple instances(PvP Battlegrounds, dungeons, etc) for multiple realms. Their plan seems to be to make Tamriel one super continent, so I'm curious how they'll distribute the load for the entire realm so the main world isn't being ran by a single server. I'm assuming that major cities will be instanced.

We'll all be questioning these things until the info is actually released. I just want for info already!

I mean, it's certainly possible for them to do that, but they'll need one hell of a server to handle the entire mainland, and not to mention, if it goes down, the entire realm goes down. One strength of WoW's system is that if one of the continent servers crash, the entire realm doesn't go with it.

Well then Zeni should definitely focus on the servers, so we can avoid a server crash, and avoid being set back.