Doesn't EVE's superserver slow down entire regions of space during fights, or something like that?
Yes it's called
Time DilationAnd to the above poster a few posts back, Archage CAN'T do load balancing of characters by simple virtue of how it's designed. Guilds can control vast swathes of territories and properties, and wars between these guilds can be fought over the territory. So swapping them around on different servers would essentially break the entire metagame for endgame players.
Which also leads to the population issues. Because of the persistance of the world, you can't really just keep opening more and more servers to deal with player load, as all games, even (or perhaps especially) MMOs, tend to have a massive drop in players after a few weeks past release, regardless if it's a mediocre game or the greatest game to grace our generation in a decade. A ton of people just move on. Which then means you either have to do server merges, or deal with servers where the endgame is gone because there's not enough players anymore. While I can't speak for how well they are balancing those two sides of the same coin, it definatly is something in the back of their minds I'm sure.
For instance, a lot of Planetside's pop woes were attribuited to SOE overreacting to extremely long login ques durign the first few days of release, and not taking into account the sustainability of the population after opening the server floodgates. Combined with performance issues, this left several servers essentially ghost towns after a few months untill they eventually got around to server merges. Planetside at least had the luxury of not having a persistant world to deal with, at least in the sense a game like Archage or EVE does.