I didn't read everything so maybe the OP already get his answer but when they said 500 per map, its not a hard cap as if the 501 guy won't be allowed in, well i don't think it is. Its a hardware limit, they know the game will work fine with that number and will suffer with more. That number is the same cap for any mmo anyway, not just GW2, it is the limit reached by all the mmo. We all know past 500 guy mmo are just not playable anymore, even at 200+ in the same screen players need a good machine to handle it anyway, it's not what they want, you want or any one would want, it's a hard fact. Telling they can handle more would probably be a lie.
 

Originally posted by Lord.Bachus

There is a maximum of  500 players allowed in each of the 4 areas, now imagine that me and my friends march intoo a zone with an army of 400. .. then none of the 2 other servers can get enough people in that zone to defend anything...

 

On top of that most people will probably want to fight in the middle zone...  which makes that zone easilly overpopulated... and when the zone is full, noboddy can tresspass through it to other zones...   I think the 500 people/zone max will call out for a lot of frustrations, when there is an important battle going on and people can't join it...

 

 

As i remember correctly in DAoC it was capped at 700 per zone. Not software capped, but the server crashed with more than 700, and was long before that more or less unplayable. ( at least at some time.. i dont know if it was any better if they changed the hardware anytime afterwards)

So this may be a problem, but i think it is a rather small problem, and it could be a clever solution for that.

But however, i would be happy if those 500 ppl in one place would be lag free..

Originally posted by Lord.Bachus

There is a maximum of  500 players allowed in each of the 4 areas, now imagine that me and my friends march intoo a zone with an army of 400. .. then none of the 2 other servers can get enough people in that zone to defend anything...

 

Let's see. You + 2 friends (imaginary ones do not count) = 3 people.

Who are the rest of the 397 in your army?

In all seriousness, we don't know enough of the mechanics to know how this works. The only thing we do know you are not going to gather an army of 400 online players. Not a chance.

Yea Monday nda gone. So http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOyPUx5d72M video on WvW. Every 5 min points are accumulated base on how many base in the world you have. Looking at 0.16 in the video I figured out how many points you get per base: 5 for the small one, 10 medium, 25 large, 50 for the biggest base in the middle. Their are a dozens of bases scatter in the very large zone. Since the map is so massive moving such all of your server to one area would cost you alot of points.