MMO Developers: Read this, learn from it

Gamasutra has an article posted wherein CCP outlines their design philosophy behind EVE Online's single-server design. It's an amazing read and no blurb I can quote from it does it justice.  But I'll throw a teaser out to get you to click on over:

The real solution to this problem is to embrace the notion that in an MMO, just like in any other social network, players are the content. Once that is accepted as a fundamental design guideline, it becomes easier to navigate the challenges involved in creating and maintaining a single shard architecture and actually gives the advantage to that design model.