basically Tranquility is the single shard server. if you go to any system in new eden from anywhere in the world, anyone in the world can go to that system and see you in local, they can also perform economic transactions and talk business.

The reason that currently match making is being devided into regions is to reduce lag as an american fighting on an Asian server can cause a horrendous amount of lag and impact gameplay.

from what i understand, this is what it will be like for high sec games. Matching players up on skill and geographic locations to reduce lag. However Low sec will not be match maker. anyone can join or initiate a battle in a planet in low sec and it will just be a matter of risk.

I hope this clears a few things up

When you play an Instant Battle you are participating in your standard matchmaking. At least for right now those battles are taking place on a local server cluster to place you in matches you will feel comfortable playing in with minimal lag.

However the battles in the Faction Warfare and Corporation Battles will be able to be played by anyone in the world, and it is these that should be all located in one place in the world with hopefully minimal lag to everyone everywhere.

I see a lot of people here missing the point. Single shard doesn't have anything to do with details of how infrastructure works behind the scenes. Most MMOs divide players up by server names (shards), and you can create a character on any of them. If you're on the Tunare server you can't interact with someone who is on the Vallon Zek server. You are forever divided by that barrier. Eve doesn't have that. It's a single universe, meaning that I can fly to any system in the galaxy and talk to / attack / scam whoever is there.

Dust shares the same backbone as Eve, meaning our Dust mercs are actually present in one of those solar systems and can interact with Eve players inside the game. That is what single shard means. No more, no less. The idea that all the fps servers would be kept in a single location in the world is patently absurd. No amount of fancy technical trickery to improve the performance of the servers themselves will overcome the fact that a player on the other side of the planet will have an atrocious level of latency. Individual battles will have a capped number of players on each team. CCP has even talked about this, and how they'd like to eventually raise it to 64 players on each side.

That ability to interact with the Eve players is the one thing that sets Dust apart. It means that the battles we fight will have a larger impact than your k/d ratio. It means you'll have a reason to fight that isn't just bragging rights.