If you check the video you'll see it's very slow paced and the ships basically don't seem to move at all (maybe tiny unseen ones do I don't know)

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/

Eve doesn't have WASD controls, there really isn't constant input.

The ship movement command in Eve are limited to:

* Set course / speed (double clicking in space, speed set via clicking a speed dial thing). This is not something that gets constant tweaks, more a 'move in a general direction' command.

* Orbit x @ y distance

* Keep x @ y distance

* Approach x

In addition other actions in eve are relatively long lived, there isn't fps style aiming but 'locking on' and activating modules which have cycles times of 2-60 seconds.

In practice, even in the heat of battle, I doubt the average player gets even close to 1 input action per second over the course of a fight.

Combat in Eve is more D&D and less Wing commander. When I played (a few years ago) you would get text based messages pop up saying stuff like "X hits Y for 38 damage"

Eve's gameplay could be represented as a text based game, it is not a fast paced space shooting game.

I also have been toying around with trying to create a MMO fast action space simulation of my own creation. I have a few ideas on how to limit areas of dense players with game mechanics. I haven't even really started on multiplayer beyond the ability to download modify and upload solar systems though.

I think for some really hard engineering problems like this the best course could be to try and find a 'good enough' approach that will allow a significant ammount of players to interact while limiting the upper bound with a game mechanic to make it feel less artificial.

http://code.google.com/p/stableorbit

here are a couple videos from the never ending pyopencl port.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnOmy1ly6M0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCvRBHtPbzE