Comment by cbm-vic-20

To expand on "time dilation": an EVE Online star system is served by a single compute node in their server farm at a time. Most systems are empty most of the the time, but some locations in the universe have much more player activity. Eve can dynamically move systems between server nodes, depending on player activity. Once the number grows into the thousands in a single system, the server CPU resources can't keep up. In the past (prior to 2011), this would make the game randomly unresponsive, or cause dropped connections.

Time Dilation is the in-game solution for this: the simulation is throttled so the game runs slower for everybody, but doesn't kick people off. Last time I checked, time dilation could go as low as 10% normal time- meaning you can only fire at 10% normal rate, move 10% as fast, etc. It feels like your ship is flying through molasses- it's not fun, but is also more fair for all players.

Alliances that know there will be a big fight can fill out a form with Eve Online to "schedule" the fight so that star system can be migrated to a larger server before the fight.