Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Was kind of curious what impact fewer downtimes might have on overall player numbers over longer periods of time. Right now we're on a 24 hour reboot schedule, and it's been made known that a lot of things are contingent and dependent on a reboot, because they were coded/implemented in such a way to take advantage of down time (e.g. replenishment of ice/asteroid fields).

Right now there's a 2.5 hour stretch of time that straddles down time, where at 10:00, on the latest day for example, player numbers precipitously decline from 16,400 around 10:00 EVE time, before rapidly rising back to around the same number at 13:00. What if that 16,400 remained level instead of rapidly declining to 0, then increasing back to the same level within 3 hours?

What if instead of downtime every 24 hours, it were possible to at first have one every 48 or 72 hours, then maybe within a year, ultimately just once a week? I think keeping people logged in and playing over long periods of time by making the game universe more persistent could pay dividends in overall player number totals over the long and medium-term. Fewer downtimes would definitely lead to at least 10,000 people logged in in the 3 hour gap, or maybe even no decline, and could possibly lead to several thousand more players logged in at peak hours, for example. It might not be a huge impact during peak hours, but I think it'd be measurable.

Of course, those things that are dependent and contingent on a reboot of the server cluster every 24 hours would need to be re-written and/or re-implemented in such a way that they could go on for longer periods of time before needing a server reset to make them right.

Does anybody have a general list of all the features that are currently contingent on a reboot every 24 hours? And maybe outside-the-box ideas on how they could be re-implemented in the game environment to be able to tolerate/survive/persist for longer stretches between reboots?