How can you justify this?

So recently, Linden Lab's vice president of platform and technology development, Joe Miller, said in an interview with the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6209616.stm)



"World of Warcraft touts a six million or larger active user base - but they shard their world off into smaller servers so you never see 16,000 people in the same place", said Mr Miller.
"That's unlike Second Life, where tonight you will see 16,000 people enjoying exactly the same world all able to communicate with each other, all attending the same live music event should they wish to."

Now come on. This is a flat out lie. We all know that the max you can get at any one event is bout 200 people and that's only if you have four private sims with a 'four-corners' area and everyone comes primless and has the best video cards on the market. The actual numbers for an event are normally somewhere around 50 for a private island and 30 for a sim. However even if you disagree with those amounts and want to postulate that the amounts are double that -- in no case are they ever at or around 16K.

That he would say this is preposterous. How can you justify this kind of lying about your product to the press?

Joe was referring to the fact that Second Life is one large contiguous space housing all the concurrent users, while WoW is sharded into servers that support sub-sets of the concurrent users.