"Eve handles it poorly"

That made me laugh. What CCP has achieved is remarkable. The linked images is an event from 2010, the invasion of Deltole VI. What you're seeing is around 2 x 200+ ship blobs of AI. Most of them battleships. Lag was minimal. CCP diverted power from tranquility to this region, the same way they divert power to big PVP battles now when fleet commanders ask for it in order to maximise performance.

http://i424.photobucket.com/albums/pp329/KillSlim/Deltole6_zpsf2d0a0fa.png~original
http://i424.photobucket.com/albums/pp329/KillSlim/Deltole62_zpse1801423.png~original

I can't upload directly due to image size.

Sorry OP but you don't seem to know what you're talking about.

EVE is amazing in many ways. However, to be fair, throughout most of the life of the game huge fleet battles were lagfests, even when CCP diverted power to the region. I was engaged in many of the Goon vs BoB fleetwars in that game where hundreds of players on each side engaged eachother in massive battles and most of the time it was just a slideshow - and that was in a game where everything around you is just empty space with no terrain or models to calculate except for the ships themselves.

Patrick, while I like your technical solution of hit detection, I think 4 shots per second is pretty damn too many for a bolter...lore-wise. So, 2 questions here: 1) are these numbers subject to change? 2) how much ammo (approximatelly) will you carry with you in the field? I.e. how many seconds of sustained fire are you taking into your balancing calculations for bolter users?

Sorry for breaking into You and Patrick. 4 shots per second too many?? Are you serious, would you like 1 shot per second, do You know how long it would take to kill a marine with this garbage? And where do You take info about bolter rate of fire from?

this is ofc subject to be changed, more or less is totally up to our game designer, and I encourage you to ask Brent or Michael about that! I took it as an example because it represents the way how we make tech serve the game design while at the same time addressing problems, in this case a possible higher latency. I think that the clip size currently is 20 or 25 shots, but we are pre-alpha in production - all this might change many times before we release the game!

Me2.

I take this from the wh40k novels, kinda. SMs are shooting mostly single shots, or very short bursts. Usually, before the enemy closes to melee combat, in the last moment (1s) the SM is able to fire 1-2 shots. So, its not like spraying the enemy with 10s of bullets, rather than sniping with your bolt weapon. So, for me bolter and bolt pistol could have like 1-2 shots/second; heavy bolter 4 shots/second; autocanon 10 shots/second (less dmg per shot than bolters). SM would take somewhere between 5-10 rounds to kill, that is 5-10 seconds, not counting criticals. In this scenario bolter shots will behave more like magic missile or fire bolt in fantasy setting games (meaning amount of dmg per shot and rate of fire).

Edit: Forget to add - I am not a game designer, so it is possible that low dmg high rate of fire weapons are much more easy to balance - in this case I will understand the "fun rather than lore" paradigm already presented by the developers.

The main problem with high damage/low RoF are harder to come by with, because you can't just spray and pray, but rather take single, well aimed shots. If we're talking about a gun which is still fully automatic, like the Bolter, this makes it even harder because you (usually) won't be able to one-shot enemies, so you'd have to make around 5-10 hits, while the other one (e.g. an Eldar with a fast firing rifle) could just spray into your general direction. Depending on the skill of the players, the outcome will be different, but an unexperienced player is more likely to get kills with fast firing weapons.

TL;DR: High RoF is better for Newbies.