Maybe I’m missing something, but what’s so remarkable about persistence? EVE Online has had persistence since before Star Citizen was even announced. It’s nothing new to the MMO world. Especially since it’s sharded, so it’s not even synced between shards/servers. It’s literally just numbers in a database somewhere. Where’s the novel technology? They don’t even have server meshing yet.

It might have been hard to code, but that has as much to do with their choice of engine as anything.