One thousand cubed is one billion. Of course it depends on what the Big-O notion is hiding, but one billion 'steps' is generally okay. But if you had tested it with ten thousand players it would go from one billion to one trillion -- which we'd expect to take more than a day on the same machine. That scaling is pretty brutal. Whereas something like sorting a list with O(N log N) would only have gone from about ten thousand to about one hundred fifty thousand. In order to hit one trillion steps we'd need to be sorting a list of nearly thirty billion items.

I sometimes find myself working with ten thousand 'things', but very rarely with thirty billion.