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Are you sure?

https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/...

Where is that on Steam? Because it only shows Windows and Mac Steamplay, not Linux. Hence it's NOT on Steam.

EVE-Online used to have an official Linux client, but it was discontinued several years ago as there weren't enough users to justify the time & cost. That client used Transgaming's tech (i.e. their WINE fork).

*AHEM* I'm pretty sure you meant to say the 13th annual alliance tournament, thank you very much: http://community.eveonline.com/community/alliance-tournament/

Never allow real money into the game economy.
Make your money only through subscription / buying time.

EVE Online allows players to buy an item called a "pilot license extension" (PLEX) that's worth a month of play time but can also be traded for in-game items. Is that acceptable to you or not?

... "Pew pew pew" in Russian?

Russians don't pew pew, they Logoffski.

CCP's EVE Online once accidentally erased user's boot.ini file during a major patch.. http://community.eveonline.com... They survived, and there is even a commemorative item in-game in remembrance of the event. I think Steam will work this out, too. Any word on how many were affected?

You may as well render lens flare.

Only if you call them Solar Flares

Besides, do you think Sony will ever allow PC/PS4 gamers to play together?

It's a developer decision, not SCEfoo's. It has been done in the past and present:

FFXI on the PS2 had cross-platform play PC, PS2 and later the Xbox.

PS3 Dust514 players can communicate with Eve Online players.

http://www.eveonline.com/retri...

PS3 Portal 2 players can also play with PC players.

Final Fantasy XIV players play cross platform across ALL platforms, PS3, PS4, and PC.

Please note that you cannot train for that ship with a trial account, on account of the fact that you cannot train Cloaking or Covert Ops. A complete list of skills you cannot train on a trial account can be found here. Furthermore, ultimately, even though you could train fleet command in about 20 days, actually fitting a cheetah would take closer to 30 (small projectile turret, motion prediction, basic fitting skills, etc).

I think a large reason for the skills that cannot be used on trial accounts is the fact that some skills with attractive names cannot actually be effectively used within a few weeks (battleship fleet command), or are really only useful to established players anyways (cynosural field generation). Cloaking is probably an exception here, but hisec might be a more dangerous if people's trial alts could cloak up.

Right, just google pictures of people at EVE conventions.

Except he didnt' google anything...

I see reading comprehension on Slashdot is still the same as it's always been. Wait, are you a football fan?

I'm sure CCP hires booth babes too (first hit for Google image search for "eve online chicks", BTW). The conversation is about how cool the people who pay to be involved are (yeah, it's stupid topic, but it's a slow news day). When I think of EVE players I think of geeks sitting in their basements in front of a computer with Mountain Dew. When I think of people involved in football, with the exception of the small number of actual players and cheerleaders, I think of shirtless fat guys with painted faces and beer. They're different, but I'd be hard pressed to say one group is cooler than the other.

Right, just google pictures of people at EVE conventions and you are looking at the very definition of 21st century cool.

Show them Python - Snake Wrangling for Kids.

Then tell them it was used for Eve Online and that is the only game that supports over 60,000 players in the same world at the same time.

Mmm hmm:
http://www.eveonline.com/

That's not really true. In Eve lore the capsuleer becomes the mind of the ship but crew are still required on a ship to perform certain tasks. A ship captained by a capsuleer simply requires fewer crew than a non-capsuleer's ship (such as an NPC ship).

The mininum number of crew ranges from 0 (shuttle) to thousands (titan). The exact number depends on ship type but also on the faction that designed the ship. Some have more or better automation, hence requiring fewer crew.

In actual gameplay the crew are never encountered or play any role in the mechanics.

See http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/New_Eden_crew_guidelines for details.

Hehe,

A friend said the fight got on Slashdot, so I just though I should mention that /. user number 42, got some kills in this fight ;)

Click here, for a free 21-day trial :) https://secure.eveonline.com/trial/?invc=e3af1093-bced-4da3-969a-c5788532ed93&action=buddy

Fly safe, guys! :)

If the game has to slow to 10% how does that prove anything good?

It's not the game that gets slowed down, it's the star system (and maybe the surrounding deployment systems) where that battle happens, which gets slowed down with what CCP calls Time Dilation, nicknamed "TiDi" by EVE players.

That's something completely different and IMHO a clever way of handling things. Other players in different parts of EVE's universe won't be affected and can continue to play as if nothing has happened.

We went to war for the Space monies.

And nothing of value was gained, but valuable time was lost.

You mis understand, there is most certainly real money involved with this.

https://secure.eveonline.com/PLEX/

Plex = GameTimeCard = ISK currency

when I played, it was worth 300M ISK = $14 USD

a battle like this would lose thousands of billions of isk. It was, and is a very fun game, if you get in with the right sort of corp. Solo, not so much. You need some kind of group to maintain even a small space station. But when you get up to owning systems, with a few corps and an alliance: Well sir, no pvp you've ever done, beats the pvp in this game.

After all, you got money to lose.

http://www.stackless.com/

They are using Python 2.7:
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/stackless-python-2.7/

Great discussion of pros and cons of Stackless:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588958/what-are-the-drawbacks-of-stackless-python

Here's an interesting page with a few nuggets of info. In the discussion section, some people claim that the game used to crash with space battles as small as 100 ships. Clearly the game has been improved since then.
http://highscalability.com/eve-online-architecture

If you are really interested, here's a talk from PyCon 2009 that goes into some detail on what they do with Stackless. They had some problems that only showed up on the crazy load of a real system, so they had to go live with some code to test it!
http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/stackless-python-in-eve-pt-2-1959372

P.S. A couple of good trailers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrrVDV_NsNo

This one bored me at first but then got much better as the music got going.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euMjOHgb9A8

I don't know, some of those Prostitutes in game are pretty...well, sketchy at best.

Lasers, and drones. It's official. We have become the Amarr.

Executive summary of this post. When big wigs shoot from the hip recklessly it can be costly: http://oldforums.eveonline.com/?a=topic&threadID=1538881

This reminds me of the Eve Online where they were introducing a new currency Aurum, had an internal newsletter (Fearless (Greed is Good)) That debated the pro's and cons of virtual currency. The playerbase was upset for a number of reasons:

1. Pay to Win was not ruled out e.g. special ammo (some argue that PLEX is the same but I disagree).
2. Price on current virtual items was limited and overly expensive (Monacle Gate - $60 U.S. for a virtual monocle for one character).
3. Players felt that they were getting milked and non of their current fees were going back into development/bug fixing of Eve Online (Some milking is to be expected but the "perception" was all resources were going towards White Wolf MMO in Atlanta).

The internal (leaked) response from the CEO was basically don't listen to the players watch what they do. The public response from one of the developers was some diatribe about how $1000 dollar Japanese Jeans makes one feel (no seriously - http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/24/eve-clothes-defense/ read the italicized text).

The players then started mass rage quitting their subscriptions, the CSA (Player representatives) were flown and conference called to Iceland for an emergency meetings, CCP mea culpa'ed - reversed course on the most egregious issues and saved themselves from imminent death. However, CCP did not come out unscathed, they re-orged layed off a ton of people in the U.S. Atlanta that were working on White Wolf MMO which would not be cannibalistic to their core product. This was a bad call in my book but I don't have all the stats. They chose to keep developing DUST 514 a FPS for the Play Station 3 (Not sure how that is going) that can affect and be affected by Eve Online proper..

Python isn't fit to run on a large cluster to simulate things, too much overhead.

Have you heard of Stackless Python? Your presumption that Python isn't fit for large clusters to simulate things may be news to the largest single instance human particapatory simulation ever done: New Eden.

using thread is not necessary to do multiprocessing and use multicore machines

This is incorrect and you've missed the point.

Whether you host one thread per process or many threads in a single process it is absolutely necessary to have multiple threads to "do multiprocessing." You're so called "UNIX way" provides multiple concurrent threads of execution, each hosted in a distinct process.

None of this threading model yap is relevant anyhow. The point isn't how threads are hosted. The point is that an EVE simulation model is exclusive to a single thread creating a bottle neck that fundamentally limits the size of the simulation, and only true concurrency can overcome the limit.

This isn't speculation. CCP is perfectly aware of this. If speculating one might imagine the developers are still making excuses for not fixing the problem because it is not trivial.

I'm a EVE server dev and this analysis is not quite right. The DB is indeed a central point of failure, but it's rarely a performance bottleneck nowadays. The part about migrating resources is half-wrong, as yes, we can't (yet) move solarsystems around machines without disconnecting the players in it, but unless there's a fight going on in a to be moved system, we still do it to free cpu for the system where a fight is indeed going on. See more here http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=74227 .

My God, you haven't looked at their configuration have you?

Amazon still has nothing on this (circa 2011 - yes, it's that old).

The new database system has:
Over 1TB of RAM
64 logical processors (w/ hyper-threading enabled)
32Gb/s of storage throughput capacity
200,000 IOPS capacity
51TB of RAW storage capacity (23TB after RAID and spares)

In 2007, they were using sixty blades for the "Sol" tier - details.
It may be possible to consolidate that now to 8 servers if they used dual 16-core nodes, but you may lose some memory bandwidth.
Each of those nodes would need about 1TB ram.

My God, you haven't looked at their configuration have you?

Amazon still has nothing on this (circa 2011 - yes, it's that old).

The new database system has:
Over 1TB of RAM
64 logical processors (w/ hyper-threading enabled)
32Gb/s of storage throughput capacity
200,000 IOPS capacity
51TB of RAW storage capacity (23TB after RAID and spares)

In 2007, they were using sixty blades for the "Sol" tier - details.
It may be possible to consolidate that now to 8 servers if they used dual 16-core nodes, but you may lose some memory bandwidth.
Each of those nodes would need about 1TB ram.

Stackless Python is used client-side for some logic. The server code isn't written in it.

Bzzt. Incorrect.

EVE server side is Stackless. That's why it's single threaded. So say EVE's developers.

Know of what you speak. EVE core is stackless tasklets cooperatively scheduled on a single thread.

... or CCP port EVE?

Don't know about the others you listed, but EVE runs fine on WINE from what I understand. There's even a section on the official forums for Linux users: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=topics&f=274

Don't count on them making an official executable for it, however.

Bah !! your signature its relative: http://www.eveonline.com/

Who was Vile Rat

(can't find "Titan" anywhere except the name of one ship)

The super-duper top secret Titan specifications can be found here: http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Titans

It is from a game.

> UI Rendering speed is exactly the same for native code and html elements.

That is not entirely true (but mostly correct.)

Native apps have access to DirectX / OpenGL and you can optimize UI rendering by caching textures and alignment. See this blog on EVE Online about how they changed the UI rendering / compositing back-end
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=916

Now if only it was strontium clathrates I could go trigger happy with my sieged dread...

i've never played, but http://www.eveonline.com/ may fulfil your needs

meh, it would only be worth if it included some sort of accountancy simulator module, otherwise it might be too stimulating.

It doesn't look that great to me. They should have outsourced that to Iceland.

In precisely the same way that PLEX work in EVE Online (see http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/30_days_Concord_Pilot_License_Extension), this item will eventually stabilise at a certain price on every realm, based on the in-game market. That price point will be zero, however.

The problem is that in EVE, you need a new one every 30 days to keep your game time topped up, meaning that there is a constant stream of supply and demand.

In WoW, this is a one-use item - once you "use" it, it becomes bound to your character and from then on getting another one will have precisely no use/meaning at all, unless you want to give it to an alt character, so eventually the market will become saturated and they will lose their in-game value, and the RMT will just return. I suspect this will be an experiment of sorts by Blizzard, and that depending on how this one does they may well come up with a set of, say, 10 of these items.

Eve online did it first, and paid a price for doing it incorrectly...they've since apologized and said they will roll it out right.

Meanwhile, WoW is hemorrhaging users...this can only further accelerate their departure, as people find a game with more meaning...Should provide some tasty n00bs to pod...

The EVE MT experiment did not just fail because of that, it failed because of a multitude of reasons, most of which a sane person would have seen coming from miles away.

First of all, the NEX Store (the name of this abomination, yes I'm biased against it, deal with it) was released in a vacuum of a completely single player environment. The only place your purchase will be seen in all its glory is in the confines of your own game client in a shabby little hole called the Captain's Quarter (or dismissively, the Captain's Closet). Multiplayer Avatar interaction was indefinitely postponed for now (they finally admitted/realized that they had nothing fun in terms of gameplay value on the drawing board for it, go figure), so the only way your purchase is visible to other players is through the Tiny Avatar portrait (which is one of the reasons why the Monocle was the only item seeing significant sales, the other being trolls buying them to enrage the more easily excited opponents of microtransactions in EVE).

Second, the concept of a market-less (if you ignore the resale), infinite supply item is diametrically opposed to the core concept of EVE's player run economy and sandbox nature. Everything in EVE has a price defined by supply and demand. The price of the Vanity Items is based solely on the current ISK equivalent value of a month's worth of game time.
For a more sane approach on that and how it would be at least somewhat acceptable, I made a thread about that on a community forum in the wake of the ingame riots.

Third, even the low-price tier is still retardedly expensive. Even the cheapest items still cost 1000 AUR which amounts to 1/3 of a PLEX (the Gametime Code token which converts to 3000 AUR, clocking in at around 17 USD from a cheap supplier) and a full set of clothes (boots, pants, shirt/jacket, etc) would set you back over 20 bucks worth of PLEX/Gametime.

The reason given in TFA, while certainly not wrong as it really was bloody stupid to launch with almost exclusively high-tier items, compounds with all this and resulted in a huge backlash against CCP over it (and other poor decisions and a backlog of frustration over the last two years of neglect towards the core gameplay) but was definitely not the only or even the main reason for it.

I should probably also point out that the prices of the items in general are also hugely immersion breaking. The ISK equivalent price of a monocle (the highest priced item) is roughly that of a dreadnought. Which is a capital ship. The second largest and expensive tier of ships (after supercapitals).
And even the cheapest boots cost as much as a battleship.
Admittedly, you apparently buy a lifetime subscription to your clothes as they don't get destroyed upon player death like implants (another decidedly un-EVE feature of the Vanity Items) but that still seems somewhat extreme...

It's much more complicated than this, and right now a lot of players are too enrage over the poor implementation to see the big picture.
If you're easily bored by explanations, jump right to the last paragraph, if not, read the rest too.

A bit of a background is needed here to properly understand what's going on.
I won't bore you with much detail (as incredible as this sounds, this below is the short version).

Since many years ago, for the majority of the game's life actually, CCP (the game makers) attempted to curtail attempts of RMT ("Real Money Trading") - and mostly succeeded in reducing the frequency of it happening - by allowing players to sell GTC ("Game Time Cards") for ISK ("InterStellar Kredits", the in-game currency).
This meant some people were getting the ISK they wanted without having to buy from "goldfarmers" (so to speak), while some players could afford to "play for free" (not pay any real-life cash for their subscriptions). It didn't take long for CCP to introduce a secure trading method, which became the only allowed exchange option, with the game time automatically applied to the purchasing account (to prevent RMTers from buying GTCs and selling those for cash).
This became popular enough that nearly a quarter of the total active accounts were actually subscribed using this particular method. Or, in other words, they were seeing a more than 30% increase in subscription counts because of it.
About two and a half years ago, CCP decided to introduce a new way to trade GTCs, by allowing players to split a purchased 60-day GTC into two 30-day PLEX ("Pilot License EXtension") in-game items, which could be traded on the in-game free market.
What CCP didn't expect however was just how popular PLEX would become.
TOO popular, in fact.
It didn't take long for the player base to realize that investing ISK into PLEX could be viewed as a hedge against inflation, as a security blanket for the time they might not afford to pay real-life cash for a while, or even just as yet another good to be traded by the ultra-rich (in ISK) players.
Because of that, the demand to purchase PLEX was outstripping the need for PLEX to be used on the spot, so the price on the open market was a bit higher than what it would have been if it would only have been used as a subscription extension tool - and as such, the supply side (people purchasing it for cash to sell for ISK) obliged them, and increasing numbers of PLEX have been stockpiling in people's hangars.
The only data regarding this trend is quite old, from mid-August 2009 - a developer blog with some interesting graphs : http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=684
Players have speculated about just how many PLEX are now stockpiled, the most reserved estimates put a lower count of around 75,000 PLEX (real-life cash equivalent of around 1.3 million USD), with opinions split about the upper bound, but even 300,000 PLEX would not be difficult to believe (roughly 5.25 million USD), and some people claim it might be even higher.

Now, it should be pretty obvious as to why a company the size of CCP would be worried about "unclaimed" pre-paid subscriptions worth anything between 1 and 5 million dollars floating around inside their own game.
As they say, within this here lies the rub.
So they hatched a plan, this microtransaction deal.

It was by no means the first contingency plan, they tried various other methods first, anything from allowing people to use PLEX for other services that used to require a cash payment (like character transfers, for instance) up to holding donation drives for real-life aid, drives accepting both ISK and PLEX (to be converted by CCP into cash and donated on behalf of the player base to charity, without any tax breaks from it).
Obviously, that didn't work well enough, and the threat of financial liabilities growing ever larger in these uncertain economic times (and let's not forget, they're an Iceland-based softw

Eve's economy is an interesting beast. They are one of the few companies who employ a full time PhD economist. In fact he publishes a quarterly report much like any publicly traded company does. CCP benefits from the sale of Pilot's License Extension (PLEX) using real-world cash, which are traded for in-game items. These items are sold for in-game currency and eventually exchanged with CCP for a 1 month game play extension. In other words CCP has been in the Real Money Trade (RMT) business for years. And a large part of the EVE universe make enough in-game currency each month (ISK) in order to play for "free", barring the cost of their time. Since the inception of Eve there's been a set hierarchy - the folks who have been playing the longest have the greatest advantage because item use is directly related to Skill Points (SP) invested and player skill. Obviously nobody can purchase skill, but neither could anyone purchase SP to gain an advantage, or more importantly to close the advantage gap with older players. RMT for better ships or SP would change all that. Because the sale of characters is allowed there is a secondary market and many players depend on "baking" a kind of character for many months and selling it for in-game currency as well. RMT for SP would also impact this market. Just as the "old guard" have no interest in CCP allowing the re-release of unique and limited supply items, neither do they wish for the introduction of any other mechanisms that could close economic or skill gaps. This is one of the reasons Goonswarm was so very reviled with their entry into the EVE universe - they tried to play nice and were ignored or mocked by older players, so the Goons invented tactics to counter the older player's play style, resulting in a huge upset in the balance of power and required game play. This is more of the same and although the source is CCP, the reaction is the same. Nobody wants change as long as they have an advantage over everyone else.

Did you read any of the rest of the discussions here, or just drop in to post in a hurry?

You can either read the several other discussions here where it's been explained to people that said that how there was a missing part to their understanding, or you can read the thread on the forums where that's very clearly explained.

The quick tl;dr: What the player buys with real world money is an in-game item called a PLEX, which is then put on the player market, so that other players can buy it with in-game currency. That in-game item is then used by the purchaser to extend their game time, thus removing it from circulation.
The buyer gets isk, the seller gets game time, and the market stays stable. Items purchased by the PLEX-seller are items that were produced by players, and that isk goes to those players - standard economics.

This is not "Not News for Nerds" nor "Stuff That Matters", and here's why:

The people that play Eve Online do so after agreeing to its Terms of Service.

Link: EVE Online TERMS OF SERVICE. One of its sections states:

CCP MAY FIND IT NECESSARY ON OCCASION TO MAKE CHANGES TO OR RESET CERTAIN PARAMETERS OF THE PERSISTENT GAME WORLD MECHANICS, INTERFACE OR FEATURES OF EVE ONLINE IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN GAME BALANCE AND ENHANCE PLAYABILITY OR PERFORMANCE FOR ITS SUBSCRIBERS. THESE CHANGES MAY AFFECT OR CAUSE SETBACKS FOR THE CHARACTERS YOU’VE CREATED.

The next paragraph states:

"THESE RULES MAY BE REVISED AT ANY TIME. IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO REVIEW THEM OCCASIONALLY TO ENSURE THAT YOU ARE IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE RULES, POLICIES AND AGREEMENTS DESIGNATED BY CCP."

So, I say "Fuck 'em - even if they were too lazy to read the TOS, they are still bound by it."

They are free to gripe, bitch, etc., but in the end, they have no recourse.

It's a game, they paid to play under the terms offered. If they don't like the changes, they are free to quit. If they think that they're "owed" anything, they're delusional: They gained whatever they did, BEFORE the changes... so, they've already benefited from the money they spent.

Sorry, but I've no sympathy: I've played the original EverQuest for over 11 years now, and have occasionally been pissed off as SOE has attempted to make it more "WoW-like"... but, I CHOSE to continue to play. If I were sufficiently angered, I'd quit, but it wouldn't make me think that all of time and money spent previously was wasted, nor would I think that I was somehow entitled to protest and have such recognized simply because of the money I knowlingly spent and the time I willingly consumed.

I suppose that this is one of the ways that I'm different from the "Entitled Generations" that came after me... I actually *read* the TOS', etc., read it when it's updated, and then decide whether or not I wish to be bound by its terms.

That, of course, is contrary to many of the people here on Slashdot these days, who think that such are merely suggestions, or can be ignored 'cause they didn't read them or disagree with them.

Regards,

dj

This really doesn't make sense, either, as EVE actually has some serious IT professionals working for it and has very high levels of security.

"High level of security"? You mean like storing authentication credentials in plain text in cookies?

Don't get me wrong, I like EVE, I do like the guys at CCP to some extend and from what I've read over the years, the server/hardware guys seem to be one of the better departements at CCP. Unfortunately, you can secure your servers hardware-wise all you want, if a coder is too sloopy and let things as the above happen, you're out of luck.

Yeah, I think I'll stick to EVE Online and when I feel like shooting stuff, I'll get Dust 514.

Nah, all the campers are either in Rancer or Amamake...

Nah, all the campers are either in Rancer or Amamake...

What sunk Xanadu, IMHO, is that it was much too ambitious. They were trying to make a framework to present the sum total of human knowledge. Still, some extremely clever work was done on that project, both before and during the Autodesk years.

too ambitious?! Not ambitious enough I say!
What about non-human knowledge?!
Or, a little more seriously, knowledge synthesized by some machine intelligence? What about imaginary knowledge? Or, knowledge of the imaginary? What about unknowledge?!!

Actually, that is one problem we have with using the web as a knowledgebase for bootstrapping GOLEM III , there's to way to capture the veracity of anything. All this information from different sources is given equal weight in truthiness.

I can definitely see something like this happening in the future, hell, just recently we got the Google +1 button, the EVE Online forums recently added a "native" (i.e. not linked to Facebook) like button. Not to mention all the Facebook "like" buttons strewn all over the web. But to summarize, I think we will be seeing a lot more "native" like-functions appear over the web, especially on forums and other sites aimed primarily at discussion. If nothing else, it may help cut down spam and "me too" posts.