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Eve Online Hits 100K Subscribers

Posted by Zonk on from the that-is-a-lot-of-space-jockeys dept.

CCP Games' Massive Title, Eve Online, now boasts 100,000 subscribers. Though there are many games with more users Eve Online is a very different title, set inside ships in the depths of space. They currently hold the record for most concurrent users, set at 23,178 simultaneous users on a single server. From the article: "To help accommodate its growing population, CCP will complete a hardware overhaul, allowing the game to handle more users, expand its universe, and run smoother." Ethic, over at Kill Ten Rats, has been writing about Eve a lot lately. His posts cover intergalactic war and courier missions, and might give you a sense of what gameplay is like. If you're interested in that sort of thing.

9 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Diversity in gameplay by Tallon29 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Read an article in a gaming magazine a few months ago about a massive coordinated effort to assasinate and rob blind a large guild in the game. That a game could have a universe that allowed such treachery quite frankly shocked me. Most MMOs these days are all about babying the player through the game. No lasting consequences for mistakes, etc. I'll have to see if I can find a link to it.

  2. 23k a record? by Onuma · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Do they mean 23000+ people on one server? I know there were more people than that on at one time during the height of Diablo II, for example. I'm not sure how that game or others are faring now, but I guess it's gotta be ignoring multiple servered games.

    --
    What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
  3. the great eve scam by wirm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    www.thegreatscam.com if your an eve online fan, or just interested in weird stuff on the internet check that out, i bought the domain and host it cause its such a good story.

  4. Loved this game... by rocjoe71 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I really really liked EVE, I started playing it about 3 months after beta. Fairly regular game updates, an extremely large playing area with vast stretches of solar systems to explore that really added an element of mystery to it all. I enjoyed it so much it's the yardstick by which I measure all MMOGs.

    The only downside to it was the proliferation of griefers on the system, who would attack when you were at your most vulnerable state, often exploiting the flaws in the software leaving you feeling freshly fucked, but not in a good way. I left it when PvP was too big an obstacle to play the game the way I wanted to.

    That being said, if I ever find a game of the same scale and ambition again, I could easily part with $15-$20 a month to join in, as long as the griefing was under control.

    --
    Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
    1. Re:Loved this game... by heartless_ · · Score: 2, Interesting

      An open PvP system like EVE's will always be open to the griefer. That is how the system works. Ships and ship fitting have specific roles. In EVE no amount of player skill will get a weak ship through a fight.

      What you call an exploitation of the game is actually what makes EVE's end-game so damn satisfying. You want to move that high price blue print original accross low security space? Then you better bring friends. You want to transport an assload of high price cargo? Bring friends.

      Pirates exist, but the chances of getting gunned down in your own corporations space is slim to none... as long as your corp stays on top of defense. Chances are you just jumped into a corporations system without permission. Instead of letting you pass... you were eliminated.

    2. Re:Loved this game... by coolGuyZak · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I find the political maneuverings between alliances and corporations to be one of the most satisfying elements of the game myself. So far, I've been 100% carebear (miner/refiner). However, my corp is finally beginning to move into 0.0, and so I am picking up some combat skills. I am looking forward to the change in gameplay :)

  5. TW2002 anyone? by jchenx · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wow, reading about the game makes it seem a lot like my favorite BBS door game of all time, TradeWars 2002. That was another slow-paced, space-based game. Every day you only had a limited number of turns. The primarily way of making money was via trading from one port to another (buy low, sell high). Only after a long period of time, could you truly amass a fortune (buying planets, bigger ships, etc.). There was also the notion of corporations with shared assets that could be plundered, if left unguarded (or the defense vaporized).

    I wonder how many of EVE-Online's designers played that game. I'd be willing to play EVE, if I weren't already sucked into WoW.

    --
    -- jchenx
  6. Yup by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Unless you liked EVE's PvP, it was BORING AS HELL.

    And many people didn't like EVE's 3-hours-of-boredom/jumping-for-ten-seconds-of-comb at PvP system. (I didn't.)

    I had my account for a year starting at release, so in terms of skill points I wasn't far behind most other people. (I was deficient in combat skill points, given that I intentionally planned to be a commerce/production/science guy and my main character was Gallente because of that.)

    For those not familiar with EVE, your character's stats affected how rapidly you gained skills. Each skill category (combat, science, etc) had a primary and secondary stat. Gallente characters had GREAT stats for the science/production/commerce stuff, but were AWFUL and took as much as twice the time to learn combat and ship navigation skills.

    Pretty much, unless you only did combat and intentionally planned your character around combat and nothing else from the beginning, EVE got boring as hell once you obtained your first battleship.

    By the time I quit, the only thing exciting about EVE for me was the fact that 90% of the client code was byte compiled Python, which one could convert back to human readable source code with a Python decompiler, and then *have the game recompile the source*. Yay for autopilot code that automagically hit afterburners and chose appropriate instajump bookmarks (if you had them) for you. That excitement lasted only a month before I outright quit.

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  7. Re:I didn't enjoy it. by Ayaress · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Exactly how I feel. I have other things to say, too. Like the blatant astroturfing - I've seen more than one account posting the exact same plug for this game off-topic in every MMOG related thread on this site in the last couple weeks. I mean identical down to the spelling error. I got a spam a while ago telling me that if I cultivated established accounts on at least 50 sites, with an "on topic" post rate of 10 posts per hour distributed (That's 24/7 - so somewhat higher during the time I'd actually bother), and then also had a sufficient rate of plugs for their MMOG about how great it is and how it's better in everyconcievable way than any other MMOG, I could get free game time as well as getting paid. I have a sneaking suspicion that I know what game that was without having to fill in personal information on the marketer's website.