Slashdot Mirror
Eve Online Hits 100K Subscribers
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.
Hopefully this wonderful community does not succumb to the disease known as 'Poplaritis'
I remember the days before Counter Strike was sold on store shelves... way more mature.
signatures are for fools with hands
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.
i miss final fantasy VII...
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?
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.
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)
Maybe one day I'll be able to play a space sim where you can actually walk around on your ship, do EVAs in zero G, hijack other ships, etc.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I subscribed last month, played it for a couple of days, didn't like it, and unsubscribed, but the unsubscription only occurs at the end of the month that you paid for upfront.
So they only have 99,999 users!
The previous comments are only true, if no-one says they're wrong.
They meant on one server. WoW may have a MUCH larger population, but not nearly that many people can play on one server at a time.
Except that EVE is one server. Let's see you get 2,000 concurrent users on a WoW server and have it run smoothly, let alone 20,000.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Eve is played on a single server. WoW, even though they have way more users online at any one time, is played over a large number of servers. I'm not sure how many players can be on a server at one time in WoW, but it's nowhere near 23178.
There is a Twilight Zone episode where this guy ends up dying and finds himself in the afterlife. He was a big gambler in life, so his after life has him in a Casino. In his afterlife, he always winds. Every single hand, every roll of the dice, every spin of the wheel is a win. After a while he asks his after life guide what kind of heaven this is. He complains that winning is meaningless if you never lose. The guide responds with, "What makes you think you are in heaven?"
For all the WoW fans having trouble understanding what is so special about this, the EVE Universe is one big single realm (hosted on a cluster of servers).
So where as a single WoW realm (hosted on a cluster of servers?) can accommodate about 2000 concurrent online players the EVE Universe(realm) has now supported over 23000 concurrent online players.
Now that is something special.
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
Its much easier to host 23,000 people when you dont have to render terrain. I know that Anarchy Online initially had hopes that they'd be able to support up to 50,000 people on a single server; their opening day showed them how fruitless that idea was. Had their servers been able to allow everyone who was trying to login and play together, they could have surpassed this. Not to take away from the technical achievement of concurrently serving 23,000 clients in a mmporg, this is simply a measurement which will constantly be increased as technology allows. Way to go Eve Online, for being #1!
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
Happens all the time. Don't worry about it. :)
Pretty Pictures!
If you don't believe me, just trail the EVE online forums. You will see many people casualy talking about how they read a book or watch television while their ship travels/mines-ore.
In the end, even though I was quite wealthy for EVE standards (i stumbled early upon a mixed trading/manufacturing market arbitrage possibility introduced when a new type of ship components was made available in the game), i eventually left when i came to the conclusion that after all the time i had invested in it, most of the time playing EVE was composed of boring tasks, NOT fun.
I don't think Blizzard can fix its problems simply by adding more hardware. I think they have simply fracked their design, and fracked it hard.
Unless you liked EVE's PvP, it was BORING AS HELL.
b at PvP system. (I didn't.)
And many people didn't like EVE's 3-hours-of-boredom/jumping-for-ten-seconds-of-com
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?
I don't think that's very likely, given that the game is set in deep space.
--
Sig nell
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.
They would have 100,001 players if they had a Mac OSX client :(
_______
2B1ASK1
Not at all.
It is closer to Elite than Starflight. There really isn't any mystery out there it has turned into mostly politics with some really big battles to sort out the disagreements.
I have seen nothing since Starflight that compares well and certainly nothing in the mmorpg realm.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
still agree with the start of this piece, 23k on one server doesnt mean anything,
how many cpus is that?
sure many MMO games like linage and COH can do 5k per server but they are tiny
inexpensive boxes.
you need to clearly define what this server is so that apple to apple comparisions
can be made.
I played the trial, and loved it and the concept at first. I've read the stories posted here and elsewhere about the billion isk scandals, awesome I thought.
My problem with the game was that my accomplishments did not translate into a stronger character, only more resources. Even were I to do something really savvy and make a billion isk during the 14 day trial, I realised there was no way I could possibly reach a high enough skill level to fly something cool, because of the way skills are acquired in the game (you acquire skills by training them, which occurs constantly, even in or out of the game, but it takes several real life days, even over a month, to train some of the higher skills). So basically the game rewards longevity over skillful play. As I observe having to spend several real months doing nothing before I can play the game, and the reality that I have to pay per month to do nothing, the trial was promptly uninstalled.
I hear a lot of players quote that the game gets more fun as you invest more time into it. But to me, enjoying a game should not be a chore I have to work towards. It should be a part of the game.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
Ok, I have no idea what the heck are you complaining about.
You say everything revolves around MINING ?
You meant, most of anything in EVE revolves around MONEY and time spent learning since char-creation.
Mining is one of the lowest income-generating professions, in "secure space".
I have went through 7 (yes, seven) pieces of 14-day-trial accounts before finally deciding what it is I want to do in EVE.
And that, after playing for a couple of hours on an almost one year old account of a friend, who makes his living mining.
In 0.5 space (considered "pretty secure", at least no player-controlled pirates around), he was making *at best* 3 mil ISK per hour with a Covetor and 3 strip miners fitted. I was making 2 mil per hour with a 9-days old account in a less than 2 mil total worth frigate (including equipment).
Don't complain about the lack of options. Just step aside your "normal" account, cancel the learning, create a 2nd character focused on combat (high perception, willpower, average mem/int, low charisma), "gift" yourself a full set of +3 implants and some cash, start up with frigate L4 and command L2, train science 3 and cybernetics 1, plug the implants, learn "learning-related" skills up to L3, then focus another 2-3 weeks on gunnery and related skills... and see the difference.
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
Agreed. It doesn't matter how much hardware you throw at something if the design doesn't scale or is flawed.
It would appear that Blizzard was beat pretty hard by their own unexpected success. I don't think they ever anticipated the load they now have to deal with.
Star Control II was the only game that came close to Starflight.
No MMORPG developers seem to have figured this out. I had hopes for Earth and Beyond and Eve, but neither was much like it.
I am dam proud to be a part of EvE.
Viva! Viva la EvE-o-lution!
One Cluster = One Universe, no sharding.
Threat Level: Outstanding
-Fiend-
didnt this used to be called Freelancer?
More fun. All fighting. More risk of course. Missions have the least risk, pirating the most risk (basically PVP), but the rewards can be much higher. And mining in Empire space is of course going to be boring. Mine in 0.0 instead and I dare you to go AFK during your job. Also, mining by yourself is inefficient (and naturally boring). That's why corps have mining operations. Miners, haulers, and escorts.
I know, its not worth much to most of you, but I would like to set something straight. The EVE population, while more dynamic, is certainly not more mature than your average CS player. Griefing is a Big part of the game, just not the most advertised.
http://bbs.memphistw.org/poison
:)
Click on BBS, which will connect you to an old skool BBS.
There, you can play a bunch of doors including TW
Fact of the matter is that EVE is not for most people as it require you to have a longer attention span than most games. EVE has more depth than all other MMO's combined and that the company behind the game and/or GMs doesnt hold you hand every step you take is what makes this game so special. This way there's also a natural age limitation as people past their teens tend to have a longer attention span thus making this game much more enjoyable in the social aspect.
:)
99% of the people who say they've played EVE and it was boring never ventured out, never took the time to understand anything outside of the secure Empire space. Common among the 'EVE is boring' people are that all they talk about is mission running, mining and griefers when there's so much more to this game.
This game is built upon PVP, there's simply no where I cant kill someone, there's a portion of space (where people begin) where the police (CONCORD) will respond and kill you. The whole premise of this game is as few rules as possible. I'm sorry for your moneyloss if you have only tried the starting points of this fine game, if I had only tried mission running and mining I'd felt cheated too, but I set out and encountered pirates (griefers) and fought back - eventually I won and adapted to the ways of 0.0 (insecure space) living. Today I'm a high ranking member of one of the top alliances in the game and I've tried most this game has to offer, still the political landscape and the thrill of PVP keeps me going yet after almost 3 years.
EVE is not for everybody, but besides air and water nothing really is
* good judgement comes from experience - experience comes from bad judgement *
Give up now. It is too high a goal, there will never be another game like Starflight and Starflight II.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
EVE today is very different to EVE during its first 6 months of life. Your opinions of it are dated and in some cases invalid with today's game. 6 months after release I quit for 6 months having played from beta and into the initial game opening. There was no content. It was boring and open to griefing or exploitation. I saw the vision but realised they had a ways to get there. When I came back various bugs were fixed, gameplay strategy and tactics had been modified and content was added. I've been subscribed ever since. EVE today is not to be compared to EVE at opening date.