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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.
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)
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!
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).
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
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'd have to disagree.
Rendering terrain (or not) is a function of the game client and has no effect server-side.
Everything in the game is merely a list of data - object type, stats, position, vector, state/animation etc. How that looks graphically is down to the client.
EVE's concurency *is* impressive since it implies they have a server farm capable enough to access a single database at high speed .
In contrast, the idea behind seperate "realms" (like WoW) is to limit the size of each database for speed purposes.
The bigger the database, the more entities it contains and the longer it takes to cycle through each one and update them. So WoW's server farm contains lots of smaller databases. I would expect it makes maintenance and backup easier.
Of course, this is just a rough impression - there's a myriad of ways to design such systems but you'd probably find something akin to the above if you ever went to work for either company, I'd guess.
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
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?
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 :(
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