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.
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 don't think it will. EVE takes a lot of patience, preparation, and time (not necessarily in-game time, just time to build skills up), whereas the more popular games with the annoying communities (CS, WoW) are pretty much "pick up and play" type games. They have their rewards mostly at the beginning of the games, and as you continue playing them you start running out of new options and your fun decreases. What I've found with EVE is that the more I play, the more fun I have, because there are actually MORE things to do.
The people who make up the majority of the community are people who stay with the game. There may be a few hundred accounts or so that are 14-day trial people that act like they are still in WoW, but the majority of the gamers will be players who have been playing the game for a while. It just happens that those people tend to be less annoying and "OMG I PWNED J00 N00BZ0RZ LOLOLOLOL."
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)
Do they mean 23000+ people on one server?
Yes. EVE has only one "server", which is a cluster of IBM hardware with a large Texas Memory Systems solid state disk. I'm not certain what operating system is running on the cluster nodes, but I know the database is MS SQL Server.
The game is implemented in so-called "stackless" Python. I believe they are using a now rather obsolete version of stackless. I continue to wonder when and how they will address that problem. Perhaps they have been maintaining an internal stackless Python fork...
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
You can grab it here. The client is free, and if you want to continue it is $30 (american) for a "real" key (30 free days), and something like 13 or 14 bucks a month after that (standard MMO fare)
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).
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."
This post is mostly correct. The IBM cluster forms the proxy layer. The Texas Memory Systems box is a cache between these systems and the SQL servers. The hardware upgrade is on the proxy layer -- basically, they are replacing 1U SP 32-bit boxes with blade DP 64-bit Opteron boxes.
As far as Stackless goes, they aren't doing the coding themselves -- last I heard, they have the creator of Stackless at CCP doing the work. Going to 64-bit is a huge win though -- systems like Jita and Lagsulert (whose real name is Oursalert, but you get the idea) are now approaching 500 people in that system in prime time. Considering the number of agent missions they are running, and all the market activity that goes on, you've got to start getting close to your 32-bit architecture memory limit.