EVE Bans Exploiters; Dropping 2% of Users Cuts Average CPU Usage 30%

Earthquake Retrofit writes "Ars has a story about EVE Online banning thousands of accounts for real-world trading of in-game money for profit. From the article: 'Those who buy and sell ISK, the game's currency, are not only exploiting the game, but unbalancing play. That's why the company decided to go drastic: a program they called "Unholy Rage." For weeks they studied the behavior and effects these real-money traders had on the game, and then they struck. During scheduled maintenance, over 6,000 accounts were banned. [Einar Hreiðarsson, EVE's lead GM,] assures us that the methods were sound, and the bannings went off with surgical precision. ... While the number of accounts banned in the opening phase of the operation constituted around 2 percent of the total active registered accounts, the CPU per user usage was cut by a good 30 percent.' Looks like they got the right 6,000.' Further information and more graphs are available from the EVE dev blog."

Comments

Re:About time

[fooslacker]

Not to argue because I've never seen a physical architecture diagram of the EVE system but how do you know this? You seem to be taking in game experiences (which may have something to do with server capacity) and I assume communications form the company to the user community then assuming a design.

Additionally I seriously doubt the cluster is "FIXED" otherwise they've implemented a system that can't scale (btw, scale generally goes both ways up and down or it's not very useful but it does have a minimum and maximum point). Finally even if you have inside knowledge and what you say about the design is 100% accurate that really doesn't have anything to do with whether or not they'll decommission some nodes, just which nodes would be targeted and what type of consolidation strategy they might use.

All that said I don't have any ideas what CCP's plans are I'm just telling you how these decisions are made and how various architectures can support different scaling models based on several years of software architecture experience across multiple industries. If you have information on how they chose to provide scalability I'd love to see it out of general curiosity.

And they'll all be back in a few days

[Snaller]

1. Buy new account.
2. Trade gold (ISK).
3. Profit!