Slashdot Mirror
EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers)
captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."
For those who don't know, there were already 750-800 players in the system when the defending forces decided to jump into the system. It was a stupid move on the part of the commanders, and they deserved to be shot down like they were.
EvE has many thousands of systems, and many have very few players in them a large portion of the time. CCP requests that when large alliances are going to have a large fight that they notify them so they can put the system in question on a more powerful server to support the large number of players.
Goonswarm, PL, and SOT knew that the system in question was going to be attacked and failed to inform CCP. After they lost the race to get players in the system first, they decided to attemp to crash the node by spaming the local chat channel and jumping everyone in at the same time, and then beat IT alliance back into the system when the server came back up, but they failed, and lost a record dollar value of ships for one fight. Before that fight there had only been about 15-20 titans killed across the whole game, and they lost 4 in one fight. Pretty epic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WERqUb0G6vQ
In this particular case, there were 1340 people in the same star system at peak. A star system is handled by a single server, due to code limitations - CCP have stated that they want to improve the code so that a single system can be managed by multiple servers, but they are not yet there. About a year ago, this number of people fighting in the same system would've been next to impossible. CCP later improved their code to be able to handle fleet fights of 1500+ players with reasonable responsiveness (IE, lagged but playable). Due to the fact that eve is more of a tactical simulator than an action sim, lag is not always such a big issue. A five or ten second weapons activation lag is actually playable in a fashion, unlike many other games.
Now, keep in mind that this is actually 1340 players fighting on a single physical server, with upwards of 50,000 players logged in at the same time on the single world shard of eve. Compare this to many other MMOs, where you may have 1340 players total on a shard cluster.
Now, EVE is not designed for 1340 players. The fact that that many players are able to play in a single solar system at all is a testament to the sandbox nature of eve, where the developers have decided to try to avoid hard limits as much as possible (IE, no 25-man raids or maximum players on the server), but instead allow the players to use as much as they can and want. This obviously results in situations where the servers cannot cope, which is a known problem with fleet fights. CCP's response has traditionally been "Yes, we allow you to do this, but be aware of the potential consequences - we won't reimburse you for lag or poor server performance". The alternative would've been hard limits on the number of people on a node, which would've favoured those who made it in first, with the most people on their side - there are no defined sides in eve, so you cannot for instance let in 100 red and 100 blue.
The battle that the OP refers to was one of those cases. It was well known that server performance was unreliable after the Dominion patch. In many cases, this would prevent fleet fights from occurring, and when they did occur, they were often one-sided massacres. Knowing this, and despite being warned by their allies numerous times, the opposing force still decided to enter the system. Not only that, but they also decided to jump in at the same time, instead of staggering their jumpins - something that has been proven to reduce lag and avoid people getting stuck in loading - or jumping in to different "grids". In fact, leaked logs indicate that they did this knowingly with the intent of crashing an already overloaded node, so that they'd be at an even footing when the server came back up.
In the end, this backfired and they lost their entire fleet as a result.
Once again, CCP allows fleetfights with no hard limit on the number of participants, but their stance is "Yes, we allow you to do this, but be aware of the potential consequences - we won't reimburse you for lag or poor server performance".