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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."
I still don't think I'll sign over my credit card to a MM online game, but a game that lets you destroy THOUSANDS of dollars of stuff that other people value for the sheer malicious joy . . . well, that's perversely COOL!
Mod parent up!
You can have enough skill points to be useful in 0.0 (the unsecured space where players make all the rules and large alliances carve out empires) before the end the free trial. Sure, you won't be able to kill the most valuable NPCs or take on almost anybody in a solo fight, but you can make more than enough money to support buying the ships and gear that your skills allow you to use, and you can certainly be useful in a roaming gang or defensive camp. Heck, you might even get lucky and find some idiot with a hauler full of valuables and nobody escorting him (happened to me once) in which case you really only need a warp disrupter (cheap and easy to train for) and enough firepower to overcome the hauler's shield recharge rate (which you could get by your second day of playing the game).
EVE and CCP may never completely live down poor decisions on the part of several employees, but the game itself goes on and for most people such events are scarcely newsworthy for a week. While we'd certainly prefer if such things had never happened, they're old news - almost irrelevant by now - and the CCP has taken some fairly solid steps to prevent such things from happening again.
From the sound of it, this fight was executed wrong in almost every possible way, perhaps most importantly in that CCP wasn't notified ahead of time so they could put the system on high-end dedicated hardware. Consider also that having hundreds of people in the system used to be enough, by itself, to cause atrocious lag (even if they weren't fighting one another), a problem which is very rare today. Now, while fights with nearly 1000 player/side might still be a bit more than the game can handle, a few hundred per side is commonplace and a thousand total is well within the capabilities of the "reinforced" (with dedicated servers) nodes.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Building a Titan' a quick overview.
Very basic overview, with time requirements attached to give an idea how how much work goes into it.
Materials: 30 man or more strip mining fleet running through some nullsec systems for materials.
Time: Two three weeks of a few hours of mining every day.
Skilltime: About three months of skill trainning to be able to do this job.
Blueprints: 3 or 4 people needed to do Research on the blueprints and make copies of needed components. A player owned structure is needed for this with all maintenance done. Usually but another group of players.
Time: Three to Six months of minimal research and development on blueprints to make them useful.
Skilltime:Four to Six months minimal time needed to make an effective researcher in eve.
Building: One Two or Three players depending on how you build to make a Titan.
Time: Takes about two months to build components and then a full month to build the full ship.
Skilltime: Nine months Minimum skill training time to have an effective industrialist.
Flying: One person, usually a dedicated player that does nothing else.
Time: Hours of sitting around waiting for something to happen followed by a few minutes pure terror as you take your alliances Titan into battle and hope to hell you don't lose it.
Skilltime: One year of dedicated training minimum required to actually fly the thing.
This is a very basic overview, and the support structure needed to make this all happen tends to take at least a few hundread people activily playing the game to make it happen.