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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 mean, its great that they won't give you a refund for your ships if you got them destroyed because of stupidity... but if the network code destroyed your fleet? Isn't that CCP's fault entirely?
The thing about network issues is, they are an easy fix. Get a faster internet connection and buy more servers. Yeah, you can optimize your code and get similar results, but its usually one of the few problems in technology you can throw money at and get good results.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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!
Only in EVE would the players decide that network failures are a factor they should take into consideration.
Gamertag: WyleType
And in other news, this morning while my mom was on the way to work, she couldn't avoid a piece of road debris, causing thousands of dollars of assets to be destroyed. She had to pull over and call a tow truck.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
...effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets.
If you have played eve, at this point you will know that a thousand ISK is small change. Even a million is pretty much small change. In fact, the Titan ships mentionned in there are rumored to cost around 60 billions. Sixty billions. That's far from thousands.
It's well known and not even contested that the forces bridging in to the system black-screened and never got to fight.
However, they got what they deserved. The node in question was not reinforced due to the unexpected nature of the fight (as in; the notification system was not used to put the system on a dedicated server). And jumping into large fights was well know to be bugged since the expansion and the Fleet Commander was made aware by an alliance member that the specific way in which they were going to enter the fight would trigger the bug.
They ignored all those warnings and decided to go ahead. Sources claim the intent was to crash the node and get a more even fight once it got up, multiple accounts even got banned for spamming local chat. Funny thing is the bug seems to be in the simultaneous transfer of 100+ ships into an overloaded system, and doesn't affect people warping around within a system once they are there. This being the worst possible situation for the attempted rescue of the system.
- These characters were randomly selected.
The scene where Kirk is facing off against Spock's unbeatable scenario and shuts down the servers temporarily, disabling the shields all of Spock's ships, before blowing them up.
"annihilated amidst controversy"? When has there ever been any significant battle in Eve that didn't feature people blaming server issues for their loss? (often correctly, I might add)
When you write about something like Titans, your talking about multi-BILLIONS in game assets. To have lost 4 or 5 is enough to bankrupt many Corps. Not to mention all the cap ships and support fleets that went down. Its always nice to see GoonSwarm get the smackdown.
I'm not trolling, but I fail to see the point of EVE for several reasons. I used to play EVE myself for a few months but quit...
One, why play a game that takes you at least a year to be able to do anything fun and useful? That's not a game at all, that's a job.
Two, CCP has shown themselves in the past to be shady and unreliable, having developers specifically favor certain alliances and otherwise abuse their powers for their own in-game corporations.
Three, the amount of bugs and inability to cope for server stress for large battles (which is the meat and potatoes of this game--large space wars!) has apparently been evident for quite some time now.
I understand that EVE online fills a niche few other games do, and EVE is probably the only one that even attempts what it does, but, IMO, that in no way means the CCP has displayed what I would consider a necessary amount of competence or good game design to make me want to play it. I mean, if Age of Conan (no, EVE is nowhere near the mess that game was at) was the only MMO out there I still wouldn't play it even though I like MMOs.
It's pretty poor form when CCP will claim that subscribers need to account for their own ineptitude when playing their game and not take responsibility for their own, and not even fire the developers that gave unfair advantages to their own corporations way back when. And I hear the game masters are incompetent jerks, too...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WERqUb0G6vQ
Sarki was a huge mountain gorilla, and usually not very amicable. But he had seemed to take to Kate immediately, usually hanging over her shoulder or something whenever she was in his cage. Today was no exception, as she climbed up toward the ceiling to get at the lights. There was a large platform near the ceiling and she climbed up to that in order to inspect the lights better.
Sarki pulled his bulk right up next to her, but there was plenty of room up there. She stood up and craned her neck, trying to look straight up while keeping her balance. Suddenly, she felt a large hand on her ass, slowly stroking it, She turned around quickly, and found Sarki staring at her as his hand caressed her. She stood frozen, afraid that he might push her off the ledge or something. But what he actually did was bring his other hand up and began to feel her breasts through her t-shirt.
Standing very still, Kate slowly reached out, to push Sarki's hand away from her breast, she gripped his thumb, and twisted his hand back away from her. The animal became mad at this action, and shoved Kate roughly back, she fell over trying to stop her forward motion, not wanting to fall over the edge of the platform. Kate landed hard, on her stomach, and had the wind knocked out of her. She lay there for a moment struggling for breath, then to her shock she felt her shorts being ripped from her body. Sarki just tore the material apart like it was paper. Kate was frozen with fear by the beast's exhibition of shear strength. She wanted nothing more than to get out of this situation as fast as she could.
Kate knew that her life was in danger, she couldn't understand why Sarki was acting so aggressively toward her, but she knew that she was all alone at the zoo, and that she had better do something quickly. As Kate began to recover from the forceful push that she had received from the gorilla, she started to get up on hands and knees with the intention of climbing down as fast as she could. But this was not what happened.
With shocking roughness the beast took one of his fingers stabbed Kate from behind, right into her now exposed hole. His finger, though not as long as a man's penis, was just as wide and she began to squirm on it. His other hand fell from her breasts and curled around her ass, pulling her closer. He brought his face close to her and stared at her with great interest. His hand was working her over, the beast was becoming aroused by Kate's body.
She screamed, flailing at the apes chest, as she twisted and turned trying to escape from his grasp. But no matter what she did, she couldn't break his grip on her. He kept up his fingering of her pussy and she kept up her struggles to get away.
The ape finally grew tired of fighting with the human female, and smacked her across the face knocking Kate
into shocked submission. She was stunned and had temporarily lost her wits. The huge ape was totally aroused by now, and he flipped Kate back over on her stomach, and moved downward, further, until his now erect huge cock was staring right at her.
All thoughts of anything else quickly flew away with the sight of it, and she immediately knew what was going to happen to her, she couldn't believe it, she had never even thought that something like this could happen. But the great ape just started poking her face with his huge erect cock, trying to enter her mouth, finally after several attempts, and another smack to the head he shoved the tip of his cock between her lips and made Kate take it in her mouth, taking great pleasure from this, he began to force it in farther in obvious excitement.
His cock grew to an un-believable size that she could barely keep in her mouth. She could taste the few drops of his sexual fluids that were seeping out of his now rock hard cock.
After forcing her face against his crotch for a few minutes he pulled away, then pushed Kate down flat on the platform and spread her legs. With his finger he stabbed again into her pussy, which had become wet from the fear she felt,
And in other news, this morning while my mom was on the way to work, she couldn't avoid a piece of road debris, causing thousands of dollars of assets to be destroyed. She had to pull over and call a tow truck.
Is your mom willing to host a LAN party?
Because that'd totally be news for nerds.
Slashdot has been posting stories like this since its inception, and your self-righteous whining about it isn't going to change that. So shut the fuck up. Also, no one gives a tin shit about your fucking mom.
Also, no one gives a tin shit about your fucking mom.
On behalf of every member of his mom's local high school's football team, I humbly beg to differ.
Gamers with a tighter schedule (work, studies, family etc) or a lagging connection to online servers should really consider an offline alternative that goes with their own pace and allows time speed adjustment. Without time speed adjustment (which is by definition incompatible to large online games) space games can be extremely time consuming.
X3 Reunion + Xtended mod (I didn't like TC very much) is a good alternative but I'd be willing to know more.
Sorry to be blunt, but an event that affects multiple hundred people is more newsworthy than one that affects only one. But thanks for your participation.
To be more sensible, certainly we're talking makebelieve money here. Then again, given the current economy, I'm not so sure the stuff we use to buy goods and services is anything better.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As does the entire crew of the USS Nimitz. She is a legend. Hup!
in time. For all To place a paper Bombsheel hit overly morbid and I'm sick of it. problem stems states that there and the Bazaar share, this news Corporate To download the same worthless and coders impaired its never heeded NetBSD user smells worse than a
...for any WoW patch afterdays!
Props to CCP for contributing to the development of "stackless python", but maybe they should write their server code in a different language.
We aren't talking about imaginary money. Eve currency has a real dollar value, because...people value it. Exact same reason why government-backed currencies have value. It's valued by a smaller population, but that doesn't really matter - the assets that were destroyed could have been sold for a real dollar value.
this is, from my perspective, without a doubt a technical issue.
the people who got wiped out, if the killboards are correct - only destroyed 3 ships (helios, onyx and anathema)
for them to not have dropped any other ships in such and engagement, given their capability - can only mean they could not move or couldn't even see they were in a fight.
the killboards would also suggest the engagement was 421 against 65, even at those odds they should have destroyed a portion of the other fleet. even if it was 842 vs 65, nothing would prevent them from attacking except a technical issue.
i have been in engagements with over 800 in system (before dominion) and was able to function.
so, certainly there was a record broken on sheer lost of assets in one stroke, but it defiantly needs a foot note.
(also, if there was a deliberate attempt to drop the node, well yea - strike against them too, anyway)
there will no doubt be a rematch as the attacking alliance still owns another 20 titans
What's a "real dollar value"? Oh, what other people consider it worth? Ok, then ISK are basically like USD, just for a smaller group of people.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm a Goon and I was there, sat a system out because I was late and didn't jump in, listened as everyone lost their shit, will not x up again until CCP unfuck their servers. Pre-dominion fights with these numbers were doable (I believe the final count was 1700). You'd get some module lag and might e-warp when you jump in but you could at least fight.
Now, all you have to make your move post downtime (node reinforcement requests have to be made at least one downtime ahead, SoT dropped their shit post downtime that day, I know a request was made but the node wasn't reinforced) and then pack the system with more than 300 people and keep eyes on all the gates (this is a doable number in eve, some people might need to stay up late or call off work but when the alternative is several weeks of work to take the system back you just do it). Then, when the attackers jump or bridge in you just turkey shoot wherever they show up while they're blackscreened for 3 hours trying to load.
It's funny that CCP went through all this trouble to make an RPer news brief (I bet some guy in provi creamed his jorts at THAT little piece of roleplay gold) about a giant space battle when there wasn't even a fight. PL was dumb as hell for jumping a bunch of titans in, but considering no one involved except the NC had been in a fight this big since before Dominion they have some cover for not expecting the situation to turn out as bad as it did.
Regardless, this is really all good for us. While IT have a station right next door to us they still have to come like 10 jumps through junk space to actually get to anything and we can do pretty much the exact same thing they did to us in every station system (of which we have like 40 and, thanks to ccp, it requires 4 days of poopsocking to take a station. If you lose one of those days you have to start all over).
This is of course unless CCP pulls another t20 and fixes the situation right before IT shows up on our doorstep, one of the reasons I'm unsubbing three accounts is there were things that happened in that 'fight' with bombers and grid load for people who were already in system that were pretty damn suspicious, I will keep the details to myself however as some of it is opsec.
Dominion was supposed to shake up 0.0 sov warfare. It has (in usual CCP fashion) instead pretty much killed it.
Obligatory 'u mad' 'tl:dr' 'cool story bro' etc etc
The allegations that IT (the victorious side in the battle) was the "successor alliance" of BoB (to inform the ones not caring too much about EvE: The alliance that allegedly had undue and "illegal" help from CCP insiders) and that it's the whole BoB inside job deal again are already starting.
I love EvE. It's one of the few games where just watching the metagame, rumors and drama around it can be at least as entertaining as playing the game itself.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You can accumulate Interstellar Kredits (ISK) by gaming, or you can actually BUY it with real money.
After all you can sell PLEX (Pilot License EXtentions, essentially game cards) in game (for ISK) bought outside of the game with real money.
OP is a bit lame as it fails to even mention Pandemic Legion who
lost the 4 titans.
Pandemic Legion loses 4 titans
( contains teamspeak recordings of the attack, screenshots, chatlogs, etc...)
Bobbechk's comic strip about the event
EVE-O Uncensored Daily Political Updates (reliable source of information about EVE Online politics, updated daily.)
What is this shit, looks like a damn advertisement for EVE?
EVE is horrible game, the performance is horrible after Dominion, and someone is trying to present this failure on CCP's part, like something cool?
I canceled my accounts. Not because I lost something (I lived and killed quite few hostiles, woohoo), but because I realized I spent more time waiting in this game, than playing it.
If I want to wait, I can go to a bus station. For free.
Fuck EVE.
Wasn't the stated purpose of the Swarm to grief BoB in game? When did they get all serious about the game (just like the group they were mocking).
The problem ain't like a webserver where you can seperate users, this about a LOT of users needing to interact with each other as they are in the same battle in the same area. You then run into the problem that for every person added you need 1+N more data being handled.
Imagine a battle between a B17 bomber and a single fighter aircraft. The game needs to handle direction changes by both players AND their firing action BUT while the B17 can generate a LOT of fire data (10 or so guns) it won't actually be doing that since many of its guns will not be able to shoot at anything.
But now add 1 more enemy fighter. Suddenly the B17 can often have two of its guns being able to see an enemy and fire at it. 1 more player added means not just that players flight and fire data but also additional data being generated by the original B17 player.
And you now got extra as well with the fighters wanting to know each others status.
That is why multiplayer games scale so badly and you can't just say, "oh my connection is 10x faster, now I can host 10 times the number of players. If that was true, we should be seeing home hosted 256 players game servers. We aren't.
Personally I think that for the next move in massive player worlds (lots of people in the same area rather then just a massive world made up of different zones) you need to talk to IBM about mainframes and "super" computers. And that would involve more serious money then a small MMO company has available.
MASSIVEmo's can't just be created by adding more servers, they have the difficult problem of needing a lot of CPU power to be applied to the SAME data, exactly what current super computers do NOT want to do. Parallel programming won't save your ass here. Neither will splitting up the load.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes, CCP personnel are known for favoring BoB, given this bug was specifically reintroduced, one can reasonably conclude the CCP wants to favor BoB's playstyle.
I tried one of the 14-day trials.
It was obvious to me that in order to be a real player in this game you would have to invest a LOT of time and/or real money buying ISK.
I didn't have that kind of time or money.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I took my cleric up to level 70 in two month and a half. It took only a few week to go up to level 50, then nearly two month to go to 70. I haven't the latest expansion, but it does not take MONTHES to see most of the content and be involved in raid and stuff. Whereas for eve it clearly take much more, and one of your "co-player" above even said it would be a waste to give powerful ship on newbie.
A lot of what was said here is incorrect. EVE usually allows for very nice fleet battles with small amounts of lag. However about a month ago a new expansion was introduced that includes a nasty bug which makes it extremely hard for people to load the grid that already contains many other players. There were several battles in the past month where one side was completely annihilated because of that bug. Everyone involved in that conflict was already aware of that. IT alliance had a strong presence in system for the whole day, preparing for possible battle. Their enemies decided to show up when it was almost over while boasting about crashing the node. Sov was neutral and both parties had the same starting position. IT was bringing in forces during the whole day, the other side did nothing about it and gambled it all on one moment and lost.
Call me a carebare, but I tried EVE in December and the culture's so aggressive that it's simply not fun.
I liked the idea that a ship loss is a ship loss and you have to build a new one -- the old one could've been insured, but not everything's insured and you'll still have a significant rebuild-it time. It adds a gravity to the situation that games like WoW (or even less an FPS) don't have. At first, it also seems attractive that their's a range of security from "secure" 1.0 space to lawless 0.0 space.
Problem is, the game's culture, encouraged by CCP, glorifies griefing and there is no safe space. You can be ganked in 1.0 space, whether for grins or profit, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it and you still have that significant death penalty. In games like WoW, there are at least some safe havens on a PvP server, and if you die and get camped or otherwise griefed, in the worst case you can simply logout and come back later. (Or choose a PvE server and only PvP when you choose to.) In EVE, literally the only safe place is docked in a station.
Case in point: if you had a paid account in the last two weeks of the year, you could claim a cool solar-sailing, explorer vessel. Problem is, you're only guaranteed to be able to undock in it. A significant portion of the population decided to compete to kill them. Your location and your skill level does absolutely nothing to prevent this.
Guess I'm not their demographic, since I like fighting, but I also just want to login and run a few missions to decompress sometimes, without running the risk of having someone who lives in the game force themselves on me. Just a word to those who become interested in EVE while reading this thread: the game is intriguing with its many skills, ships, and the apparent number of ways you can play the game (trader, pirate, etc, etc) but the bottom line is that it's a PvP game with no safe haven at all and you cannot feel safe in any region or doing any activity that takes you outside of a station.
Fuck their networks up and take out disabled ships!
first semester 2009 CCP deleted 30'000 accounts they identified as farmers
their team of economics analysts confirmed impact with saner enconomy after the "holy rage" operation
(google : video eve online fanfest 2009 economy : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHYcrow4ZUU)
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
what strikes me even more is
"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"
in most if not all other MMO
they would whine & petition for compensation
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Is there a 'crymeariver' tag that I'm supposed to use for stories like this? Or how about a "worldssmallestviolin"?
If there is next time you jump into numerous cynos on different grids and you will have much more success. The grid load is the problem, so if you spread it out you will have the ability to load the grid much faster than jumping into a single cyno on a single grid. It forces the defender to reload the grid you are on and debate on the effectiveness of moving from the safety of the deathstar and capitals around their TCU's.
Hopefully Jumpgate Evolution when it comes out learns from EvE's mistake...
Jumpgate is for hardcore space sim folks.... This sounds like a complete and bullshit attempt to take down a server and the perps got raped instead...
If that happened in JG, they would be hunted until the end of time for such a lame ass act.