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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?
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
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.
You seem to have RL and virtual life mixed up. Try going outside your house, but be careful.. The bright fire in the sky can burn unprotected skin.
- 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)
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...
You do know that an isk is not worth a dollar right?
Consider either the cost to buy 60B isk from currency sellers, or take the total man-hours needed to make a Titan and multiply by minimum wage, and then you'll have a much more useful figure representing how my *real* value was invested in those ships.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WERqUb0G6vQ
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.
You do know that an isk is not worth a dollar right?
Consider either the cost to buy 60B isk from currency sellers, or take the total man-hours needed to make a Titan and multiply by minimum wage, and then you'll have a much more useful figure representing how my *real* value was invested in those ships.
If you google 'buy ISK', there are a ton of ads from places selling - if you buy 60B, even with the bulk discount, it will cost about $2200 at the places I checked..
Isn't this offtopic? I'm not familiar with EvE Online, but your post doesn't seem to be addressing the same issues as the other posts. Probably meant to post to another topic (G-Spot article?) and got mixed up, that happens sometimes.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
I'm guessing the ape is the IT Alliance and GoonSwarm is the zoo worker.
If it was easy, don't you think it would have been done already? Even Blizzard can't handle the load of an entire server in one area and had to create a random queue to let people into Wintergrasp.
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.
Hmm... last time I checked a PLEX was about 300m for 30 days. 15 USD=300m, so a Titan would "cost" about 3000 USD, the equivalent of 200 months of play time. So I guess the description could well be correct.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That makes much more sense.
Is it the internet connection? Or is it the throughput of the NIC, the loading time of the HDs, the processing time necessary, or is it...
Not always it's easy to identify the bottleneck. Throwing more resources at something is not always an option, there are physical, and technical, limits.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...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.
"Even Blizzard"?
Just 'cause they have the largest subscriber numbers doesn't mean they know anything about server load balancing and handling hundreds of players in close vicinity. There's a reason why they opened auction houses in all the starting areas, ya know...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think they have stated that their bottleneck is the database (microsoft btw), everthing in the are has to be tracked and eve does most of the work on the server, its a very light client.
Well, like basically any MMO client. Like any MMO client has to be.
You can't really let the client do much more than take input and display the result. Anything besides that opens you to a lot of abuse.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.)
If money and sheer 'raw performance' could solve the problem, I'd bet that they would have already done that. The (salary of the engineers + server downtime + crashses (resulting in bad reputation) + etc.) are much more expensive than the hardware cost.
The problem in this situation is that they are trying to put too many people inside a small region.
For example, if you develop some kind of chat server, which can have 10 people inside a single room, and assuming that each person types one message per second, you have 10 messages per second on the room for 10 people, resulting in 100 messages transmitted per second. Make that 1000, and you have 1,000,000 messages to broadcast per second.
The problem is that, all that data has to get out of your server farm. Even worse, is that the required bandwidth grows square-proportional of the number of users on the battlefield. Now, add the 'computing load distribution' when the computation (and the interaction between the users) also grows square-proportional of the number of users. Things will get ugly quickly. That's why most MMOs put queues and user caps on individual 'servers' or 'instances' or whatever, because potentially everything inside the region need to interact with each other.
Actually, I heard that EVE online had done a tremendous job scaling the size of battlefields up to remarkable sizes. Well, at least they are trying.
200 months=16+ years The game wasn't on for that long
ics
200 months=16+ years The game wasn't on for that long
You do realise that EVE is a multi-player game, right? And that the efforts of hundreds of players go into producing one titan?
Pirate Party UK
Buy more servers, indeed! I'm also told that nine women working together can have a baby in one month.
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.
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.
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.
Because eve has only one subscriber.
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.
Yeah I'm one of those people who have no patience for griefers. Sure they exist, there are games
that legitimize their asinine behavior, but that doesn't mean I need to hang out with them.
You can try Anarchy Online if you want a game with futuristic themes and less griefing. It
has different resource issues - mostly that cities can only be placed in limited areas
that are already taken, but if you can live with having to find someone with a city rather
than buying your own, you can solo pretty much most of the content in the game if you like.
It isn't as bad as you say. Stay in hi sec and you will have few problems. You will be bored, but wont have too many issues.
However, just like in real life, people do get mugged in good neighborhoods.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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
No offense, but you must have been pretty terrible to have that experience in highsec, or you talked a lot of smack and pissed people off. I've played the game for over two years, spending significant amounts of time in highsec, lowsec, and nullsec, and I have never been killed in highsec by another player. Not once. Avoiding conflict in high security space is quite easy if you keep your wits about you and don't smack like a child.
They do an amazing job when the node is put into reinforced mode when they are notified about it. Trying to do a fleet battle of this size on a non reinforced node is like trying to run vista on a 386.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
PlanetSide has virtually no griefing. The system punishes it fairly well and the other players even more so. The main annoyances in PS are hackers and sometimes low populations.
Plus, it has no player trade (no virtual currency to buy, nothing to farm), it is pure PvP, shallow power curve (noobs can go toe to to with vets), fosters team play (but does not require it), has virtually no grinding, the battles can be 130 vs. 130 vs. 130 on maps that are several Km square (they make Battlefield 1942 maps look tiny).
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!