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."
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.
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
They're not real ships, and "thousands of dollars" were not lost.
There is a legal way to get money into the game that is exchange real money for virtual money, so things in the game have real value. Conversely, there are illegal (violation of EULA) but doable methods to get real money out of the game. Also, these virtual things were created by the people in game and their time spent can be valued by the cost of the subscription. So it's pretty easy to calculate the value on these nonexistent in game items. The approximate cost of one of those large ships mentioned is $10000 real world.
But it did take a lot of time to build up the in game credits to buy those ships. And you do literally pay real money for time in game.
*DrugCheese rants*
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.
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.
I never got refunded when I lost ships due to Goons and their lag inducing tactics. Why should they get any refund when they get lag pwned?
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
If a player played for a year to build up your ship and treated it all as a horrible chore as merely an investment for possible future fun, then the fault is that of the player. If instead the player had fun while building up those ships, then the money is already well spent and thus isn't "lost".
My educated guess is that they tried to bring the server to the knees with the load, then be assembled and ready for the restart and get an edge that way. Because even with a reinforced node, a group jumping in sync does not necessarily appear at the other end simultanously. Instead, my guess is the idea was to pop in, crash the server, log back in together and be actually assembled and battle ready while the other side is still trying to muster and/or log back in.
Unfortunately, the node didn't crash.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because we didn't get lag, we got a failure of the game system. We stared at a black screen for 2 and a half hours. My killmail is dated 30 minutes after I logged off.
Lag is expected in a fleet fight of any size. You expect to be able to see that someone is present though, even if you're not sure if they're shooting you or not.
Whether you like the Goons or not, that's not a fun game to play for either side. Hell, when IT and the Goons agree things are broken and need fixing you know there's either a problem or it's the end times.
Eve is operated with a very laissze faire policy. Fraud, taking advantage of weak code, and other forms of "cheating" only get punished if repeated after explicit announcements. Piracy and fraud attempts are one of the interesting learning aspects for most new players.
The game is treated as something to be played as it is, not as some perfect environment where you should be compensated for deviations.
This is to my taste, as is the extreme PVP orientation. Playing a carebear game instead of Eve is a more appropriate response than whining if you don't like it.
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.)
Next time you play chess I'll come over, shake the table and make one of your pieces fall down and roll under the couch. Then I'll cry "Oh noes - I just lost an imaginary soldier! I want someone to blame someone now!..."
Well, sort of. But the bigger point is not so much 'money was lost' as a 'basis for comparison'. Lets face it, only a WOW player knows what 1 gold is worth, and only an EVE player knows what 1 ISK is worth. But to compare it to 'real money' is something everyone can understand - whether that's done 'legitimately' or not, the point remains you can buy in game currency on e.g. ebay, and that's about the only real baseline for comparison. ... makes more sense. (even if that does make us EVE players barking mad).
My girlfriend doesn't 'get' what 60 billion isks means, but if you look at the exchange rate (which last I checked was about 300 mil for 20$?) quoting $4000 is something that
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.
Piracy or fraud in-game is one thing: that's part of the game world. But service interruption resulting in in-game loss is something entirely different. It's not like with piracy or fraud where someone's gaining something; the only thing that is going to happen is you're goign to lose something, and the other parties involved are going to get the (unsatisfying) feeling of destroying an empty fleet.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Exactly. Other posters have said that there have been leaked logs confirming that this was indeed the case. And they were warned--repeatedly--that if they *didn't* crash the node, they would almost certainly fall victim to the bug that in fact killed them, and were advised not to try it. But they did, the node didn't crash, the bug occurred, and they died.
The fact you're comparing a game to a job says loads about how fun EVE is.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Buy more servers, indeed! I'm also told that nine women working together can have a baby in one month.
Oh stop with the tears ... that kind of emo-rage might work on eve killboards, but not here on slashdot.
There's a difference between one user pressing a button innocently, and 700 all users all deliberately pressing their buttons at exactly the same moment, KNOWING what will happen when they do.
It's the EVE equivalent of slashdotting a webpage, in more insidious circles it's called a DDoS.
Now stop playing innocent, you're kidding no one, especially here.
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.
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.
If you really like to stick to the chess analogy:
Imagine a big chess tournament with 300'000 participants. And then some of the automatic sliding doors in the building get stuck, preventing some people from accessing the playing room. The referee then decides that the people in the room can have as many turns as they like, which makes winning very easy.
And no, I neither play Eve nor Chess...
EVE is a ruthless game that encourages players to be ruthless; and apparently, exploiting bugs in the codebase, trying to crash servers etc. are considered acceptable tactics.
EVE is a sandbox game that provides an environment and a permissive attitude as to what goes on within the sandbox. If people choose to be ruthless, great. If they choose to co-operate, great. But CCP have long been pretty clear that exploiting the game engine is out of bounds, despite all the Band of Developers history the old Goons like to rant about over the space-campfire.
If someone can play the metagame and infiltrate Goonswarm and disband them, good luck to them! But when CVA was disbanded via an exploit recently, CCP rolled it back.
I'm only a foot-solider, so don't take this as gospel, but my understanding is that the intention was not to exploit by crashing the server. It was acknowledged over TS however that a crash was a real possibility - they had a real large fleet, as did we. But admitting we were pushing the boundaries of the capacity and preparing for it is a very different kettle of fish to actively setting out to attack CCP's infrastructure.
I still don't get your analogy, mind - I lost a group of pixels. It hurt me no more, nor anyone else on either side, than losing a pawn, or an evening of wiping in WoW. The only participant with a potentially broken nose is CCP, as they're the ones who'll suffer if people in 0.0 get bored with pre-emptive blobbing as a tactic and stop paying their monthly subscriptions.
Not really. I know many people who spend hours restoring classic cars. The value of their time in doing so is not well repaid in material terms, but they do it because they enjoy it.
EVE is much the same - technically speaking, I accumulate in game assets by 'work' and that's some sort of reflection on how much time and effort was involved. But I do it for fun, and if it stops being fun, I do something else.
Wow... this IS insightful. A post about a game using so much in-game speke that I don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about. Well done!
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.
The problem is that, in this case, all the people outside tried to enter at the same time instead of forming a queue, and expected the door to break. It didn't, it only jammed, so they got screwed. Too bad, but they had it coming.
Dilbert RSS feed
Is it effectively a DDoS? Only if the servers can't handle it.
Agreed 100%. Which is exactly why CCP put a system in place whereby large fleets could notify them in advance to put it on a server that *can* handle it (which certain fleets choose to ignore in favour of trying to take down the whole server).
So... excessive introduction of mass in a single locality causes unbalanced time dilation effects and even loss of consciousness? Sounds like an interesting game mechanic to me.
"Oh dear, I think you will find reality is on the blink again." -- Marvin
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Especially Goons in this fight, most populous, third most populous, and a rather small alliance ganging up on an alliance that is still not up to full strength, I think the numbers in the fight were around 1000 - 500 in favor of Goon's side.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?