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How EVE Online Dealt With a 3,000-Player Battle
Space MMORPG EVE Online is best known for its amazing stories, and on Sunday it added a new epic tale. The leader of a huge coalition, preparing for a moderately sized assault, mis-clicked and accidentally warped himself into enemy territory without his support fleet, endangering his massive ship worth an estimated $3,500. Realizing the danger, he called upon every ally he could, and the enemy fleet rallied in turn, leading to an incredible 3,000-player battle. What's also impressive is that the EVE servers stayed up for the whole fight, when most MMOs struggle with even a few hundred players at the same time. The Penny Arcade report spoke with CCP Games for some information on how they managed that:
"It’s hard to wrap your head around, but they sometimes move the in-game space itself. 'We move other solar systems on the node away from the fight. This disconnects anyone in those systems temporarily, but spares them from the ongoing symptoms of being on an overloaded server,' Veritas explained. 'It helps the fight system a little bit as well, especially if a reinforcement fleet is traveling through those other systems. This was done for the fight over the weekend, but is rare.' ... They do have a built-in mechanism for dealing with massive battles, however: They slow down time itself. ... Once server load reaches a certain point, the game automatically slows down time by certain increments to deal with the strain. Time was running at 10% speed during this 3,000-person battle, which is the maximum amount of time dilation possible."
No, you're reading comprehension is just poor. Each solar system shares a node with several others. When the solar system in question overloaded the node due to the battle, the other solar systems on that node were disconnected, likely for less a minute, so that that node could be dedicated to the battle. The other systems in question were placed on other nodes. Being disconnected for a number of seconds so that the system that you are in runs at full speed is much better than staying continuously connected and running at 10% speed. On the topic of reduced speed, there is a significant difference between intentionally running a game at slow speed and it breaking into a slow speed. By intentionally slowing the speed, they are employing a controlled and tested process. That is much more sensible than trying to run at 100% and just letting what happens happen.