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."

Comments

3000 players you say?

[alen]

How many were divorced the next day?

Re:3000 players you say?

[icebike]

Yeah, that was my thought too.

How many came out of the computer room sweating on their run to the fridge, uncommunicative, distracted, and wild eyed. Then crawled into bed late to a cold shoulder and a turned back.

Then having to go to work/school the next day and not be able to explain it to anyone because, nobody would understand, and all the raised eyebrows, and looking askance, and rolling of eyes between workmates.

Private little daydreams must be problematic when shared with 3000 other basement dwellers.

Re:3000 players you say?

[Chris Mattern]

Slow? Yes. Boring? Not hardly. Watching the supercap you spent months acquiring getting torn apart piece by piece is, I would wager, anything but boring. Not pleasant. But not boring. And, looking on the other side, realizing that you've delivering a serious blow to Goonfleet, one of the most powerful--and hated--coalitions in Eve, had to have been much more pleasant. And also not boring.

Re:3000 players you say?

[Synerg1y]

RTFA namely about time dilation.

Re:3000 players you say?

[Ardyvee]

EVE takes so much time and the people involved there are part of the group that takes it "seriously" (not really, but they do care about the game), so chances are their significant other understands it -- or at least tolerates it.

Re:3000 players you say?

[Jarik C-Bol]

I still contend that EVE is simply a massive social experiment to see if you can get people to pay for the privilege of working a second full time job managing spreadsheets.

Re:3000 players you say?

[madprof]

You see, this is the ultimate problem with MMORPGs. Like any game you work hard at it, and you are immersed - it's a little suspension of reality for you. Drawing on all manner of skills you can progress a long way, only to end up achieving something worth absolutely nothing to anyone except the people who play the game.
I suppose it is a little like playing sport, except the richness of human interaction there is irreplaceable and fitness has huge physiological benefits.

Re:3000 players you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

They replaced lag with TiDi (Time Dilation) which just makes things go slow motion but everything is executed in order.

Re:3000 players you say?

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

Man I had such a flashback....New Year's Eve, 2002. My dating partner at the time was out of town, so I hunkered down to do some UO - a game I had put about four years into by that time.

My little excursion out for the evening as a Tamer turned into an epic battle for both my and my irreplaceable pets - a Nightmare (fire breathing horse) and my Dragon. This was before pet summoning etc....you could spend hours finding the perfect beastie to tame, then spend hours more honing their skills. By hours, I mean weeks, months, etc. Once they died, they died.

And mine did. After about a two hour struggle (went down a bad tunnel into a spawn of Balrons then got flanked by another set) both pets went down. I ported out...confused, sad, befuddled as to what happened, distraught...those little pixels were under my watchful eye for two frigging years, and now they were gone. Gone!

A way to say even though I have never logged into Eve, I know what that feeling is like. Emotional? Yep. Boring, nope.

Re:3000 players you say?

[julesh]

It's an improvement on the old situation because events were timed in real time even with bad server lag, so if you have a 30-second cooldown on some ability or other, but a 5 minute lag, you only get to use it one tenth as many times as you're supposed to, which breaks the game design and is really infuriating to play. Now they slow the cooldowns down along with the lag in responding to commands so you can still keep doing stuff as much as the designers intended you to be able to. Kind of like the difference between the whole game slowing down and just dropping frames to compensate for lag in an FPS -- dropping frames is the easiest design solution, but if it happens too much it'll just get you killed. Slowing the entire game down lets you carry on playing even when the lag's really bad.

Re:Since when?

[broggyr]

So, how many ships did YOU lose?

Relativity

[Anonymous Coward]

Time was running at 10% speed during this 3,000-person battle, which is the maximum amount of time dilation possible.

So relativity is just the universe's way of saying the local server is currently way too crowded with rest mass?

Re:Relativity

[girlintraining]

So relativity is just the universe's way of saying the local server is currently way too crowded with rest mass?

Not exactly. The servers might have stayed up but the health of the cluster was poor. I was logged in at the time, and was getting live reports from people on grid for the battle. There were a lot of disconnects across the entire eve universe; And this amplified the losses to the individual players. Many petitions were filed for damages due to getting "DC'd" and being unable to reconnect.

The cluster architecture for Eve is actually quite amazing, and the underlying logic exceptionally sophisticated. But the main failure point, which has been mitigated but not eliminated with the time dilation feature, has always been the database. Every action in the game generates dozens of database updates. When you have 3,000 people frobbing the gun buttons and the heal me buttons, things get ugly fast. Time dilation is a way of creating a queuing system so that the actions are accepted to the server, and then serially updated into the master database. The server tries to compress and reduce the amount of updates to this, doing a lot of calculations and updates, but ultimately, this link is of finite size.

The other bottleneck is that because of the caching and buffering mentioned above between each server and the central database, is that a server can't swap its resources to another server. If that server is managing, say, 40 (in game) systems, and one of them goes all nuclear, the other 39 also suffer from lag and such because those other 39 can't be offloaded to another server -- that state information stays on the server because of the buffering and caching issues mentioned earlier. It's a syncronization nightmare -- there's no way to cleanly break the flow of data and redirect it, and if any of those database updates get lost, it can mean real money lost to the players.

And real money was lost in Eve, not just because of player actions, but also cluster architecture. Those big ships don't just disappear when their pilot disconnects: They stay on the field, taking hits. And without a pilot, a lot of defensive actions (like warping away) aren't available anymore. I know at least 1 of those titans was lost because of a disconnected pilot. You can blame the ISP for that, but it was happening across the board, to all Eve players.

This behavior of the eve servers is well-known to regular players. Some alliances (large groups of players) even intentionally try to provoke such server failures, knowing it'll lead to losses like what's described in the article. Far from this being a success story... it's an example only of avoiding a worst-case scenario. The servers saying up means exactly dick if the servers aren't processing the requests in a timely fashion. Ask anyone on Wall St., why there's so many data centers ringed around it; Latency. It costs a fortune to host servers there, but those extra milliseconds matter.

As it turns out, MMOs have similar architectural features to our largest financial institutions. This one, more than most.

Re:Relativity

[Anubis IV]

The other bottleneck is that because of the caching and buffering mentioned above between each server and the central database, is that a server can't swap its resources to another server. If that server is managing, say, 40 (in game) systems, and one of them goes all nuclear, the other 39 also suffer from lag and such because those other 39 can't be offloaded to another server -- that state information stays on the server because of the buffering and caching issues mentioned earlier. It's a syncronization nightmare -- there's no way to cleanly break the flow of data and redirect it, and if any of those database updates get lost, it can mean real money lost to the players.

Doesn't the quote from CCP in the summary directly contradict this paragraph of what you said? As it their quote says, they can move systems physically away in order to move them to different servers. The result is that the players in those 39 other systems get disconnected temporarily, but then they are moved to other servers where they are able to play more easily, thus leaving a bigger chunk of the computational pie on the first server for the one system that's going nuclear.

Granted, I don't play the game and it sounds like you do, but if what you're saying is true, I'd be curious how it's reconciled with the official statement above.

Re:Relativity

[afidel]

Yeah, EVE was one of the first large test cases for SSD backed database servers I read about and the numbers they talked about amazed me because it far exceeded all the business processes for my S&P 500 company.

Re:Relativity

[EinarTh]

I'm a EVE server dev and this analysis is not quite right. The DB is indeed a central point of failure, but it's rarely a performance bottleneck nowadays. The part about migrating resources is half-wrong, as yes, we can't (yet) move solarsystems around machines without disconnecting the players in it, but unless there's a fight going on in a to be moved system, we still do it to free cpu for the system where a fight is indeed going on. See more here http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=74227 .

Re:Relativity

[sg_oneill]

That is actually what happens when you disconnect and reconnect, you get blasted away to a "safe spot" (and then disappear). When you reconnect, you return to the safe-spot and your shit starts an auto-warp back to where you where before. Which in this case might be the middle of an absurd 3000 man punch-up.

$3600 ship

[Chris Mattern]

According to the Eve message boards, it was a Leviathan-class Titan. $3600 may be a bit on the high side, but it was worth thousands, definitely.

Incidentlally, estimated losses for the entire battle (which included *three* titans lost before it was all over, all on the side the guy who misjumped) is over 700 billion ISK. That's about *$25,000*, kiddies.

Re:$3600 ship

[Darby]

which included *three* titans lost before it was all over, all on the side the guy who misjumped

Let me guess, he jumped into the battle screaming "LEEROY JENKINS!!!"

Re:$3600 ship

[Russ1642]

I'm a bit new to this kind of thing so humor me please. You're saying a guy had $25,000 locked up in virtual stuff and lost it in this battle?

Re:$3600 ship

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a bit new to this kind of thing so humor me please. You're saying a guy had $25,000 locked up in virtual stuff and lost it in this battle?

Let me clear up a few misconceptions here:

1) It wasn't any single player who lost that much in the battle; those are the losses attributed to the losing group of players, which in this case is huge, so those assets were originally generated by the collective work of probably thousands of players.

2) Even those thousands of players did not collectively pay $25,000 in real money to acquire those assets, they just played the game like anybody else.

3) The conversion of 700 billion ISK (the virtual in-game currency) into $25,000 is based on the ability to buy 30-day play-time cards for $15 and then sell them in-game for (as of writing) ~600 million ISK each.

4) If you do the math on the above, it's clearly wrong; 700 billion ISK would only buy ~1167 play-time cards, which would have cost only $17,500.

5) To top it all off, that real-dollars-to-game-ISK conversion only actually goes one-way; you can use game money to buy the play-time cards, but you cannot (legally) exchange those cards for real money. So the 700 billion ISK isn't *really* worth $17,500 since it's impossible to (legally) exchange the ISK for the dollars;, the conversion ratio is an academic metric.

Re:$3600 ship

[jxander]

Sounds like total losses across the board, not just for one guy.

One of the big selling points for EVE Online is that they fully allow real currency (yes, actual dollars) to purchase in-game goods and services. The general thought process being : in normal video games (specifically MMOs like WoW) people without jobs are at a distinct advantage because they can spend all day killing boars, leveling up, mining ore, etc. EVE balances that by letting employed individuals use the fruits of their daily activities in game. You spent all day farming in-game, I spent all day farming in the real world.

That being said, I'm not intimately familiar with the economy of EVE... but from the article, a single ship is worth upwards of $3,500. A lot of the smaller ships are worth a few hundred bucks at least. Multiply that across 3,000 people involved and, well ... that's a lot of real money blown on virtual space ships.

Re:$3600 ship

[Chris Mattern]

Why he simply didn't jump back to escape from this territory?

Because the first thing any opponent does in this situation is have tacklers web and warp scramble you. And they'll start bumping you to push you away from directions they don't want you go. And you materialize from an incoming jump a few kilometers away from the gate/cyno field. You ain't goin' nowhere.

If he couldn't jump back, why he simply didn't use his escape pod to escape, sacrificing only one titan, instead of three?

*That* is an excellent question. It's probably what he should have done. But he didn't want to eat the loss, so he upped the stakes, hoping he could win.

Re:$3600 ship

[Spikeles]

Real Money($) can be converted into in game money (ISK) through the use of PLEX so it's pretty simple to calculate the amount of ISK lost and convert the value back into dollars to get an approximate real money value. The current lowest sell of a 30 day PLEX is about 530,000,000.00 ISK and it looks like 30 Days PLEX costs $20. So some division (*depending on if billion means thousand or million million) and some multiplication gives you a rough Real Money cost.

Re:$3600 ship

[SillyHamster]

The value is tied to the ship, which can be destroyed. The character survives, but its value is not involved in the calculations.

Re:$3600 ship

[Chris Mattern]

So... just to clarify, did this guy actually spend $3500 on his ship?

Almost certainly not. But he probably could've sold it for enough ISK to buy enough PLEX to enable him to play the game for the next dozen years for free.

Re:$3600 ship

[Sperbels]

The fact that you don't really understand why your statement is stupid is why you can't get-by in Eve.

Re:$3600 ship

[cockroach2]

Technically he didn't jump to enemy controlled territory but to an area that isn't strictly controlled by players. From what I read the idea was to drop some big guns on top of a handful of enemies in a "neutral" system, a couple of enemies that were pleasantly surprised when instead of a sizable fleet they got a juicy target.

Then everybody called in reinforcements plus the locals also wanted to join the party.

Re:$3600 ship

[Chris Mattern]

You use your real money to buy a month's subscription, and an item called a Pilot's License Extension is deposited in your inventory. You can either use it to extend your own sub by a month, or you can trade it on the in-game market for ISK or any other goods.

Not quite. Nobody uses a PLEX they bought for US dollars to extend their own subscriptions because they cost $20 and you can buy a month's extension to your subscription directly for $15. PLEX are bought from CCP solely for the purpose of selling them on the market for ISK (or for obtaining Aurum, but that's another subject). People who have a lot of ISK then buy them so they can play without having to spend real-life money.

Re:$3600 ship

[Jim Haskell]

He didn't jump back because he was physically incapable of doing so. In Eve: Online, other ships can use ship modules on you that prevents you from leaving the area. It's called "tackling." The pilot in question, upon erroneously jumping into the system, was tackled by enemy forces before he could escape. Instead of eating the loss, he called up on his allies to jump in to attempt to destroy the ships that were tackling him. (A titan-class vessel is largely unable to destroy the much smaller Heavy Interdictor-class vessels that are capable of tackling it due to the ship's poor tracking and large guns, and requires help if it is tackled. A good analogy here is trying to kill a fly with a cannonball at 30 kilometers -- guns in Eve work similarly.)

When the pilot's allies arrived, the enemies called THEIR allies and joined the fight. With the amount of tackling ships on the field, neither party could easily escape, and things snowballed considerably. The enemy forces in this case had the upper hand of available pilots and were able to inflict heavy losses.

Re:$3600 ship

[mfnickster]

Luke: "TEN THOUSAND??? We could almost buy our own ship for that!"

Ben: It's all right, Luke. I have a cousin who can get us a ship for $3,500.

Re:$3600 ship

[squiggly12]

He jumped instead of opening a bridge which (a bridge) lets you send others in your fleet to the cyno (which meant he went there instead of the people in fleet). The commands are extremely close to each other, pretty much separated by one command. It's happened many a time.

Re:$3600 ship

[L4t3r4lu5]

Because the first thing any opponent does in this situation is have tacklers web and warp scramble you. And they'll start bumping you to push you away from directions they don't want you go. And you materialize from an incoming jump a few kilometers away from the gate/cyno field. You ain't goin' nowhere.

Clarification for those who haven't played:
- Tackler: A very fast and highly maneuverable ship fitted no offensive weaponry, just modules designed to prevent your escape. Very fragile; Relies on its speed to survive.
- Web: Propulsion suppression; Severely restricts your speed an maneuverability.
- Warp Scramble: Prevents you warping. In Eve you can warp to planets, stations, asteroid belts etc in the same system from anywhere at any time. Almost all ships need to be at a Jump Gate to leave a system; Capital ships are the exception, of which Titans are an example.
- Bumping: Eve ships have non-catastrophic collision detection. They "bump" off each other, with the imaginable results. You need to align your ship towards a destination to be able to warp there; Bumping prevents that.
- Cyno(saural) field: A point created in space onto which Capital ships can lock and jump to without traversing the systems between your current location and the Cyno. Jump distance has a maximum range, depending on the ship.

One tactic not mentioned is "bubble": A ship called an Interdictor may be fitted with an Interdiction Sphere Launcher. Interdiction Spheres ("bubbles") prevent warping while within their area of effect.

Re:$3600 ship

[SharpFang]

PLEX is the bridge between dollar and ISK - can be purchased with or sold for both.

Once the real money goes into the game, there is no -official- way to get it back. But the market where you can sell PLEX to other players for dollars is thriving and quite successful. You CAN earn real money on EVE.

Imagine this:

Guy A, overworked businessman with lots of income, little time.
Guy B, a basement-dwelling no-life nerd.
Guy C, a casual with some cash and some time.

Guy A wants to play the game; buys 3 PLEX $15/piece from the official game shop, uses one to prolong account, sells two other for 2bln ISK to guy B, buys an awesome ship with the 2bln ISK.

Guy B is running some corporation, earning heavy ISK on various in-game activities. He spends 2bln ISK on the 2 PLEX from guy A. Uses up one to prolong account, puts up the other one for sale for $13 on a forum.

Guy C decides his subscription is running out, not enough ISK to purchase PLEX for it, but he happens to know there's the forum with PLEX cheaper than the official shop. He pays guy B $13 over PayPal and gets his PLEX which he uses up.

Note Guy B didn't spend a single penny on his PLEX and turned 1bln ISK to $13.

This is all completely legal and within the framework of the game. Since the game creators are the only ones that can create new PLEX they will always get the money, no matter if the PLEX is used up or sold for ISK or sold for $. Sooner or later it will get used up, decreasing in-game supply, increasing the price in ISK and encouraging purchase in $ - both for prolonging and for obtaining a lot of ISK easily.

My Takeaway

[Guppy06]

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,

UI issue leads to massive server load.

so who won and what did they get?

[gl4ss]

so who won and what did they get?

Re:so who won and what did they get?

[meddle99]

so who won and what did they get?

EVE Online won. They got $25k.

Re:Since when?

[Cinder6]

I read that as "stories about EVE" (things that happen because of player actions), not "stories in EVE" (things that happen within the scope of the game's narrative). Whether you like the game or not (I couldn't get into it), there certainly have been a lot of interesting/cool stories about things that have gone on inside the game. This event is one of them.

Re:Fascinating article.

[michael021689]

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.

The game is SLOOOOOOOWWWW!

[VortexCortex]

So, the answer to how the game stayed up is that it's not a twitch game, and is actually pretty fucking slow with regard to "real time" actions of other games. In other words: It's basically a turn based game where latency isn't an issue so big fucking deal folks.

Re:The game is SLOOOOOOOWWWW!

[Chris Mattern]

Please repeat after me:

Slow does not mean turn-based.

Turn-based does not mean slow (ever seen a game of blitz chess played?)

Re:Computers, Soldiers, Men

[timeOday]

I'm sure there are second-years studying military strategy who are shaking their heads at newbie errors.

Well, it is a game. I won't claim blowing stuff up is the whole point, but it's certainly a big part of the attraction. They were in the Great Battle of 2013. (I'm betting they have a more colorful commemorative name for it already.)

Re:It is as if nothing really happened

[Dragon_Eater]

http://themittani.com/media/pretty-lights-video-battle-asakai

Tada!

Also..
eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&adjacent&kll_id=16069454
and...
http://dog-net.org/brdoc/?brid=16053

There, it did happen!

Re:Help an old guy understand this

[yurtinus]

And then the whole battle got eaten by a grue!

Re:Since when?

[Keen Anthony]

The elitists definitely earn it. They have real money in the game, if they didn't buy their characters, their skill levels came with longevity, and they survived the jump from carebearing around in high sec with destroyers and cruisers modded for salvage and mining to doing PVP in null sec with total assholes. I would have loved to be amongst them except I just found the game frustrating for the constant "Join my clan!" invites. I like soloing, and it's not easy advancing fast without help and protection. I remember slipping into near low-sec territory because I wanted to sell some merchandise at a higher price. I decided to make a quick raid on an NPC pirate hideaway and do some good mining when a player jumped in, destroyed me, then held my pod for ransom. He pod-killed me when I refused to pay. Have to say I respect the guy's style. That you can play EVE that way or you can play EVE my way and try to earn a modest living selling components speaks much about this game.

Re:Since when?

[tonywong]

Not an EVE player but I thought the coverage and screen cap was impressive here:
http://themittani.com/news/breaking-massive-super-fight-asakai-lowsec

Bullet time

[tylernt]

Time was running at 10% speed during this 3,000-person battle, which is the maximum amount of time dilation possible."

Cool: bullet time!

Re:Since when?

[cockroach2]

Low-sec still offers plenty of opportunities for solo / small gang PvP, whether you learn it on your own or as part of a noob-friendly corp is entirely up to you. I went pirate after some dreadful months in high-sec and I have to say it was probably the best EVE-related decision I ever made.

Screenshot from the battle

[Aereus]

This is apparently what (part of?) the battle looked like... talk about a clusterfuck...

http://puu.sh/1TcVz

Re:Screenshot from the battle

[Aereus]

And another one:

http://i.imgur.com/xXhcWOy.png

Re:What the ???

[citizenr]

Okay, in this day in age of scalability and Cloud Services, why the hell can't they host this in an EC2 Availability Zone on Amazon?

Because that's a completely asinine idea, not even warranting a technical response?

I'd urge random smarmy Slashdotters to dig through the EVE dev blog and get a glimpse of the boundaries they've been pushing. Their infrastructure team knows their fucking business.

Boundaries of stupidity. They are using Stackless Python (NO multicore support) on the server.

>'We move other solar systems on the node away from the fight

No they dont, They disconnected people left and right, basically kicked them out of that node and made them reconnect. Its been what, 7 years? and they still didnt figure out how to do live migration.

>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

He failed to mention your FPS counter also goes to 10% :) It takes HOURS to kill one ship in that SHIT hack of a lag fix mode.

Instead of implementing proper multicore support, or even dividing load among many racks they run everything in ONE python thread ....

Re:Help an old guy understand this

[Cajun Hell]

> l
Gimli the Dwarf (Necromancer)
Strider the Human (Greater Necromancer)
Legolas the Elf (Necromancer)
>'hey guys, are you all ready?
You say, "hey guys, are you all ready?"
Gimli says, "y"
Legolas says, "wait, I think Frodo is coming"
> s
Pirate Cave
You are in a pirate cave. There are various pirate props here. The only exit is to the north.
Sauron the Maiar (Greater Necromancer).
Saruman the Istari (Necromancer) (blocking the north exit).
Grishnakh the Orc (Lesser Sorcerer).
Magic helmet.
Balrog the Balrog (Greater Necromancer).
Ugluk the Orc (Lesser Sorcerer).
Balrog says, "I see them on who, so there's a chance they might attack today"
>ooc oh shit, meant to type 'lead s'
You say (ooc), "oh shit, meant to type 'lead s'"
> n
The exit is blocked.
Strider shouts, "aren't we coming with you?"
Ugluk takes Magic helmet.
Legolas shouts, "wait"
Sauron grapples you!
Sauron says "what do we have here?"
> n
The exit is blocked.
You can't move while grappled.
> kill sauron
You attack Sauron!
Sauron attacks you!
> shout help!
You shout, "help!"
Saruman laughs.
Balrog blocks the north exit.
Gimli shouts "Are you coming back or should we wait?"
Ugluk wears Magic helmet.
Grishnahk attacks you!
Legolas arrives.
Legolas says "come back north, we're not ready"
You hit Sauron hard!
Ugluk attacks you!
Legolas tries to move north but is blocked by Saruman.
Azog arrives.
Strider arrives.
Bilbo arrives.
Strider says, "did you mean to lead us?"
Shagrat arrives.
Frodo arrives.
Sauron shouts "lag!"

Re:What the ???

[Mr307]

Boundaries of stupidity. They are using Stackless Python (NO multicore support) on the server.
No they dont, They disconnected people left and right, basically kicked them out of that node and made them reconnect. Its been what, 7 years? and they still didnt figure out how to do live migration.
He failed to mention your FPS counter also goes to 10% :) It takes HOURS to kill one ship in that SHIT hack of a lag fix mode.
Instead of implementing proper multicore support, or even dividing load among many racks they run everything in ONE python thread ....

This 100%

Time dilation is a kludge at best, it serves only to make large fights just bearable instead of impossible.

The single threaded nature of EVE is grossly apparent in large fleet fights where all input is processed in order, so if you commanded your ship to go in 10 different directions, your ship goes all those directions in order, even if the last command was an all stop, and during the larger fleet fights this may take minutes to complete so most likely you are way out of position, add to that weapon cycles, reload cycles, warps, jumps and lots more to the queue that are stacked and processed in order with no real time consideration.

IMHO what they really need to do is groom the queue for redundant ship commands, Yes an upgrade to multithreaded for all kinds of good reasons, but grooming the command queue will net them huge improvements in playability when the fights get big.

Re:Since when?

[Keen Anthony]

It'll probably quite some time before I return to EVE. I just don't get the time to do more than log in and train. For anyone interested, in EVE you can queue training so that your character can be constantly training to level up even when you're not logged in. Low-sec is definitely where the fun begins even if you're wanting to play the market. Right now though I'm really craving a real world based competitive MMO FPS with a lot of customization options for my character builder game personality, but I don't think such a thing exists. I'm living off COD because it's instant satisfaction when I get 10 minutes here and there.

Re:What the ???

[gmueckl]

Don't dismiss what you see that easily. Sometimes there are perfectly good reasons why things came to be the way there are.

1. CCP practically invented Stackless Python, which is quite different from normal Python, although it retains the GIL
2. The core of EVE online was written in the late 90's. Multicores were not really on the radar back then. They became practical and affordable only years later.
3. Throwing away millions of lines of working code behind the company's single most important product (which was responsible for 1% of Iceland's' GDP last I checked) is not justifiable.
4. Nothing prevents you from starting multiple server processes on a single node as long as you have enough memory and network bandwidth left.

Granted, the inability of CPython to run truly concurrent threads would deter me from using it for applications requiring high performance. But 10 years ago I simply wouldn't have lost a single thought about concurrent threads. Would you?

Re:Computers, Soldiers, Men

[Anonymous Coward]

Military-wise, those who made the first mistake decided not to cut their losses, tried to recoup by throwing the good after the bad, throwing in reserves to save suddenly severely exposed friendlies, and they got severely burned for that. I'm sure there are second-years studying military strategy who are shaking their heads at newbie errors.

You are wrong. The narrative you are basing your comment on is the story both sides want you to believe (for different reasons) but it is probably not what actually happened.

Here is my current understanding of events:

There are three major coalitions involved in this battle: CFC, HBC and N3. CFC and HBC used to be very close friends but grew apart over the past ~6 months with tensions escalating to a cold war-like state as of late. N3 is nominally hostile to both but has good diplomatic relations with HBC.

There are also two small alliances involved - Drunk ‘n’ Disorderly (DnD) and Liandri Covenant (AZULA).

On January 17th DnD engaged a CFC fleet in a very ballsy maneuver - it didn't pay off for them as the CFC fleet commander DaBigRedBoat (dbrb) was very fast to call in massive reinforcements (many EVE players are connected to their coalition's jabber or IRC server even when not playing and will log into the game if a "ping" on jabber/IRC goes out. In this case dbrb called for everyone to log in which was a completely disproportionate and unnecessary response.). DnD took more losses than they could deal damage but the CFC now knew them for being a bit reckless and DnD had seen dbrb escalate a small engagement beyond reason.

On January 21st DnD showed - while fighting an unrelated opponent - that they could call in support from Pandemic Legion (an alliance that is part of the HBC) and were quite willing to do so if it would get them the advantage they need. Everyone following current events in EVE took notice of this fact.

On January 25th DnD attacked a Liandri Covenant POS (player-owned starbase) but due to game mechanics couldn't finish it off quite yet (a starbase goes into an invulnerable mode for 42 hours after being dealt significant damage - this defenders time to organize a defense and prevents a starbase from being sniped in some off timezone where no defenders are online).

Knowing that DnD would return the next day to finish off the POSm knowing that alone they would have a hard time defending it and being aware of the events of January 17th Liandri Covenant contacted the CFC (some CFC pilots probably have alts in AZULA) to organize a trap: Liandri Covenant would engage DnD when they returned to kill off the starbase, then dbrb would jump with a superior CFC fleet right on top of them.

The CFC was well aware that DnD could call on support from the HBC within minutes and factored that into their plan. Once DnD was engaged they would jump a Nyx supercarrier into the fray while having a supercapital fleet on standby - hoping to bait the HBC reaction. Nobody knows why dbrb thought this would be a good idea - maybe he just thought he could take on the HBC in late US TZ (as some of the HBC's supercapital-heavy alliances are EU TZ).

Today is the day... dbrb has set up his trap and DnD arrives to kill the AZULA starbase. The HBC is probably aware of the CFC trap (spies are everywhere). When DnD is on the field dbrb intends to jump in his bait Nyx first. Multiboxing several accounts (he is known to praise himself for his great multitasking capabilities) he makes a grave mistake and jumps his Leviathan-class titan instead of the Nyx supercarrier (he needs the Leviathan to stay back and "bridge" other ships to the battle, also the Leviathan is about 5x more expensive than the Nyx [which already is pretty expensive]).

DnD tries to prevent the Leviathan from escaping and calls on Pandemic Legion for support (which takes at least 10 - 15 minutes to form up). dbrb knows that this escalation will come and is pinging madly to get more CFC members to reinforce his planned t

Not everyone buys PLEXes

[grahamlord86]

The real-money losses are very sensationalised. A single player in null-sec space can easily farm 50-100million ISK per hour.

Hell, even a rookie like me (in my first battleship) solo'ing level 4 missions can generate 100m in half a day if I get on with it, and I only have 4 or 5 months of casual play under my belt, which isn't much by EVE standards.

With a PLEX (the method of converting real money into ISK) being worth around, say, 600ish million, the average ship on EVE doesn't need to be paid for in real money.

Likewise, titans and big stuff like that is often corp funded, they're not necessarily owned by the player flying the ship.

So I very much doubt that $25k actually flew out the door, or into CCP's coffers.

Can't stick with it.

[Westwood0720]

I love this game. I do. But it seems once I get enough SPs that I deem comfortable to leave high sec and venture into nul sec, I get scrammed, webbed, and podded before I have a moment to react. At this point I got bored of mission running and frustrated by getting the absolute shit kicked out of me, I quit. Then, two months later I start a new account and start the process all over again.

I have no idea how CCP makes such a boring yet intense game that is fascinatingly addictive. =P

Re:Since when?

[Methadras]

I'm still getting my space legs on EVE-O, but I have to tell you that I'm really enjoying it. It's frustrating as hell, but I'm an MMO vet, so my learning curve is just taking a little longer than usual, but I'll be min/maxing soon enough. :D