Epic Online Space Battle

New submitter nusscom writes "On July 28th, as has been reported by BBC, a record number of EVE Online players participated in a record-breaking online battle between two alliances. This battle, which was essentially a turf-war was comprised of over 4,000 online players at one time. The load was so large that Crowd Control Productions (CCP) slowed down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity." This is the largest battle to ever occur on EVE Online.

Comments

More to come

[Anonymous Coward]

Every other month i hear about larger and larger eve battles.

Escalation can be the only outcome.

Re:More to come

[davester666]

They should all go to a big field and then sort out their differences with butter knifes.

Re: More to come

[Mabhatter]

There's a little gathering in the Pennsylvania hills this week.. but they use sticks.
Www.pennsicwar.org

Re: More to come

[davester666]

That url is just too close to www.peniswar.org for comfort...especially for stick-fighting!

Re:More to come

[Molochi]

They should all go to a big field and then sort out their differences with boffo weapons.

FTFY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_ZEU0EsMcw

Re:More to come

[kbx911]

will we see a Gandhi in Eve? A ship for a ship makes the whole galaxy Plex-less.

This story sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

oh wait

here and
here

why on earth does slashdot have to report this as news each time it happens? Its the same boring shit about how eve's terrible servers can't handle all the buffered state updates and slows to a crawl, and only eve players actually give a shit about the meta politics.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[AdamWill]

"Its the same boring shit about how eve's terrible servers can't handle all the buffered state updates and slows to a crawl"

Or to see the half-full glass, it's a story about how EVE is the only MMO game that really even attempts to let stuff happen on this kind of scale; it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

And 4,000 players in one place is such news to begin with?

Re:This story sounds familiar

[perpenso]

why on earth does slashdot have to report this as news each time it happens?

Occasionally they need a gaming story that does not involve a Blizzard game. :-)

Re:This story sounds familiar

[MacGyver2210]

I don't think you understand. Each 'solar system' in EVE runs on a single core - the system is not multi-processor friendly within a single solar system.

They moved the 6DVT(where the fight happened) system to the same blade server as Jita(the huge trade hub which regularly hosts around 1000-1500 people, most inside a station) but on a separate core.

400% of normal traffic to a single processor. That's impressive. Also, it's running python, so there's that as well.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[multimediavt]

The load was so large that Crowd Control Productions (CCP) slowed down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity.

"Its the same boring shit about how eve's terrible servers can't handle all the buffered state updates and slows to a crawl"

Or to see the half-full glass, it's a story about how EVE is the only MMO game that really even attempts to let stuff happen on this kind of scale; it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.

So, the story is their code and single-server suck because they can't handle the load, right? If the game has to slow to 10% how does that prove anything good? I can run a simulation on my home computer and have it run at 10^-100 slower than it would run on the cluster at work. It will run, but be slow as glass flowing at room temperature. When they can do that at 100%, I will be impressed.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Urza9814]

Would be nice if the summary talked about *that* then instead of just who was fighting over what....

Re:This story sounds familiar

[mrchaotica]

It will run, but be slow as glass flowing at room temperature.

The scientists changed their minds; glass is considered a solid again.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Nyder]

The load was so large that Crowd Control Productions (CCP) slowed down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity.

"Its the same boring shit about how eve's terrible servers can't handle all the buffered state updates and slows to a crawl"

Or to see the half-full glass, it's a story about how EVE is the only MMO game that really even attempts to let stuff happen on this kind of scale; it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.

So, the story is their code and single-server suck because they can't handle the load, right? If the game has to slow to 10% how does that prove anything good? I can run a simulation on my home computer and have it run at 10^-100 slower than it would run on the cluster at work. It will run, but be slow as glass flowing at room temperature. When they can do that at 100%, I will be impressed.

Or you can play a game like Everquest 2 where the lag can get so bad sometimes (because SoE blows most likely) that it takes 20 secs for your button press to register, if not longer.

And that is with 24 people in the zone.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[iczerjones]

It's actually pretty slick how they throw in some uniform time dilation to ensure fair and timely performance across all n number of pilots in a fight while the resources are dynamically allocated to reinforce the fleet battle nodes. Definitely an improvement from the prior lopsided disconnects and variable frame times. Rather than the network or cluster deciding the battle, the players do. Since they are the *only* game in town that provides this sort of scenario, I find it rather intriguing to hear about the ceiling being pushed further and further. There are many more questionably appropriate and even dull topics that are seen daily here. Internet spaceships and clever realtime server management don't seem so unwarranted.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[iczerjones]

Surprising that this topic is getting as much hate as it is. I can say as an 'on again, off again' EVE player that I really enjoy hearing these stories. As it goes, life is just too demanding at the moment and as the saying goes, "EVE is the best game I don't have time to play." To each their own I suppose. If these stories were not posted here, they would still make my news feeds, so I could do without if that would satiate those who find it offensive.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Ferrofluid]

I can run a simulation on my home computer and have it run at 10^-100 slower than it would run on the cluster at work

I'd like to see this cluster which runs 10e100 times faster than a desktop. Is it perhaps powered by a neutron star?

Re:This story sounds familiar

[zippthorne]

Do you need time to play it? It uses the progress quest mechanic for player skills, doesn't it?

Re:This story sounds familiar

[cusco]

This is what I clicked through to see. Not being an MMO player myself, I was wondering how that affected game play for the end user. Hopefully there will be more useful comments below.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Macgrrl]

Soon TM

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, really? It's glass, not quantum mechanics. Scientists, fucking decide already!

Next thing you'll tell me, they're promoted Pluto to planet status again.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[lytles]

guessing that they just picked the most "prestigious" source. there's been a lot written about the technical aspects of the battle on reddit - here's the best that i can find at the moment:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1j8sjz/ccp_explorer_says_theres_no_cap_in_6vdth/

the technology and organization outside of the game is also interesting - thousands of people acting in a coordinated manner to achieve a real-time goal using technology (mumble, jabber, irc) is news - even if the goal is (much) less impressive than hacking the linux kernel

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically an amorphous solid, which has most of the characteristics of regular solids but without the regular molecular structure.

The sad part was that scientists decided this ages ago. It took decades to update middle school science textbooks; rather, to update the science in those standardized textbooks. I remember my science textbook in the early 1990s still recited the myth about window panes being thicker at the bottom, even thought the myth had long been busted.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Have you forgotten about UO? Anyway; they have built a system that really can cope (even though its basically a text game with a graphics wrapper) with the traffic coming from a hand full of clients (yes, 4000 is a hand full when it comes to software) and they make no attempt of fixing it with software, they buy faster and faster server to keep serving the same broken software.

They need to approach this as a chess problem. Who needs to know about whom and what to they need to know? Don't just send everything to everyone and turn down the speed until you can serve them all. (10%!!!! That is just stupid!)

Re: This story sounds familiar

[Mabhatter]

That is an interesting idea to simulate combat confusion by reducing the amount of data you get back as the shooting gets worse. Except you are not commanding one ship, issuing orders to dozens of smaller ones.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Grismar]

Did you even look at the footage? You sound like someone going "Pffrt, flew people to Mars in 6 months? I can get to work in 6 minutes! When they do that in 6 days, I will be impressed."

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Calydor]

it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.

Anarchy Online merged their servers earlier this year and now only runs a single world server, and while there are instances for missions (think 'dungeons') the world server itself really does just shove all the players together.

Now, whether Anarchy Online can boast 4000 active players is another matter entirely ...

Re:This story sounds familiar

[julesh]

Do you need time to play it? It uses the progress quest mechanic for player skills, doesn't it?

Yes (assuming you mean that it uses game-time based skill acquisition, where you set up a list of skills you want to acquire and your character slowly learns them whether you're playing or not). But unlike most modern MMOs which have interesting solo games, it's only really worth playing if you can get deeply involved in a guild (or corporation, to use the local terminology), which demands quite a bit of time in most cases.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[OhANameWhatName]

Also, it's running python, so there's that as well

I was impressed when I first heard about Eve's 4000 person battle, now I'm blown away. Given the overall horrible quality standards of MMO's, the Eve devs look like they might be the pick of the crop!

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Noughmad]

He _can_ have it run 10^-100 slower. It doesn't mean that is his home computer's top speed.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn scientists and their scientific method...

Re:This story sounds familiar

[alphatel]

I don't think you understand. Each 'solar system' in EVE runs on a single core - the system is not multi-processor friendly within a single solar system.

They moved the 6DVT(where the fight happened) system to the same blade server as Jita(the huge trade hub which regularly hosts around 1000-1500 people, most inside a station) but on a separate core.

400% of normal traffic to a single processor. That's impressive. Also, it's running python, so there's that as well.

So I don't see a lot of talk about 4,000 players on MUDs hosted on 486 DX 66 processors anymore, but listening to this drabble about Eve on that can only run a single core on Python should get me excited?
Seriously, there's nothing here. Dead Story before it began.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[V for Vendetta]

If the game has to slow to 10% how does that prove anything good?

It's not the game that gets slowed down, it's the star system (and maybe the surrounding deployment systems) where that battle happens, which gets slowed down with what CCP calls Time Dilation, nicknamed "TiDi" by EVE players.

That's something completely different and IMHO a clever way of handling things. Other players in different parts of EVE's universe won't be affected and can continue to play as if nothing has happened.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[lxs]

Actually it mostly is quantum mechanics.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[SkunkPussy]

It is simulating a few more objects than those muds though. For example, each player is likely to have 5 drones (mini robot spaceships), which takes the number of moving entities that have to be simulated up to 24000...

Re:This story sounds familiar

[TheNastyInThePasty]

I don't believe that they dynamically allocate the resource to reinforce the fleet battle systems. They have to be given a heads up and a GM takes the node down and allocates extra resources to it before the battle begins. I may be mistaken, but that's what I remember from the last time this sort of thing appearing on slashdot.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[afidel]

Yep, and the guys that run EVE were one of the first major case studies for FusionIO, they proved that a lightning fast local SSD card can improve database performance more than any other reasonably priced upgrade. It's interesting the kinds of things you have to do when you push the envelope in massive multiplayer.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Maritz]

It must be so tiresome to put up with lesser mortals everywhere you look.

Re:This story sounds familiar

[Lonewolf666]

Impressive, but I wonder how much better it could be when CCP finally comes up with a multi-processor friendly architecture and replaces some more Python with C libraries.
A factor 10 seems possible, and then the same battle could run in real time :).

Re:This story sounds familiar

[hairyfeet]

Not really as I like educating those below me but what IS tiresome is flag waving douchebags, which remind me of the ancient Mel Brooks joke "all go to hell except cave 76!". I mean do you HONESTLY think that CCP gives a fuck about anything other than your wallet?

Now is that automatically a bad thing? No not at all, as long as they give you good value for your dollars and if you'd like an example I'd point out Gearbox with their Borderlands series or Volition with their Saints Row series, both just love to play the DLC tango but when my boys and I are playing co-op in some massive free for all in Borderlands 1 or 2 or Saints Row 3? I honestly couldn't care less about their trying to squeeze that last nickel by appealing to completionists.

But for an example of where you are NOT getting good value see Eve Online where a LOT of the appeal, hell its even all over the ads CCP have to entice newcomers, is the "huge epic space battles" so the sci/fi fans can recreate some of the excitement of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica only to find the engine simply can't keep up, which of course i called them out on. If you are gonna advertise huge space battles at least be capable of having epic space battles in real time, otherwise it might as well be a turn based RTS.

Oh, valiant warriors! Of you, we are proud!

[Anonymous Coward]

These men of war, they are so valiant and strong. They are our finest lads, muscled and brawny, fighting for the sake of our realm. They fight not for a single king, nor for a sole lord; nay, they fight for the glory of battle itself, and the pride of their people. We are their people, and of them we are proud.

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[amiga3D]

Less chance of diseases at least.

huh

[Anonymous Coward]

News for Nerds and you get scooped on the largest MMORPG fleet fight in history by...really the BBC?

Re:huh

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a news aggregator, not a news agency.

How many entities?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, 4000 players, how many entities were in the battle?

Re:How many entities?

[Anonymous Coward]

4000
likely closer to 3000 players and if you factor the amount of people that run multiple clients

Re:How many entities?

[Dunbal]

4000 in the same battle, out of 36k online in the game. There was a large battle a few weeks ago too, at least until CCP mistakenly crashed the node while trying to reinforce it with more hardware. But this one was pretty epic.

Re:How many entities?

[Anonymous Coward]

4000 entities isn't a lot.

The army runs simulations with a lot more than that. Do some research on Omni Fusion.

Re:How many entities?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're comparing military simulations with a video game? What...?

Re:How many entities?

[lytles]

not sure what an "entity" is, but it's 4000 humans acting in a coordinated manner. wouldn't be shocked if the military manages the same with war games, but doubt that it's an order of magnitude more than that (couldn't find any numbers for omni fusion). i don't play the game, but the organizational structure for these coalitions is extensive

Re: How many entities?

[Mabhatter]

4000 players is WAY more than 4000 PIECES on the board because large ships carry and command individual small fleets... So tens of thousands of pieces were in play.

Re:How many entities?

[Pino Grigio]

If you're talking "entities", I expect there were far more than that. Some players have drones out (up to 5 each, depending on their fit), some people fire missiles/bombs, which adds to the entity count, whenever a player dies he becomes a "pod" and leaves a wreck, so for each kill you transform two entities into one, etc, etc. A conservative guess would be around 10,000 entities.

Now, I've seen 100K particle simulations running at 60FPS on GPUs. I'm really not sure why CCP can't make the entire server a single core i5 2500K with an ATI 7970 and some clever DirectCompute shaders. In fact it's a complete mystery to me why nobody has tried it yet.

Re:How many entities?

[SkunkPussy]

Many of those players would have had 5 drones (mini robot spaceships) so that's potentially 24000 moving entities.

Re:Old men having fun.

[gagol]

Video games are for old kids.

FTFY.

Re:Old men having fun.

[2fuf]

Men will be kids

Yawn

[C0R1D4N]

We saw basically the same story six months ago and already discussed it.

Are we gonna put it on the front page each time they add a few people to their cap?

Re:Yawn

[Ardyvee]

Of course. Otherwise it wouldn't be slashdot. Oh, and btw, it was very fun, but man was it frustrating to try to do *anything* in the fight.

Re:Yawn

[Dunbal]

Still TiDi is better than staring at a blank screen for 30 mins before your client crashes.

Re:Yawn

[MacGyver2210]

It's not a hard cap, it changes to match actual server load. The more they 'reinforce' the node(aka put it on the good machines) the better the numbers get. Can't wait for some serious cluster upgrades on the CCP end.

Re:Yawn

[iczerjones]

Amen to that. The only thing I recall from JV1V was jumping in, then the login screen. =P

Re:Yawn

[jellomizer]

But that was a 3000 player battle. This was a 4000 player battle... It changes everything... Right?

Re:Yawn

[Andy Dodd]

Yeah. My one encounter with a Titan (which occurred 2-3 weeks before quitting the game for 5 years) was:
Fleet commander initiates a fleetwarp to the gate
I go to warp
Client hangs as grid loads
Hey look I'm at my clone station

Re:Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

CCP could easily solve their TiDi issues if they actually upgraded their systems and code. They are STILL working off 10yo code, its inefficient and their hardware needs a serious upgrade to current technology.

Re:Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

While we apologize for your having to scroll a couple hundred pixels past a story that you're not interested in, these stories generate a lot of discussion in the userbase, among people who are apparently not you.

Having 4,000 people in a single battle in any game on the internet is a big deal.

Acronyms

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the BBC didn't dare to write out what CFC actually stands for.

These big battles are a rarity

[GodfatherofSoul]

I started my account after hearing about the last huge battle a few months ago and very coincidentally uninstalled EVE the day after this battle. When the game is fun, it's great, but there's SOO much downtime in between PVP fights (PVE, PI, mining and such get old fast). CCP took the approach of more content rather than focusing on playability and new players get a truckload dumped in their laps. The UI is murder on new players and even the plugins could use a major upgrade or at least more consistency with colors. I had major friendly fire annoyances with color tags that were too close or misleading.

Game could be fun if there was more interaction, but from my experience there's a lot of spinning ships in station and yacking on Mumble. My two recommendations would be for CCP to create true CCP-sponsored corporations that stage lots of PVP and training against each other (much like the Blue and Red do) and do away with the non-functional NPC noob corps where new toons get dumped. Second, they need to improve the UI standardize that overview. The colors and codes are head scratching and sometimes *way* too similar.

The curve is just too high for people looking to have fun and not turn the game into a way of life. I felt barely competent after 4 months of play.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[DJ Rubbie]

> I felt barely competent after 4 months of play.

Try three years. Nobody is really competent in this game. If you are looking for fun in the game play you won't really find it, I've had more fun chatting with the people I met there, maybe while doing things which may or may not be tangentially related to the actual game play. It is an MMO after all.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Pinhedd]

I played EVE for years and I concur completely. It's more of a chore at times than a game. Ultimately I think that it's more fun to talk about EVE than it is to actually play EVE.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[phantomfive]

If you are looking for fun in the game play you won't really find it,

Wait, what is the purpose then, really?

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just the learning curve, and It's not even necessarily skill related. XWA, I can kick ass. Age of empires / strategy games? Very good. Sim city , resource management? I spend the hours at a time perfecting cities.

  There are no "Levels" per se, so nowhere to cap. People that play the game for 5 years will ALWAYS be better, faster, stronger, better than someone who's played for 6 months. There is an imbalance inherent in the design of the game.

Also, it's a glorified spreadsheet. Not that that is a bad thing, but you can't even turn your ship without three dropdowns.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[CFBMoo1]

Star Trek Online is no Eve by a long shot but it does have that nice and quick aspect your looking for. Doesn't take long to level up and do stuff on there from what I've messed around with. The ground combat aspect of it is iffy I think but it's got it's moments as well.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[DJ Rubbie]

Think of it as an open sandbox. There isn't any purpose to any single pile of sand, except to individuals who are creative and persistent enough to sculpt something out of it, and changes made inside the sandbox has long lasting legacy (if not impact) for future users of that sandbox.

If you think of EVE Online as a means to an end, not the end in itself, it makes much more sense. Consider that in other games, the achievements within often are the end in themselves. While being the first group to beat a raid boss in WoW might get you talked about for a week, pulling off a legendary heist or being a double agent to take down an empire results in the party responsible still being referred to many years later. This is the kind of thing that EVE Online provide that no other games out there have.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Imbalance between 5 year and 6 month players is at issue in 1-on-1. In multiplayer battles, it shouldn't be if the game is designed correctly. Not that an older player's "stuff" isn't better, but that one of many noobs shooting is highly effective.

As long as traditional levels don't come into play (someone 10+ above you, your shots bounce off them) then an old musket is still effective if it hits you.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Could. Not. Stand.

Between the warp space being idiotic and non-treky, and combat being godawfully silly (It's a freaking computer-controlled ship. Can the computer please do it instead of me button mashing and clumsily flying in circles? That is not a game to me.)

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[MacGyver2210]

As an 8-year player of EVE, I have heard this a whole lot. What you are really saying is, "I'm not good enough to play this game, waaaaaah". If you don't like it, don't play it. Much like I don't play Final Fantasy games, you're welcome not to play EVE. Some of us love it the way it is, and can appreciate where the good moments are without bitching about having to loadout ships or move assets to a system for a sov takeover.

The more you play the game, the more you get used to the interface. The good players(the real die-hards) love the UI, and know and use every inch of it. We need all of those displays for information, because otherwise we miss something important and die(not fun). You think it's bad when your Battlecruiser goes down? Imagine how we feel when our supers pop. Hell, I know people who run 4-6 clients at once, some running ships that cost over a billion isk on all of the screens. I believe the guy on the Alliance Tournament this weekend would call them 'richfags'.

The more you play, the less time you spend looking for controls and instead actually spend that time trading, building stuff, fighting, making iskies, whatever. You start to memorize components for your ships so you know exactly what equipment you want for what task. You get used to fleet formations and how to travel as a group without becoming the next Leroy Jenkins.

Don't like PVP? Go PVE, Faction Warfare, or be a Miner/Trader or something 'safe'. You can make assloads of currency with a quickness if you pay attention and know what you're doing. Shooting rocks too boring? Join a decent corp/alliance, and get in on these enormous battles. You can find some REALLY cool mods on the field after popping a few old-hat players in their special tourney ships.

It's a difficult game for sure, but the fact that you want everything just handed to you immediately with no work or waiting, having only played the game for a few months, says more about you than about the game.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[GodfatherofSoul]

And, your attitude, much like that of CCP in general I'm guessing, is why nothing changes and why EVE is a minor MMO. If you don't appeal to new players and simply dismiss criticisms of game complexity as some "l337 h4x0r IQ threshold" to keep stupid people out, EVE is going to stay right where it is. CCP seems to have this philosophy that anything that exists in the game is acceptable as an artifact of the game world. They don't have to assume everything that exists is as it was meant to be. Make it better, get more players, get more action, make more money.

And, I gave the game 4 months of my time. That's not expecting handouts.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[sheetsda]

but there's SOO much downtime in between PVP fights

I reopened my account a little under a month ago (originally quit when Diablo 3 came out, THAT game was a waste of time and money.). After two weeks back with my old alliance, spinning ships, AFKing in station, I joined a new one. Night and day. I have seen more action every day in the new alliance than all 2 weeks with the old one. The problem for me was that the old alliance had largely faded from glory and the remaining members are 80% people in a 12 hour different time zone, and located way out in the middle of where there was nothing for a lone player to shoot at. The remaining 20% were insulated in their own system 15 jumps away and own teamspeak server. They invited no one else to come with them. The new one is right in the sweet spot for my time zone, and in a much better location for PVP and quite active. There is so much PVP going on I haven't had as much time to try out the new exploration mechanics as I would like, and best of all I don't feel like I need to be on all the time so that I don't miss what little action there is.

Ultimate lesson: A new corp solved your situation in my case.

I felt barely competent after 4 months of play.

But competent nonetheless... Mastering a game ultimately makes it boring. Four months would be quite a short time scale to master any decent MMO. The deeper the game, the longer it takes.

The curve is just too high for people looking to have fun and not turn the game into a way of life

I assume you have seen this, but I will post it for the amusement of others: EVE Learning Curve

Unrelated comment: I have only recently come to realize that EVE is only cosmetically a game about space ships. Its true nature is more a game of risk versus reward. You can mine in 0.5 space and make money faster... but those suicide gankers are 2 jumps away, or you can mine in 0.9 space and make less. Make your choice and live with the consequences. Trust no one, and never undock anything you cannot afford to lose.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[dpidcoe]

Wait, what is the purpose then, really?

To do what you want and have fun. I know this is a foreign concept to veterans of other MMOs who have been brainwashed into thinking that fun == reaching endgame, but as soon as you break out of that way of thinking, a huge amount of possibilities open up.

When I started playing eve, I subscribed at the same time as 3 other friends. We formed a corp, picked a .5 system bordered by several lowsec systems, and based out of there. After about a week of playing, we announced to anyone we saw in system that we were pirates and started demanding protection money from the local miners. No one paid up, so we read up on canflipping mechanics and started stealing their ore. Then we figured out how to suicide gank and racked up quite a few expensive mining barges that way. Eventually one of us pissed off the wrong person and a rather powerful mission running corp filled with veterans who had been around for years declared war on us. We read up on wardec mechanics, and won that through by exploiting the fact that an industrial is no match for three people in competently fit pvp ships, no matter what the player ages are. That got us into the business of wardecs, and we ended up merging with another corp at about the three month mark in our eve careers. From there we spent a good three years terrorizing people in highsec for isk, with some side interests of ninja salvaging and scamming.

The end result of all of my time playing is that I legitimately ruined the lives of several people (drama queens make great targets, several corps we went after had members who are now no longer RL friends), have two scams named after my scamming character, and made some awesome online friends. And when I flew through our old home system recently after after having been unsubbed for two years, the miners apparently still remembered me. Within minutes of entering the system they all docked up and immediately began cussing me out in local chat, so apparently I made a lasting impression on them.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

is why nothing changes and why EVE is a minor MMO

And you're the sort that's left the industry in decline, having pouted and raged and thrown temper tantrums demanding all games be World of Warcraft.

The genre is littered with the corpses of games and studios destroyed by your insanity.

EVE's players and developers are generally quite thrilled at where EVE is. For good reason.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

This is how you get 2-3 million new players who hang around for 2-3 months, get bored and leave.
In the mean time you've destroyed the game for the existing player base who are now forced to fly around in Hello Kitty livery and can't shoot each other anymore.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd never play a MMO but the stories that come out of it are awesome

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that EVE is a great way to be an asshole?

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Sprouticus]

Sounds like you get off on being a dick. Which is cool if that floats your boat, but it is exactly why I never played Eve.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Dominare]

Nobody is really competent in this game.

Certainly not comprehensively so. EVE is just too big and too complex, and even the various roles that divide PvP combat are diverse enough that skill at one doesn't necessarily mean skill at another. Then you've got trading, industry, wormhole exploration, lowsec piracy, the list is massive. It is definitely possible to become competent in some things, it isn't really feasible to be good at everything.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you get off on being a dick. Which is cool if that floats your boat, but it is exactly why I never played Eve.

He also never gets rafted or blown up himself, so he's a liar too.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/4456/learningcurve4.jpg

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if that is to "advanced" for the on-board computer, those ships are supposed to have highly trained crew numbering in the hundreds per ship. I thought the whole point of being captain was DELEGATING, not doing it all yourself.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is a blathering moron. You dont study wardec mechanics and 'win them' by exploiting the fact that a single industrial, something for hauling ore, can be beat by 3 pvp fitted ships...

Can flipping mechanics? You open the can and take the ore, then you are flagged as free to kill by the owner of that can for a brief period of time. Let me guess, you ran and hid in station?

Nor are any new players going to beat any like number of senior players in any real engagement, they dont have the skills to equip the better mods and fly the better ships. It is non-sense.

Right though, you were a bad ass pirate popping miners, we get it.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[timeOday]

Geez, wouldn't it be more fun, and probably easier, to just start a business in real life?

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is an imbalance than why could this happen? (sorry for the low quality)
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCc3kwxOfWc

Band of Brothers has their 'perfect' and expensive veteran ships.
Star Fraction bought 10 Toraxes, which are almost noob ships (in an 50 Level MMO, you would get this at level 10, right after the tutorial).

Band of Brothers get completely owned.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

There are people who like challenges and people who like casual play. I really hated the way other MMOs went to become easier and try to be the next WoW. I don't know how the state of the game is today, but when I started EVE the background stories were fun and it really wasn't a hard game to play. Really. A little bit reading and geometry is everything you needed. And if you missed out on that in school people like me were eager to provide examples why your gun needs to turn a lot faster for an object in close orbit than distant orbit. There was no magic in EVE and the math behind the space mechanics known. It weren't a lot formulas and there were websites which did all the calculating for you. The challenge in EVE was to make your ideas work out under stress and work the human provided market. And for many people there was also a challenge in bigger isn't better (Using real big guns (slow turning) on small fast orbiting ships for example is quite futile).

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be a badass. /s

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[rtb61]

Interestingly enough that is the sort of game play that certain three letter organisations look for when it comes to matching people's real world actions with their game actions. Not that all game players that do bad things in game, do bad things in real life but people who do bad things in life inevitably do bad things in game.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the way of describing exactly the sort of person that people pay to escape from in The Real Life.

It's a sort of ultimate irony to discover after millenia of escapist fantasies that all we really needed to do was convinced the criminals, despots, tyrants, sociopaths and assholes to pay to be the escapists...

Lesson learned: I'm staying the cunting fuck away from EVE and urging everyone I know to do so as well.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

If you pull the sort of shit in Real Life that you do in EVE, you'd find that your little business is smuggling stuff in your ass in jail.

And that's a good thing. Video games have inadvertently stumbled upon a contributing solution to a larger problem plaguing gaming culture. CCP runs the MMO culture's prison system. They call it EVE Online. The most brilliant design idea CCP has had wasn't in the design of the game itself, it was in convincing the criminals to pay for their own incarceration and separation from the rest of the MMO population and all of this without a penny of cost from the taxpayer...

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahah 4 months, i have done research on war-targets for longer.
Time in eve does not work like the other mmos.
You simply aren't good enough,.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell you what, don't interact with anyone IRL either. Assholes are everywhere, more than you know. You gotta put up with it.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[gbjbaanb]

amen - the guy proudly says he lost several real-life friendships over this crap, and you think he might be the kind of guy who'll go to work one day with a shotgun? Well, I don't know, but it does seem he gets off much more with the notoriety than he does with human empathy.

Maybe we'll read about him in a few years when they catch him with a few body parts hacked up in his basement. But it'll be ok, 'cos he'll have made a load of great online friends while he was doing it.

Maybe EVE isn't the gaming role model we really want to encourage. Or maybe the problem with EVE is that its completely wild, they need a NPC federal marshal system to restrict the damage the outlaws can get away with, then they might learn something about real life interaction too that having an "I win" button isn't as much fun as it appears to the childish mind.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

You know all about that. Don't you, asshole?

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

the guy proudly says he lost several real-life friendships over this crap

No, it sounds like he said he ruined other peoples' friendship by disrupting their corporate activities. Still nothing to be proud of per se, but there is a distinction.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I loved EVE. I also quit after one or two years. There are some fundamental gameplay designs that just did not work for me.

I don't know if it has been changed recently, but when I was playing, doing missions and other PVE content required a very different loadout from PVP. A PVP loadout required many more 'trick' modules while PVE mainly required tank and offense. This is a problem if you get attacked while you are flying this PVE loadout since even if you want to fight him off in a fun match, it's just not possible as you are not flying the right ship and the aggressor will always have the advantage.

The only solo solution is to avoid the fight, get into a station and hop into a different ship/loadout, after which chances are your target has long gone elsewhere to seek easier prey. So all that happened is some guy wasted your time (time you were using to earn money) and you didn't even get a fun fight out of it.

Another solution is to call in aid from friends who happen to be flying PVP ships at the moment and try to lure your target into a fair fight or ambush. Chances are your attacker will do the same, ad-infinitum. The huge battles we hear about occasionally are just this on a larger scale.

The end result is that PVP is only really fun for those who focus on PVP and/or community all the time and instantly switching between PVP and PVE is not really possible. There really are precious little fun things to do in EVE if you are a loner (not interested in joining a corp/alliance) since all the cool stuff requires investment into a corp (worm-holing) or an alliance. (nulsec)

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Krommenaas]

What makes you assume he wants there to be changes and more players? Apparently he's very happy with the game just the way it is now.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

... the mind boggles. do you genuinely have nothing better to do with your life than spend four months "researching war-targets" on EVE?

No, wait, I end up as big an idiot as you because we're talking about it on /.

I think I'm going to drown myself now.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been fairly competent at Eve-O, and so has my corp. It could be said that we were doing excessively well.

But I'll assure you, you'll be playing Eve like it's a job. Spreadsheets and numbers and crunch hours and often weird work times. It's actually tiring to be good...
 

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

EVE is a minor MMO

Nope. 4000 players in one battle on the same server is not minor. It does not matter if some MMO has millions of players if those players can not interact with each other.

EVE is the most massive MMO there is, because only players on the same server shard count towards "massively multiplayer".

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

There definitely are professional assholes, like dpidcoe, in Eve, but they're a small minority. They just couldn't exist without a large body of 'nice' people to prey on. I've been playing eve for about three months now, and the only times I've had any unwanted pvp action have been trips into lowsec (and one can claim that visiting lowsec is asking for pvp confrontations). Gankers and can-flippers in Eve are like panhandlers IRL: some of them can be annoying, but for the most part they're pathetic and easily avoided. They tend to think they're the ones "winning" Eve, while they sit spinning in a station waiting for their criminal status to wear off, but everyone ends up with his own way to win.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez, wouldn't it be more fun, and probably easier, to just start a business in real life?

To start a business in real life requires investment of more than $20/month. To start a business in real life requires more time than 2 hours a day. To start a business in real life involves a host of unquantifiable risks and some means of distinguishing your business individually. All products in Eve are completely commoditized, so competition is solely on price and profitability is formulaic.

Eve is a business simulator, in the same way that SimCity is a government simulator or Duck Hunt is a hunting simulator. It facilitates the fantasy of being a big-time tycoon by shielding you from the actual hard parts of being a big-time tycoon. Come to think of it, that's kind of what most games do.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell? If you can't stand the heat stay out of the kitchen. It's a game! You sound like the kind of people I would never ever play board games with. The kind who actually get offended when I backstab them in game, and who take grudges to next games. If someone gets mad IRL over a game i'd say it's good to lose them, as they clearly take the game too seriously. Games offer a great way of acting completely different than you would in real life. In games you can also act with all kinds of ways at the same time by playing multiple characters, it's called a mmoRpg, for a reason. Makes a really boring game if everyone plays lawfull good.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

.. What?

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[delt0r]

Your doing just fine without eve.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[delt0r]

So why should it be easy? Why should it be easy for a 3 month account to blast a 3 year account? Why should they not behave they way they do? You seem to think there is a such a thing as a "correct" attitude... which probably translates more closely to "things should be the way i want them to be and i should win".

Eve is a lot of things. But its not a minor MMO.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Pino Grigio]

Eve doesn't discriminate against arseholes. Think of it as a public service: Because all of the arseholes are playing Eve, they aren't in any of your other games pissing you off.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[CronoCloud]

STO needs voice command capability, that would help. Instead of the player hitting the "Evasive Action" hotbar button, you could say, Kirk/Picard/Janeway style: Helm, Evasive Action.

Instead of manually tweaking power levels, you could say: Power to Shields/Weapons/Aux/Engines.

Sure it would sound silly to those you live with, but it would be Awesome.

You can turn on autofire/target for weapons, that helps.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Pino Grigio]

I don't change my personality suddenly when I go online and I try to avoid the kind of people that do, because I know that they haven't changed their personality at all. In my experience arseholes in games are arseholes out of them too.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-most-impressive-dick-moves-in-online-gaming-history/

Check out the story for #1, Mittani is the epitome of douchebaggery, and the best part is he was the chairman of the player council. I predict a very successful career in politics for this young man.

Capcha: drones

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[CronoCloud]

The UI is murder on new players and even the plugins could use a major upgrade or at least more consistency with colors.

I'm mostly a console gamer so I've not played EVE, but having a PS3 means I've tried Dust514 and CCP simply can't do good UI.

Dust514 UI was murder. Not the actual gameplay UI, but the out of battle UI.

Also the last time I played you couldn't have different settings for vehicle and personal combat. Which sucked if you liked playing with mouse aiming but liked having inverted Y with vehicles.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Pino Grigio]

Learn to do PvE in your PvP ship.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not doing fine at anything, look at the other comments everyone else sees what the AC you responded to saw. You seem to be the only one that doesn't see the troubling behavior pattern. Which suggests you might have the same affliction.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

You didin't give it much of a try. I have been playing it for 7 years and I find new and interesting stuff all the time. I'm constantly learning something new, and if I want battles, I can get in battles every day.

If you only want ot be in mega battles, those take time to plan out.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

He was just givin an example of many posibilities. other players dedicate themselves to trades, cargo runs, exploration, bounty hunting, covert operations, scouting, drug manufacturing and drug running, pirating, militia, etc. etc. etc.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[ProzacPatient]

My problem is that coming from a game like X3: Terran Conflict I just couldn't get into a game like EVE because it felt more like a Facebook game rather then an epic space game.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Atrox Canis]

I doubt you'd be interested in impressing me but if you were to have told a bunch of stories about how you did good guy things and helped the other players defend themselves against the pirates and came back after a long absence to the applause and cheering of the miners, then I would be impressed.

It's not how you do the things you do in game it's what you do that matters.

I don't give two rat farts what you do in game, but bragging about being a dick then berating people that call what you do dickish seems churlish at best.

That "it's a game and nobody knows who I am so I can beat them up with impunity" mentality is pervasive in EVE. Because some people choose not to participate and consider that attitude as unacceptable is a lifestyle choice. You could be more tolerant of their views and just let it go.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[sg_oneill]

Check out the story for #1, Mittani is the epitome of douchebaggery, and the best part is he was the chairman of the player council. I predict a very successful career in politics for this young man.

That whole story kind of is exagurated. Mittens isn't really such a bad guy IRL, he just just sort of screwed up an eve fan fest tradition in a *spectacularly* drunken way. Basically pirates reading out angry in-game messages from miners was who had been ganked was sort of a tradition in the fanfests, and so Mittani had a particularly messed up one he had been sent. Problem was with a head full of booze he revealed some personal details about the guy and then made fun of what had sounded like a suicide threat from the dude. It *was* a douchey move, but it wasn't as out of context or unprecedented as it sounded, except for where he went over the line.

The sad part is, Mittani isn't actually a nasty or malevolent guy in real life, he just plays one in game as his role-playing character, and unfortunately drunk he role-played it a bit too hard and broke the magic-circle between eve super-villian and real life villian that most eve players instinctively treat as a bright line in the sand.

Eve online does generate some fairly messed up content, but its almost always role play. Just be careful of that roleplay after a few too many beers!

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[dywolf]

EVE is the closest to a real world sim (and real world economy too) that any MMO has gotten.

you have people who play spies, covert ops, merchents, miners, bounty hunters, corporate fat cats, lowly daily to day workers. hell, people have played hiddens ecret agent, joining an opposing corp undercover, working their way up to a trusted position (talkng multiple years), and then leaving with the keys to the vault and their brand new Titan ship.

that's the whole point: rather than following a predetermined path, the world of EVE is completely player driven, and you see a lot of emergent behaviour that mimics real life.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to keep bringing it back to this: but Eve is a great reflection on life in many ways.

"I'm 13, I put 13 years into this damn 'game of life', I DESERVE more!"
"I've worked for 15 years doing X, I deserve a raise!"
"I've been married for 30 years, I don't deserve my wife leaving me!"

People deserve nothing. No matter how much work you put into ANYTHING, one should never have a "right" to anything. Life, like a game, is a social experience. You can make of it what you will, within a set bound of "rules" and "limits" (Limits being law, consequence, etc, rules being laws of physics etc).

If you don't like a game being hard, go play another. Hundreds of thousands of people have started and stopped playing Eve Online, and many more will come and go. It's not a game for everyone, but it's funny how often it totally changes one's opinion about how an MMO SHOULD be.

I'm not a hardcore gamer by any far stretch. But I can appreciate that 4000+ _PEOPLE_ showed up and spent time shooting at (and repping) each other for hours: in a single game.

Try running anything that computationally (3D Space, time, modules on every individual ship, keeping track of kill-mails, etc) intensive with that many people, and tell me:
"that's not a huge accomplishment for computing!"

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[phorm]

Better in a game than in real-life. No cheating or cussing out other players were mentioned. Just good ol' fashion tactics and possibly a mental games.
Sounds like fair-game to me.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[dpidcoe]

I don't give two rat farts what you do in game, but bragging about being a dick then berating people that call what you do dickish seems churlish at best.

I'm not sure if that was directed at me, but I haven't berated anyone in this thread. I would suggest you re-read it while paying careful attention to the names.

That "it's a game and nobody knows who I am so I can beat them up with impunity" mentality is pervasive in EVE.

This is the part I find odd. Just because we blew someone up ingame doesn't mean we also want to slash their tires IRL. However, you seem to imply that the people who are victims of players like me would be completely justified in beating me up over actions taken ingame? And then it's implied (not necessarily by you) that I'm some kind of psychopath because of my ingame actions (which stay ingame). Double standard much?

Also, I never once saw anyone who I harassed in game make any kind of credible attempt to get even or get revenge. The closest thing someone did was make a bunch of profiles on a gay support group with the same usernames as our eve characters and then start spamming with them. If RL addresses were tied to eve accounts, I still would have done the things that I did in my 3 years of playing. It would be hilarious if someone got mad enough over actions taken in a computer game (actions the game developers fully intended to happen) that they felt the need to show up at my house and make physical threats.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Gaming is about being a dick. My Paladin is a dick to those orcs. My yellow sphere guy is a dick to those ghosts, stealing (and eating!!!) their sacred burial dots. My upward-shooting base defender is a dick to those space invaders trying to retake their home planet. I stole the giant gorilla's girlfriend. I killed the buzzard riders. I shot down the zeppelin. I played the "ancient" card on the dragon that my munchkin opponent was about to overpower. I played the TV card on the guy who was about get nookie. They're Dick Games.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[drinkypoo]

Sadly, what they are doing is reinforcing negative traits. They're practicing being assholes. Video games aren't inherently harmful as a whole, but if you don't think there's negative repercussions to being a negative person regardless of the venue then you're engaging in self-delusion.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[dpidcoe]

This guy is a blathering moron. You dont study wardec mechanics and 'win them' by exploiting the fact that a single industrial, something for hauling ore, can be beat by 3 pvp fitted ships...

That was a weeks worth of action condensed into one sentence since the post was getting pretty long. If you want a slightly fuller version of the story:
We were all less than 3 month old players. 5 million was still a hefty amount to us. A mission running and industry corp full of players (40+) in the 2 year+ range wardeced our corp, which had 4 people in it. The biggest thing one of us could fly was a BC. The rest of us were in cruisers. The aggressor corp was dumb and apparently didn't bother to warn their members that the wardec was going through. Rather than be intimidated and not log in for a week (most people did this in my experience), we checked up on the forums and made sure we understood the mechanics right (this was our first wardec, remember we've only been playing for ~2 months), then flew 20 jumps to the enemy corps HQ (which happened to be a mission hub, though we didn't really know a lot about mission hubs at the time). In the 15 minutes before the dec went live, we found several of them mining in different belts. We all picked a target, then sat there and waited for the dec to go live (I think one of us even started chatting, pretended to be clueless, and offered to defend them from the belt rats). We got several industrial kills in the first minute, then got lucky and snagged someone on a gate who was returning with a mission item. They were all pretty confused, and we explained to them that their CEO had wardecced us and apparently not informed them. We were also messaged by a neutral in a battleship who wanted some action, so we fleeted up to give him wardec agro (yes it used to work that way, and it was hilarious, search "lofty scam") and watched him alpha the CEO when he undocked. From there we avoided fighting anyone in an actual pvp ship and concentrated on their industrials (why they flew them during a wardec I have no idea, though we didn't realize how dumb they were at the time). They let it expire in the next week, and I'm pretty sure everyone was rather upset at their CEO for thinking he could kick around 4 newbie pirates.

Can flipping mechanics? You open the can and take the ore, then you are flagged as free to kill by the owner of that can for a brief period of time. Let me guess, you ran and hid in station?

And you've just illustrated why understanding can flipping mechanics is important. If you take from a can, you're flagged to that players corp (consider NPC corps a one-man corp), not the player. It's only when the player shoots you that you're flagged to the player. Knowing this (keep in mind this is when I'd been playing for about a month, I had a cruiser and thought it was amazing and expensive), I once stole some ore, let the guy shoot me for about 30 seconds, then docked up. This meant that while the corp timer had 14:30 left on it, his personal agro timer, which was refreshing every hit, had 15:00. I undocked with 10 seconds left on the corp timer, then didn't move in order to keep my 30 seconds of undock invulnerability. After the undock invuln was up, the guy began shooting at me, which was fine because he still had personal agro. Upon seeing him shoot, his corpmates all assumed it was ok for them to do so and clicked through the concord warning to open fire, resulting in all of them being concorded. Another corpmate undocked with some remote reps on a destroyer, which gave me just enough of an edge to kill the last remaining guy while the rest raged in local.

In this case, lack of understanding of how those agro mechanics worked is what got the mining corp killed.

Nor are any new players going to beat any like number of senior players in any real engagement, they dont have the skills to equip the better mods and fly the better ships. It is non-sense.

All

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

>Maybe we'll read about him in a few years when they catch him with a few body parts hacked up in his basement.

I think I speak for everyone when I say I hope it's the other way around. And it very well could be, with an attitude like that.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

"Make it better, get more players, get more action, make more money."
That attitude worked for McDonalds. They make the best burger in the world right?

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

"To start a business in real life requires investment of more than $20/month. To start a business in real life requires more time than 2 hours a day. To start a business in real life involves a host of unquantifiable risks and some means of distinguishing your business individually."

So basically what youre saying is is that youre a cheap lazy chickenshit.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

As an 8-year player of EVE, I have heard this a whole lot. What you are really saying is, "I'm not good enough to play this game, waaaaaah".

Jerking your ePeen is sad enough. Bragging about it on the internet is downright pathetic. I for one am glad we have a game like EVE around. Keeps the aholes in their own little corner. The fact that they stay there for a whole 8 years, although laughable in its own right, is a big plus. Really, I adore EVE, and I've never even played it.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[phorm]

Part of games and entertainment is separating the game from real life. Shooting people in the head isn't going to go over well in RL (well, unless you're a marine sniper on deployment), but in many games you're not going to get very far without it.

In Eve, it seems that various sneaky traits are consistent with the game universe. It's not all about a head-on attack with lasers blazing, the economics and conspiracy seem to play a pretty strong part in the game. Much like a character in a sci-fi novel or movie, when playing the game you'll have to take the risks: is this guy for real, a snitch, a sneak or a thief?

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[GNious]

I've seen EvE being described as not a game, but as an experiment to see if you could get people to hold an extra, unpaid job.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

Role Playing Game. There's a clue there. And at the end of the day there's always Hello Kitty ;)

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Pino Grigio]

Role playing an arsehole, mostly because it's harder to get away with in real life without losing your front teeth?

Sounds about right.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[delt0r]

Yea, everyone is so nice here on /., reddit even nicer. The nicest bunch of people on the internet is of course 4chan. Oh wait not its all the same. WoW teenagers, vocie chat on just about any xbox game. Its the fwad theory of the internet. Eve is not an exception. And its not for pussies.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Anonymous Coward]

you set those colors your whining about so your confusion is your own fault

if you live in null and cant find a fight you arent looking for one

and when you quit or get booted from your corp where do the people go? npc corps of course

Eve is a game where you are in charge of your destiny guess you want a WOW experience where they guide you thru the content Eve is for self motivated gamers

and yes these big battles are rare

hell they will need months to rebuild all the lost ships assuming the components are already mined and built

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[Atrox Canis]

I replied to AC, you posted as AC. I posted not as AC. Perhaps you should consider not posting as AC. Next, no I did not imply real world response to in game actions. Reading comprehension is important.

Re:These big battles are a rarity

[dpidcoe]

I didn't post as AC.

Play by E-Mail ediition

[Anonymous Coward]

Next up, in order to fight lag, all new major alliance wars will be conducted as Play by E-Mail.

Re:Play by E-Mail ediition

[perpenso]

Next up, in order to fight lag, all new major alliance wars will be conducted as Play by E-Mail.

Actually in the very early 90s that is close to how EVE-like games worked. For the one a friend wrote and operated it was a big open ended turn based game that had one turn per day. It was EVE-like in the sense that it was space based, involved exploration, exploitation, trade, alliances, government (security and taxation), pirates, smuggling, etc.

Re:Play by E-Mail ediition

[iczerjones]

Indeed. VGA planets? Trade Wars? Barren Realms Elite? EVE is a beautiful step forward for the genre and is easily the best game I don't have time to play. (though I still manage occasionally much to the dismay of my lady friend)

Re:Play by E-Mail ediition

[Sprouticus]

Sounds like VGA planets to me. Man I miss that game. Play by Email, 11 races, excellent special abilities and functions, fairly easy to run and automate. Very slick for its time.

It was the one example I can give where an entire game franchise was destroyed by a virus (primary programmer was infected and it killed his 90% complete new version). Sure he had no backup, but it was 1994 or '95, and it was a one man operation. He eventually recreated a VGAP 4.0, but it never caught on like the 3.5 version did.

Re:Play by E-Mail ediition

[Veroxii]

Try http://planets.nu/ if you want to relive that nostalgia.

Pretty nifty reimplementation which is 100% web based.

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[AdamWill]

Real world is noticeably lacking in large-scale space battles (at least, to the best of our knowledge). Swings, roundabouts...

Re:Who cares

[Andy Prough]

You do. Only a complete lack of response would show otherwise.

And then you hid your screen name, afraid that others will find out that you actually care.

Which means that you not only care - you care whether others perceive that you care. And you try to obscure it by pretending not to care.

Amazing that you have time to think of anything else, actually.

slowed game time...

[Anonymous Coward]

In just the affected areas, or serverwide?

I do like to log into EVE and do some hi-sec space trucking and trading from time to time

Re:slowed game time...

[Dunbal]

Just the affected server. The game is hosted on basically a supercomputer consisting of many blade servers and other hardware. Usually when a battle like this happens everything else on that server gets slowed down too (maybe 10 solar systems or so), and the devs try to move all non-essential stuff off the server, or even try to move the fight to their fastest hardware. It's safe to say, however, that most of the rest of the game was not affected at all by this battle, although its repercussions will be felt in the next few weeks as increased demand for "building blocks" on the EVE in-game market. Everything in the game is built by players from very basic materials that are harvested and then assembled through many intermediate components into final products. Demand will be going up to replace today's losses. Happy days.

Does this mean CCP have made EvE fun now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just checking - is EvE Online fun now?

At 10% play speed (YAY KGO TD) I would just imagine it being ten time more frustrating trying to get a anything done.

Y'know virtualisation offers a way they could have approached the load so it remained closer to 100% normal performance, but I hear CCP don't do VMs.

Re:Does this mean CCP have made EvE fun now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than the old days where the server couldn't keep up and you had a 10% chance of your ship commands actually executing.
And not finding out if it did trigger for minutes.
And sitting there giving commands for 15 minutes after your ship exploded because you didn't know.

Re:Old men having fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

kids (of the male kind, usually) will be men.

FTFY

Re:Who cares

[Cosgrach]

As are you.

Re:Who cares

[perpenso]

The aliens who are monitoring the video game and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)

Lag vs 'playing fair'

[Anonymous Coward]

Laggy gameplay may seem unacceptable these days, BUT massively multiplayer games without lag have to cheat like crazy. Even classic online FPS games like 'Enemy Territory', with only a handful of players on each side, use 'predictive' techniques to make the experience appear smooth at the cost of true accuracy.

I think EVE Online takes the attitude that the players must see and be able to respond to a 'universal' truth, not a synthetic client-side 'truth' that merely attempts to be convincing enough to most players. Clearly the game is so popular because it actually bothers to notice what really matters to its core audience.

Of course, this being so, there is ZERO achievement when the parent company handles a battle of any given size. "Our system simply slows down under stress" is no kind of technical achievement whatsoever. So, why is the story worth reporting? Because a record number of players fancied a rumble? The BBC is the world's most crap news site of repute (repute with the sheeple, that is), and is never worth using as a reference.

Interesting things have happened in EVE Online, and many have been mentioned here. They almost always have to do with unique meta-aspects of the game. "Biggest battle evar11!!!!!1!1!" is no news whatsoever, unless there is some amazing backstory to the event, or some extraordinary aftermath.

Re:Lag vs 'playing fair'

[dpidcoe]

Of course, this being so, there is ZERO achievement when the parent company handles a battle of any given size. "Our system simply slows down under stress" is no kind of technical achievement whatsoever. So, why is the story worth reporting? Because a record number of players fancied a rumble?

I think you misunderstand how their system works. When an event such as 4000 players in the same place at the same time all shooting at each other happens (no other MMO has come close to doing this), time in the game actually slows down in order to allow the servers to process everything. Now even though your ship is traveling at 300m/s, it will take it 10 seconds in realtime to travel 300 meters ingame. If your gun cycles in 6 seconds, it now takes it 1 minute of realtime to cycle. Game balance is unaffected, since everything scales at the same time.

It's also notable in that it fails gracefully. As more players enter the system, TDI begins to kick in and everything slows down in proportion to the server load. Eventually the server will crash if enough people show up. However, it's a huge improvement over abrupt crashes and/or disconnects once some load (I think they could semi-smoothly get to around ~600 people pre-TDI) over the more traditional system they used to use (which is still used by pretty much every other mmo out there).

Snore fest

[aoism]

Before I tried out Eve, I thought these epic space battles were technological breakthroughs. At the time, I was playing WoW was was restricted to 40 players and some mobs up at once. When I actually played Eve, I was quickly disillusioned. There are not many real-time controls in the game. You pick an action, then when the game decides when it's time, it executes it. It's a queuing system and it's nearly turn-based, like Civilization. You aren't controlling your space craft in real time. I am not as experienced as a lot of you guys are and you may have other input, but I quickly gave it up because it was boring as hell to do something then wait 10 seconds until it completed.

Re:Snore fest

[Anonymous Coward]

I love to ask EVE players how to get my joystick to work with the game.

Re:Snore fest

[Dunbal]

This lets you focus on the core of the game. Strategy and tactics. It's not a flight simulator. Which guns will you fit on your ship, at what range will you engage, which ships do you not bother engaging and run away from, what skills you have, what skills you need to fight more efficiently.....

Re:Snore fest

[aoism]

Totally. I am not knocking folks who enjoy that kind of game at all :) I think, if anything, is a pretty accurate simulation of what space would be like. Empty, quiet, not much action except on a few bases and sectors where there were resources. The newbie help channel was very beneficial -- the best community support in any game I've played (rightfully so, the UI is crazy). I was mostly speaking from a server technology standpoint. I marveled at how some random company could do better to handle user load than old guard Blizzard when it comes to MMOs, and I found the painful truth :)

Re:Snore fest

[westlake]

You pick an action, then when the game decides when it's time, it executes it. It's a queuing system and it's nearly turn-based, like Civilization. You aren't controlling your space craft in real time.

sounds close to what real space ship combat would be like.

Re:Snore fest

[GodfatherofSoul]

Actually, I like that aspect. It simulates how a ship commander works. It's analogous to Warcraft III. You put one peon to work, and he does it until you tell him otherwise. Just like me, you probably assumed you'd by flying the ship like a simulator such as X-Wing.

Re:Snore fest

[MacGyver2210]

Your complaint is so generic, I feel like I'm reading about someone complaining that they have to move a mouse to click on something. How abstract and ubiquitous of a concept can you find to bitch about? As was said, it's not a flight simulator. Your job is to fly to the right place, lend your guns to the right team, and make better decisions than the other team. You are a pawn that trains to become a better piece. Like in Chess, you can't win if you're playing as a pawn all alone.

Would it be amazing if you could fly first-person in a cockpit? Hell yes. Has CCP toyed with the idea? You bet. Will it ruin the general gameplay of EVE to implement it? Most likely. In case you were unaware, though, you can manually fly your ship in EVE by double-clicking in space in the direction you want it to fly. You can adjust the speed by clicking the readout, and stop your ship at any time with CTRL+Space. That's pretty real-time to me.

Re:Snore fest

[iczerjones]

As a frequent nano pilot, I beg to differ. Double click on a point in space, you fly there. Control you engine throttle manually, activate weapons, shield boosters, cap charges, warp scramble opponents, adjust transversal.. You call an action, it occurs. In any other game, you press button, thing happens. Are you instead referring to the lack of a flight stick style control method? If so then yes, you are correct. There is no flight stick or controller input. Are you perhaps talking about warping? That is a bit different as part of the game mechanics dictates that when you select a warp to target, you warp drive has to 'spin up' before you leave grid. This ensures you, as a potential victim, can't just run away without proper planning. Part of that whole 'risk-reward' system that EVE does so well. The controls are definitely real time, though I do understand your position. The EVE style of input is definitely something that takes getting used to. It is not Wing Commander. Well, unless you are flying an interceptor, that is. ;)

Re:Snore fest

[Dominare]

In EVE you're the captain, not the helmsman. If you're looking to wiggle your joystick, I'd recommend the Freespace series.

Re:Snore fest

[X.25]

Before I tried out Eve, I thought these epic space battles were technological breakthroughs. At the time, I was playing WoW was was restricted to 40 players and some mobs up at once. When I actually played Eve, I was quickly disillusioned. There are not many real-time controls in the game. You pick an action, then when the game decides when it's time, it executes it. It's a queuing system and it's nearly turn-based, like Civilization. You aren't controlling your space craft in real time. I am not as experienced as a lot of you guys are and you may have other input, but I quickly gave it up because it was boring as hell to do something then wait 10 seconds until it completed.

Hahahaha.

Sure thing mate, orbit and F1, right?

You haven't played EVE at all if you think that you don't control your ship in real-time.

Re:Snore fest

[delt0r]

I play eve. I like eve. I do physics. Eve is a game and is so far away from accurate simulation of anything. So much so that my physics and pilot background sometimes make it hard for me to understand why some of my fights go pear shaped. I am working out the mechanics. But its not accurate in any way or form.

And if it was, it would be so stupidly boring that no one would ever play it.

Re:Snore fest

[Anne_Nonymous]

Submarine simulators may also not be your cup of tea.

Re:Snore fest

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes time to start a car engine, to make a phone call, to let the TV warm up, or your computer to boot up. The modules in EVE are based on the same real world principles.

Guns take time to reload, to track, takes time for your ship to build up speed, or to line up with the set course.

Re:Snore fest

[phorm]

Possibly Vendetta Online, which is more in the MMO genre.

Re:Snore fest

[Anonymous Coward]

Or Vendetta Online:

http://vendetta-online.com/

Re:Snore fest

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically the idea is that in Eve you ARE the ship. You are the only crew, you are in a fluid filled pod and your brain is directly connected to every system on board. In the Eve universe this situation is the exception rather than the rule however, this is not considered to be the case for npc ships, possibly with concorde as an exception though I'm not sure.

Re:Snore fest

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi.

not too sure what you mean by real time: are you talking when the rare cases when TiDi is on and events are paced at 10% speed,? this concerns only the huge fights hundreds of people,at least 1000 in system

otherwise the controls respond at a click like any other game (server has to ack and apply) or we would die way too often,

just to correct misinformation :)

Re:Snore fest

[Yggdrasil42]

That's not really true. In Eve lore the capsuleer becomes the mind of the ship but crew are still required on a ship to perform certain tasks. A ship captained by a capsuleer simply requires fewer crew than a non-capsuleer's ship (such as an NPC ship).

The mininum number of crew ranges from 0 (shuttle) to thousands (titan). The exact number depends on ship type but also on the faction that designed the ship. Some have more or better automation, hence requiring fewer crew.

In actual gameplay the crew are never encountered or play any role in the mechanics.

See http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/New_Eden_crew_guidelines for details.

Re:Snore fest

[cwsumner]

In EVE you're the captain, not the helmsman. If you're looking to wiggle your joystick, I'd recommend the Freespace series.

Or try the EgoSoft X-Universe series, current version "X3, Albion Prelude". (also on steam)
Single Player Only, so there are not many griefers. (Still a few, though. 8-) )
Flight simulation where you are always flying a ship, but with data displays of other places and things.
Can also give commands to your other ships and stations, to run on their own.
But the NPCs are independent operators and can produce "Emergent Behavior", so it can get surprising sometimes.
The control interface is still a "bear", but it works well once you get used to it.
Own more than one ship. Lots of them.
Own more than one station. Lots of them.
Do what ever you feel like, or follow a "quest".
Write your own command programs for ships and stations.
Good to play for years. The "multi-player" interaction is still there, on the game forum at EgoSoft.

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[Anonymous Coward]

..... Real worlds. You know, the kind with actual girls you can talk to and touch (if you're lucky). I guess for the typical EVE online players, they'll stick with virtual women because it's the closest they can get.

Many EVE online players have far more experience with women than you. They are merely married, get close every night but don't get to touch nearly as much as they would like. So they have plenty of time for video games.

If you ever see a graph of video gamer ages you will typically see two spikes, one at about age 15 and another at about age 35. Get back to us when you are 35 and let us know how studly your life is when you are married and have kids.

All those moments will be lost in time...

[Gabest]

like tears in rain...

Re:All those moments will be lost in time...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Welcome to City of Heroes :(

Not only that, but they kicked the base-builders in the balls.

Look at all the wonderful Minecraft things people have made. Now imagine Minecraft's parent company saying, "Oh well. We're shutting you down, go play something else we make", and they shut down all the servers and everybody's painstaking constructions over months and years evaporated.

Thanks, Perfect World. You couldn't even sell it to the EverQuest people to maintain it in slow mode along with 30 other old properties.

Re:All those moments will be lost in time...

[serviscope_minor]

Well, you don't need the minecraft home servers to play offline. For offline only play it's entirely DRM free. Also, the server I plays on is regularly backed up, and when they hit the reset button (once a year or so), they leave the old world up for single player download.

In other words, even without hacked servers, the worlds will still be accessible long after Mojang bites the dust.

Re:All those moments will be lost in time...

[damnbunni]

This used to be true. However, with the 1.6.2 launcher update I can't play the game at all, even single player on my own machine, without logging in to Mojang's servers.

Theoretically it's supposed to have a 'play offline' button if there's no network connection, but it doesn't work for me or any of my friends.

Re:All those moments will be lost in time...

[CronoCloud]

you have to turn off the auto-login feature, THEN you can play your single player game without logging in.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Aha! Nice starfighter reference. :D

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[Dunbal]

Funny, I have been living with a girl for the past 5 years and just got engaged to be married. Pretty much everyone else I know in game has a girlfriend and a social life. A lot of us are professionals too, myself included (I'm a doctor). I think you've got the wrong demographic.

Re:Old men having fun.

[gagol]

For the record, not judging here, simply observing. I have to confess I am sometime an old kid myself (usually around christmas...)

What is that in electricity?

[Required Snark]

Any idea of how many kilowatt hours it consumed? CPU hours? Bandwidth?

Pull it together, Slashdot. If this is "News for Nerds" then let's go full nerdgasm!

"Set the Mertilizer on Deep Fat Fry!" -- Spaceman Spiff

Re:What is that in electricity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, 500W per computer, 4000 computers, and a two hour long battle = 2MW, 4MWh

Re:4000 players? lol

[Dunbal]

4000 players. And their missiles/shots/drones/fighters also need to be tracked. At any time you might have up to 20 objects flying around tied to a single player, so you're tracking 80,000 things in real time. You say you can do that on a 286. OK. Pics, or it didn't happen.

And now for the Ioncaine powder~

[Guppy]

Amazing that you have time to think of anything else, actually.

I read your post imagining it was being spoken using Vizzini's voice. Much more amusing that way.

Re:And now for the Ioncaine powder~

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Bernard Black is better,

Re:And now for the Ioncaine powder~

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagined your post being spoken by the Simpsons comic book guy.

Re:And now for the Ioncaine powder~

[Anonymous Coward]

Inconceivable!

Re:And now for the Ioncaine powder~

[chihowa]

I imagined your post being spoken by the Simpsons comic book guy.

That voice comes in handy quite a bit here.

The Bright Side

[Anonymous Coward]

And nothing of value was lost.
Whoops. Nevermind.

But was this battle fun ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I did take part into some big battles and more often than not it was incredibly boring due to technical difficulties and lack of actual freedom for an individual.
Eve online is a game it is very interesting to read about, but not necessarily fun to play. Especially when it comes to fights involving many players. I find it pretty sad that this kind of news is almost the only thing reaching people outside New Eden when there are things so much more interesting in this game, be it its unique economy, the freedom players have or the game's unforgiving nature.

Because...

[Greyfox]

"Epic Excel Spreadsheet Recalc" just doesn't have quite the same ring to it :-P

The battles was just bang at the end

[NeoKarn]

I was there (TM) It's not just the battle. It's the buildup. For 4 days we worked the system. Disrupting the enemy, destroying infrastructure. In the background spies worked there magic and Logistics move the materials of war into position. The phyc-ops and propagandist people boosted moral an got people to log in and participate. The battle is just one of the fun bits. 4000 pilots where just in the system. Without a doubt over 6000 pilots were involved on the day and closer to 10,000 for the buildup. EvE is serious spaceship business and this whole war is business. In EvE we are not ashamed to admit. We went to war for the Space monies.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[GodfatherofSoul]

That sounds pretty cool, but one thing I didn't like is the spying aspect. Not because spying isn't cool, but because the spying is external to the game. People use their alts to see what's going on in an enemy corporation, then report back. CCP should either limit alts to NPC corps or to the same corp as main.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Anonymous Coward]

We went to war for the Space monies.

And nothing of value was gained, but valuable time was lost.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Anonymous Coward]

CCP touts this kind of activity as the correct way to play, however. They don't want to regulate it.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

We went to war for the Space monies.

And nothing of value was gained, but valuable time was lost.

You mis understand, there is most certainly real money involved with this.

https://secure.eveonline.com/PLEX/

Plex = GameTimeCard = ISK currency

when I played, it was worth 300M ISK = $14 USD

a battle like this would lose thousands of billions of isk. It was, and is a very fun game, if you get in with the right sort of corp. Solo, not so much. You need some kind of group to maintain even a small space station. But when you get up to owning systems, with a few corps and an alliance: Well sir, no pvp you've ever done, beats the pvp in this game.

After all, you got money to lose.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? That is nothing like how real spies work.

Eve's spies are by far the most realistic. Real spies are external. They require the careful playing of a confidence game to be truly effective.

About the only thing where Eve is vastly easier to spy than real life is mobilization before a fight. The social dynamics of getting 100's or 1000's of people into their ships in a matter of hours is not something one can really accomplish quietly.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the space monies for then? If you only play to make money then what is the money good for? Increasing a counter?

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Anonymous Coward]

Valuable time was not lost. Valuable time was spent on valued entertainment and intense interaction.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[SandraMcgowan]

The game looks pretty awesome. I told my brother about the game but he replied that it was just to tedious.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Yvanhoe]

Buying gametime, or dollars if you really have a lot of them. 500M of EVE's ISK is worth ~8 â right now.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Anonymous Coward]

And here I thought the point of playing a game was to have fun. Since all "rewards" are completely imaginary and meaningless.

I mean if I want serious business, I go do actual serious business in *real life*. Like I do right now.

And damn, from what all you "players" tell me, it sounds like I have a hell of a lot more fun in my real-life serious business that you have in your "game".

So what's the point? Except wasting your life and turning it into nothingness.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's the money losing or winning aspect that gives you the thrill i recommend poker, online or offline.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[BreakBad]

Wait wait wait...the second they put down their soda cans and do something "external to the game" you complain? And it's not even external...I was hoping for actually getting out of one's chair and walking over to another's view screen to spy on the enemy....or getting information by sleeping with one of the enemy's hot sisters.....or better yet screw the game just hang with the sister. What were we talking about?

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Pino Grigio]

This is sensationalist nonsense. You can't "cash out" your ISK into real money (without breaking the EULA), only cash it in to ISK from outside into the game. If you could, I'd have cleaned out my accounts years ago.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Andy Dodd]

The thing is, the Real Money -> PLEX -> ISK thing is NOT the same as Real Money ISK

That intermediary item there changes things significantly, such that when you lose a big ship in EVE, unless you obtained it using PLEX, you didn't actually lose anything that was worth any real world money. Lots of media outlets made a big deal over "$9000 ship lost" when that Revenant was downed. The thing is - that guy didn't lose $9000. At worst he lost an opportunity to purchase $9000 worth of game subscription time at the worst pricing tier possible. (PLEX are around $20 for one month of time, a one month subscription is $15-16 or so, and if you prepay for multiple months it gets down to as low as $10-11/month.)

That's the real key here - in all of these transactions, only CCP can receive real world money. Yes, there are illicit real money trades that sometimes occur, but the exchange rate for these in ISK per dollar is shit (from the ISK seller's perspective) since it's inherently risky compared to PLEX. Someone selling ISK directly has to offer MUCH more ISK per dollar due to the massively increased risk compared to what a customer can do by buying a PLEX from CCP and selling it for ISK.

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Anonymous Coward]

Having been in a Eve lag fest or two, its really pretty boring. And the typical PvP experience reminds me more of a mugging than a fight (let alone battle).

Re:The battles was just bang at the end

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds pretty cool, but one thing I didn't like is the spying aspect. Not because spying isn't cool, but because the spying is external to the game. People use their alts to see what's going on in an enemy corporation, then report back. CCP should either limit alts to NPC corps or to the same corp as main.

If CCP limited "alts" to NPC corps or to the same corp as the "main," it wouldn't mean anything. Everyone would just get a second account and have their spy character on that one. Which is likely what they do anyway, so as to avoid being caught by someone looking at their API.

Life Follows Art

[Foozy]

Enders Game : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1731141/ Well, soon to be art, anyway...

Re:Life Follows Art

[multimediavt]

Enders Game : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1731141/ Well, soon to be art, anyway...

Are you saying the book wasn't art? WTF? The movie is most likely going to be poop compared to the book.

Re:Life Follows Art

[delt0r]

well the book was poop, can't see how a movie can make it worse.

Damn the spreadsheets, all macros ahead!

[dicobalt]

That's EVE Online.

Re:Damn the spreadsheets, all macros ahead!

[delt0r]

Only if your a trader......

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. Just ask any Carebear. Being annoyed every time a new "largest battle ever" story pops up on /. is not the same thing as "caring".

Though in my defense, I swear there have been more than just 2 other stories like this since 2010, but that's all I found from a quick Google.

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[MacGyver2210]

I don't know, some of those Prostitutes in game are pretty...well, sketchy at best.

What an apt quote.

[MRe_nl]

"Time to die", or in this case
"Time to slow down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity" ; ).

Re:Old men having fun.

[slick7]

Men will be kids

As long as it's for the sake of national security. Remember, in online chat rooms, chicks are chicks, guys are chicks and kids are cops.

Re:Who cares

[Urza9814]

Yeah, I was gonna comment the same thing. Do we *really* need a front-page story every single time there's a battle on some MMO? What next, a Slashdot article every time the Horde raids Stormwind?

I mean, I get that it's interesting how much load their servers were hit with and such, but if that's why you're posing it you should talk about *that*, not who was fighting over what.

Then again, what do I care...I used to read practically every single story on Slashdot...now I just pop in when I have an abnormally boring shift...

Lets face it

[Anonymous Coward]

In big battles you aren't some sort of superman. You are a grunt. One of many, many cogs in a giant organization playing your role and trying to not get squashed.

The real joys of Eve are in both the subversion of structure or the creation and management of it. Being a market manipulator and crashing a market segment just because it gains you an extra 20% on your investments for several hours or creating your own empire within an empire complete with command structure, commerce, human resources and manufacturing facilities. Being a kingmaker because of your connections and savvy or a destroyer of alliances through a diverse intelligence network are all part and parcel of such an immense environment to certain people.

People that go into a game like Eve and expecting to be a walking god like every other game, being in a never ending war and felling no loss or casualties, having their hand held and directed where to go for greatness, or not having to make many allies and a few friends just to survive will always be disappointed.

Eve is too much like real life. The people that have the most fun are those that are already winning in life or could if they didn't have some specific issue in their way. The rest just see Eve as work. Nobody wants to indulge in escapism by entering a world where they feel the same as everyday life.

Re:Lets face it

[Anonymous Coward]

"The people that have the most fun are those that are already winning in life or could if they didn't have some specific issue in their way"

Like playing a game for huge amounts of time every day. Not sure I'd describe them as "winning" in life.

Re:Old men having fun.

[foniksonik]

CCGCKC got it...

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look at the little boy who plays his video games try to call others children. Go play with your toys and shut the fuck up, junior.

Re:Old men having fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kids will become goats.

Wow

[readingaccount]

I'm amazed how much effort people put playing games these days. I honestly think some like games (like EVE Online) are more like jobs than entertainment, if what I've read is any indication. Shit, if some people spent their time in the real world doing and learning things with the same level of zeal and dedication as they do in the virtual world, we might all be Tony Starks. :)

Having said that, the virtual world provides more immediate payoff for your efforts compared to the real world sometimes... which is probably what makes gaming so addictive.

Re:Wow

[delt0r]

I play maybe 3-6 hours a week. Sometimes, like when on holiday i don't log on for weeks. Eve has a nice real time training mechanic that means i don't need to grind every single day to stay competitive. Its less time than many "real world workers" probably spend watching TV, probably sports that they take far too seriously.

Whats wrong with people choosing different entertainment? And for most its entertainment. The ransom for an expensive ship from a friend of mine, was to sing lady gaga's poker face song over the coms!

Re:Wow

[readingaccount]

Nothing wrong with different forms of entertainment. Everyone's different. Do what you enjoy. I just don't think gaming should require an investment in time/money/energy to the point which it becomes a second job almost - which for a lot of EVE Online players (not you obviously) it "appears" to be the case.

One could argue that hobbies like programming would be seen as putting in the same effort as a second job, which is true. Except that programming can produce something of worth, something you can say is yours and exposes your creative efforts to show to others. Gaming is vapid - entertaining, but still vapid, and when I'm old I'd prefer to see a history of projects I've worked on in my spare time and not a bunch of corporations built in some virtual world. But that's just me.

Re:Wow

[virgnarus]

Hobbes: If nobody makes you do it, it counts as fun.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm amazed how much effort people put playing games these days. I honestly think some like games (like EVE Online) are more like jobs than entertainment, if what I've read is any indication. Shit, if some people spent their time in the real world doing and learning things with the same level of zeal and dedication as they do in the virtual world, we might all be Tony Starks. :)

Having said that, the virtual world provides more immediate payoff for your efforts compared to the real world sometimes... which is probably what makes gaming so addictive.

I go to work at my Day job so i can come home so i can make money and then i go home and login my other job in EVE.

The EVE fans are some of the worst I've seen

[Sycraft-fu]

They seem to have a very self-superior attitude as though they are just better because they play a Bettar Game(tm) and if you aren't good enough to hang with them then screw you, you suck! However on the other hand they hate the other MMOs because they take players away. The wish there was no WoW, no Rift, etc so that people HAD to play EVE.

Basically, what they really want is a large quantity of people who are not good at the game that they can pick on and hate on. They want to be the ruling class that has a lower class to shit on. They are bullies, more or less.

He's mad at you because you tried the game and left, rather than stuck around to give him another potential target to beat up.

Re:The EVE fans are some of the worst I've seen

[Anonymous Coward]

"Basically, what they really want is a large quantity of people who are not good at the game that they can pick on and hate on. They want to be the ruling class that has a lower class to shit on. They are bullies, more or less."

Isn't that the fate of all PvP games?

Re:The EVE fans are some of the worst I've seen

[Anonymous Coward]

The people you describe are a vast minority. They also exist in EVERY other MMO.

"Basically, what they really want is a large quantity of people who are not good at the game that they can pick on and hate on. They want to be the ruling class that has a lower class to shit on. They are bullies, more or less."

You're directly describing the majority of 13 year olds that PVP in ANY MMO. (which is a HUGE number of players, though few at any given time. When the culture fails to hold their attention, they go back to their Shooters that they've paid to have better gear/skills in) Teenagers and assholes are few by the MMO percentages, but that's still millions of people in the ~8-15% they make up.

People that enjoy Eve really enjoy eve. I know hundreds of Role Players that love the depths of space. I also know hundreds of people that just enjoy having something to do for the evening, and at least a dozen sociopaths like the ones you describe above.

Re:The EVE fans are some of the worst I've seen

[drinkypoo]

Basically, what they really want is a large quantity of people who are not good at the game that they can pick on and hate on. They want to be the ruling class that has a lower class to shit on. They are bullies, more or less.

Thanks, I now have a new description for people who oppose financial and corporate regulation.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

"and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude_(software)

Why, are they not using Linux? It's in the repos. :P

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[narcc]

A real doctor or an MD?

An MD I can see.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a teenager. And yes, we CAN all tell from your post.

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unpossible. MDs are required by Federal Law to only play golf. On Fridays. It's one sub-section down from where they aren't allowed to have legible handwriting.

Re:Who cares

[lytles]

i don't play eve (or any other MMO), but have been following it for a year. this is "stuff that matters" for 2 reasons

first is the server load. ccp swapped out the node that normally hosts the home world and used it for this battle, they slowed things down in a planned way (time dilation), and there was lag beyond that. so this battle was the limit of their technology. if ccp is able to handle battles like this, the battles will get bigger, so what comes next, from a server and software standpoint, should be interesting

but maybe the more interesting aspect is that outside of the game, the 2 coalitions have built up technology infrastructure for organizing and coordinating the players. prior to the battle there was a huge push to motivate players to log on similar to the promotional blitz for a new game or a movie. and during the battle much of the communication happens outside the game itself - multiple channels of mumble, jabber and the web

it's news when twitter enables the arab spring. and it's news (to me) when 4000 geeks get together using online tools and coordinate their actions to achieve some goal (however useless that goal might be)

as for the game itself, i played for a few hours and found it boring. it's nominally played in a huge 3d world, but the locations are largely limited to small regions around a 2d "grid". the number of ships and weapons is mind-boggling and complicated, and the actions all more or less amount to selecting an from a menu, eg you don't aim at a target, you select it from a list. so after a few hours i found myself wishing it had a command line interface and quit

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

"and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude_(software)

Why, are they not using Linux? It's in the repos. :P

Nope, no Linux. They have been warned of earth virus so they avoid the GPL.

EVE Online runs Stackless Python

[steveha]

http://www.stackless.com/

They are using Python 2.7:
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/stackless-python-2.7/

Great discussion of pros and cons of Stackless:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588958/what-are-the-drawbacks-of-stackless-python

Here's an interesting page with a few nuggets of info. In the discussion section, some people claim that the game used to crash with space battles as small as 100 ships. Clearly the game has been improved since then.
http://highscalability.com/eve-online-architecture

If you are really interested, here's a talk from PyCon 2009 that goes into some detail on what they do with Stackless. They had some problems that only showed up on the crazy load of a real system, so they had to go live with some code to test it!
http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/stackless-python-in-eve-pt-2-1959372

P.S. A couple of good trailers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrrVDV_NsNo

This one bored me at first but then got much better as the music got going.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euMjOHgb9A8

Re:EVE Online runs Stackless Python

[IamTheRealMike]

EVE sounds like a great advert for never using Python for anything even remotely performance sensitive.

Re:EVE Online runs Stackless Python

[Anonymous Coward]

EVE sounds like a great advert for never using Python for anything even remotely performance sensitive.

I'm a huge Python fan, but I'll straight up tell you: Python code is about 50x slower than C. (If you write your own FFT function in pure Python, it will be painfully slow.)

On the other hand, Python can be used to "wrap" libraries, and much of the internals of Python is fast C code. So, properly written Python code is actually pretty fast. (If you use the FFT function provided in the NumPy library, you are using compiled C or maybe Fortran code. It's fast.)

It's all a tradeoff. If they wrote the whole game in lovingly hand-optimized C, the performance would be very high but developer productivity would be much lower. By writing the game in Python they had excellent productivity.

So, if there was a magical language that is as fast as C but as conducive to productivity as Python, they should have used that, I guess. (That's the cue for the LISP guys to jump in, isn't it!)

Don't forget, not only were there 4000 ships, but the ships had drones, the ships had railguns shooting projectiles, in short there were tens of thousands of entities at any given moment during the peak of the battle.

I'll bet that most of the load on the server was on the networking stack, which is pure C library code. If I'm correct, then Python was only responsible for a fraction of the total load on the computer, and Python slowness wouldn't contribute that much to overall slowness.

P.S. Twitter had to drop Ruby, but EVE Online hasn't had to drop Stackless Python. That ought to count for something!

http://readwrite.com/2011/04/11/twitter-drops-ruby-for-java

Re:Old men having fun.

[mwvdlee]

Chicks are chicks; so somebody that appears to be a chick, is in actual fact a chick.
And guys are chicks; so I guess you intend to mean that some of those chicks (right hand side) are in reality just guys (on left hand side).
But that would means that people that appear to be cops are in fact kids.

Or is it the other way around, that those who appear to be kids are actually cops and the ones that seem to be guys are in reality chicks?

Re: Try again

[Andy Prough]

You are way off base. I did it in Hermione Granger's voice. Try it - you'll see. And you have to stretch the word "actually" out a bit to do it correctly.

Re:Who cares

[Molochi]

I agree. Eve online is pretty interesting from the standpoint that the devs seem to be taking the reverse tack of other MMORPGs. Rather than throwing a big ol' banhammer at in game strategies that challenge the infrastructure they've created a work around to allow it. If only it didn't use yet another point and click, leveling grindfest, as it basic game mechanic...

Re:Who cares

[julesh]

The aliens who are monitoring the video game and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)

I didn't realise the aliens were involved in a massive accountancy war.

Re:Who cares

[Noughmad]

The aliens who are monitoring the video game and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)

I didn't realise the aliens were involved in a massive accountancy war.

So you didn't know about the 235214-year war between accountants and phone sanitizers?

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[raehl]

A real doctor or an MD?

Well, he doesn't have a Tardis, if that's what you're asking.

Huhmm

[Anonymous Coward]

4000 people is a massive epic online battle lol??? this is just a advert for the game

Re:Huhmm

[Punko]

Care to name another game that lets that many pilots engage in single battle ?

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Is your shift key broken?

Re:Who cares

[nicolastheadept]

Don't know if you were being sarcastic, but EVE doesn't use levelling

Re:4000 players? lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Tracking them? Fairy trivial.

Keeping every one of those players with a synced game state that reflects the server? Hard. The data needed to transfer to each client balloons exponentially as player count goes up and at some point the network interfaces of the server simply cap out.

Time dilation helps (slows down in-game time, all the way to 10% of real time, so you have ten times as long as normally to send out all the game updates) - making 4000 players feasible where in the past 400+ caused all kinds of havoc...

Now whole articles could be written about the fact that the server is running Python and doing everything single-threaded ("seemed like a good idea at the time, ten years ago") but that's how it works at the moment. At least CCP has already done considerable work on removing everything EXCEPT the "in space" simulation tracking from that single thread (it used to be that things like market, chat etc. related services also ran on that same core as the simulation.. not so any more)

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing how easy it is to tell, isn't it?

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern keyboards come equipped with two shift keys and a caps lock. I think we must assume from lytles' post that either *all three* of these keys are broken or - since they use brackets which are accessed employing a shift key and number keys - they have actively chosen not to employ them. This could be because they fail to understand when those of us who are literate would employ "capital letters", or it could be because they have failed to understand how the use of such letters gains comprehension; it could be because they didn't care at school, or it could be a general contempt for literacy. I would imagine that there are also other possibilities, and would be interested in hearing lytles' response.

Re:Old men having fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Remember, in online chat rooms, chicks are chicks, guys are chicks and kids are cops."

That's what you think. Some of them are dogs.

Re:Who cares

[Dins]

Don't know if you were being sarcastic, but EVE doesn't use levelling

And it's not exactly a 2D grid like the GP suggests. There are over 5,000 star (solar) systems but each is basically full size. It's true that like a normal star system, the overwhelmingly vast majority of that is empty space, but you can be anywhere within it. Most of the action does take place around celestial bodies, space stations, star gates, and anomalies, but EVE does a good job of making a galaxy feel mindbogglingly huge, which is appropriate.

Re:Old men having fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

Was is not a girl that stole materials worth close to 50 bill ISK earlier this year?

CAPTACHA: "murders" *snicker*

Re:Who cares

[cheekyjohnson]

You do. Only a complete lack of response would show otherwise.

What if he didn't care about the topic itself, but did care about making his feelings about said topic known?

And then you hid your screen name, afraid that others will find out that you actually care.

What if he doesn't actually have an account? What if he isn't afraid of any such thing?

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[jareth-0205]

..... Real worlds. You know, the kind with actual girls you can talk to and touch (if you're lucky). I guess for the typical EVE online players, they'll stick with virtual women because it's the closest they can get.

Yes, because the only thing in the world that is enjoyable or that matters is women.

Re:4000 players? lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh god, I'd take screenshots, but managing the realtime tracking of those 80000 objects really strains my 286 so I simply can't get the pics. Guess it didn't happen then :(

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[Dunbal]

Oh, the MD vs PhD argument again. Be careful, some medical schools hand out dual doctorates MD-PhD. In my case I'm "just" a doctor of medicine.

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[jellomizer]

It is a piece of paper that allows you to be insufferably smug. Because you have a DR. in front of your name it somehow makes you an expert in everything. Even though the course work for the most part narrows you field of study to a small section of a field.

Re:Who cares

[Andy Dodd]

FYI, CCP did not slow anything down. TiDi kicks in automatically when server load goes up.

However, in the event of an anticipated big fight, CCP will move a system to a "reinforced node" (e.g. an extra beefy server). Of interest, though, is that many fights this year have not been entirely anticipated, resulting in TiDi being the only mechanism for load handling in play. For example, Asakai was the result of an unplanned misclick - it was supposed to be a small skirmish, but turned into a massive battle when a titan pilot jumped into the middle of the enemy fleet instead of bridging his fleetmates in. TiDi + unreinforced node = interesting mechanics, in which the fight is slowed down to 1/10 time, but most of the rest of the universe is running at normal speed. In the past, fleet battles were usually over in minutes, often with half of one fleet dying before they could even load the grid. Now they can last hours, long enough for reinforcements to arrive and massive escalation.

I've played EVE off and on (more off than on) since launch... I just came back from a five year break, I think I'm going to wind up quitting again in not too long. That said, reading the news of what's going on around the edges of the galaxy is pretty neat. I just don't have anywhere near enough time to participate in shit like that, and the game can easily get very boring if you're not in on the nullsec action.

Re:4000 players? lol

[jellomizer]

That is if you give the cheaters all the control.
The problem with today's systems isn't that we are writing code that slow because of lack of trying. But we have to account for more variables.

Hackers and Cheaters (especially for a system where you pay real money for virtual goods) would have a field day if they could flip a few bits and get some of the most expensive stuff in the game. Then sell online without a bunch of other checks on what the payer is doing.

Today our computers would run lighting fast if it wasn't for all the people who wanted to break in into our systems and take data, and cause problems.

Re: You know what's better than fake worlds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. It's not like they put any time in med school or anything like that. Hell I'm getting a piece of paper now, DR janitor !

Re:Old men having fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think slick7 referred to the habit of some women to pretend to be guys online (or not mention their sex at all) to avoid unwanted attention.

And we can't upgrade air traffic control?

[DutchUncle]

No question, a game is not real life and real lives on the line. That being said, the technology to support this exists. A GAME SERVER had to be slowed to 10% to handle 4,070 spacecraft firing missiles and/or energy weapons. That suggests that 10x the horsepower could have handled the job. If we can do this for a game, using normal technology, why can't we scale it up to upgrade ATC? Is the game industry that much more lucrative, or is it that the downside risk (crashing a game server vs. crashing a plane) is so much higher that nobody wants to take a chance?

30 minute skirmish

[Flint Dragon]

5 hours at 10% real time. So this was just a 30 minute skirmish.

Re:Why EVE blows

[Anonymous Coward]

I should be able to cut a carrier in half with a strip mining laser... but I can't;

A frigate travelling at 3 AU/sec should vaporize anything it hits (along with anything withing 1000 miles), but it doesn't.

Why is this desirable?

can't jam enemy comms

Technically infeasible. Most people use communication methods external to the game.

you always show up in local eventually

This is not true in wormhole space.

all the skill in the world has very little chance of changing the outcome once combat starts

Have you actually done any pvp in EVE?

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand how all these kids on slashdot in the summer have time for women 24x7. When I was a teen or in university I might party one night a week spend a couple nights out with a girl if I was lucky and have 2-5 days of not much going on but homework for a bit and tv/video games and hanging out with friends. Which sometimes included video games.

Slashdot's #42 on the winning team ;)

[magg]

Hehe,

A friend said the fight got on Slashdot, so I just though I should mention that /. user number 42, got some kills in this fight ;)

Click here, for a free 21-day trial :) https://secure.eveonline.com/trial/?invc=e3af1093-bced-4da3-969a-c5788532ed93&action=buddy

Fly safe, guys! :)

Re:You know what's better than fake worlds?

[Dunbal]

I may be smug, but it's the smugness of intelligent people everywhere. My degree has nothing to do with it, in fact if anything my chosen field makes me more humble. It happens when you're tying to figure out what to say (if anything) to a mother who will be dead in two weeks from leukemia, while she holds her 3 year old in her arms in your office and asks about her blood test result.

pvp only

[Anonymous Coward]

EVE is really a pvp only place and does not support casual players I am among the EVE refugees that didn't like being killed and harassed all the time still looking for an eve like game that is player friendly not jerk friendly.

Re:Old men having fun.

[slick7]

Or is it the other way around, that those who appear to be kids are actually cops and the ones that seem to be guys are in reality chicks?

Well, you could call one up to have sex and you might end up with a stone cold fox or a stone cold killer or a Stone Phillip. You make the call.

4000 Kids on the playground

[drmario]

I remember when I used to get 2000 of my closest friends together and have turf wars against 2000 people from another "alliance". Now a days everything's virtual and no one meeting each other in real life... How sad the days you can't punch someone in the face for pissing you off... You have to take it out on your keyboard now :p. :)