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

Re:Old men having fun.

[gagol]

Video games are for old kids.

FTFY.

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

[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

[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

[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]

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

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: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: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.

Re:Who cares

[perpenso]

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

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

[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: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. :-)

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: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).

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: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: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.

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:Old men having fun.

[foniksonik]

CCGCKC got it...

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.

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.

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: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

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