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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.
Real world is noticeably lacking in large-scale space battles (at least, to the best of our knowledge). Swings, roundabouts...
"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.
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.
> 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.
Please direct all bug reports to
The aliens who are monitoring the video game and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
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.
Please direct all bug reports to
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.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
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.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
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.
.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.
When I started playing eve, I subscribed at the same time as 3 other friends. We formed a corp, picked a
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.
CCGCKC got it...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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.
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.
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. ;)
In EVE you're the captain, not the helmsman. If you're looking to wiggle your joystick, I'd recommend the Freespace series.
So what you're saying is that EVE is a great way to be an asshole?
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
My blog
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely