Actually, if players were fairly evenly dispersed, Eve could handle 500,000 players without a problem. Based on personal experience, with a fairly even distribution of players among all available systems (about 5200), Eve would do alright until it hit around 1.5 million players. At that point, every system would begin to experience some lag, and getting any kind of large-scale battles off the ground would be painful at best.
Regarding the graphics issue, that comes down to individuals' computers. Playing with the high-end graphics makes everything gorgeous, but it also reduces your FPS on anything but brand new (within the past year) mid to high end hardware. If you have a middle-end PC from two or three years ago (fairly common), the new graphics will be fairly slow for you. If you have a middle-end PC older than that, it's unusable.
One of my computers is a Core 2 6600 with an nVidia 7300 graphics card. It's not a powerhouse gaming rig (it's primarily just a coding workstation), but it's probably around the average of what your typical gamer has when you account for Eve's worldwide distribution. On the new, high-end graphics, I get fairly decent performance, but things get choppy when there's a lot happening at once. On the older graphics engine, everything runs great all the time.
So would you prefer to be forced into the high-end graphics when you're in the middle of fleet combat? I'd rather have the option, myself.
Something you wouldn't understand without having played it for a long time is that Eve actually does ease you into it.
It has so much depth that if it eased you in at the kind of rate you're looking for, you'd still be learning basic mechanics when you've been playing for 2 years. It's a very unforgiving world in which you can experience loss like in no other game I've ever played, right down to the skills you've spent so much (real life) time training. It's a game where success or failure can depend on how quickly you can adapt to a radically changing environment with a vast array of competing counter-measures and strategies. Gaining a deep understanding of how everything stacks together and how to counter all kinds of various tactics and tools on the fly requires that you learn at an incredible rate constantly. And just when you think you're getting the hang of it, a new expansion comes out (at the rate of two per year) that vastly changes the balance of things such that new tactics and ideas emerge.
Really, if you don't make it through the tutorial, Eve probably isn't the game for you. That's fine, as no game should try to be perfect for everyone as it will end up being poor for anyone. Eve is really for those who want to be constantly challenged in new and different ways by intelligent adversaries using skills and tools that work together in extremely complex ways. It has within it the ability to play as openly as any life simulator, but with far more danger than anything else I've seen before it.
If the challenge of the tutorial turns you off, then the game itself will almost certainly turn you off as well. In that sense, I think the tutorial does a great job of both educating those who truly are interested in Eve's world view and in pushing away those who ultimately won't enjoy themselves anyway.
I've long since lost my sense of humour for users. I'm to the point now where I think about 90% of the human race needs to be exterminated, about half of the rest banned from using any technology, and the rest can call me with any problems they're having.
It seems to imply that a citizen can commit a crime and a bureaucrat cannot.
Sort of like when police officers fly down the road at 40mph+ higher than the speed limit, change lanes without signalling, run stop signs, cut people off, tailgate people on the highway, and generally drive like the biggest bunch of suicidal assholes the road has ever seen but will pull over the rest of us for stepping even slightly out of line without a second thought?
Sorry, I just spend a lot of time on highways, so it just really bugs me.
Does my dlink nat/router do it? What about my dlink voip box?
D-link? Seriously? Why - because tapping out morse code 1s and 0s with a telegraph was too reliable?
Get out.
Seriously, anyone on Slashdot should be of a technical level to know that even in the worst of times, purchasing complete and utter garbage equipment just isn't worth it. If you're strapped for cash, go with Zyxel or US Robotics. Heck, even Belkin or Netgear is better off than the useless crap shipped en masse from the likes of D-link and Linksys. If you have a little money in hand, do yourself a favor and invest in a Sonicwall or cheap Cisco device. At the lower end, they're roughly the same price these days: around $300.
In my high school, there was a kid in the class that graduated the year before my class came in as freshman who only showed up to classes for quizes and tests all four years. He graduated with a B or B- average.
After he graduated and it was brought to the attention of parents and school administrators, a new rule was put in place that any student absent from a class more than a certain number of days during the year (I think it was 20 or so) for any reason could (at the discretion of the teacher) be failed.
Anyway, the point is, there are kids who'll use something like that to skate by while doing even less work. Those kids shouldn't be skipping school; they should be found out and set aside for advanced studies that can actually push them. Otherwise, we're giving up the notion that we're actually trying to teach anything and accepting that all we're looking for is some basic cookie-cutter standards for well-disciplined automotons.
Cool, now if I'm really good in that subject (math comes to mind), I can just skip the entire first half of each semester and still get a B in the class!
Fifth child, defective, and she kept it anyway? Daaaaaaaamn. That alone would keep me from voting from McCain - I prefer sensible, intelligent leaders, not broodmares.
A child with Downs Syndrome is "defective"? I'd love to see you say that to some parents who have kids with Downs Syndrome just so I could watch them curbstomp your ass.
And someone who doesn't abort children without a perfect genetic profile is automatically not sensible or intelligent? Her beliefs state that abortion is murder. Therefore, your line of thinking would have her murder children who are imperfect genetically. There's a word for terminating apparently inferrior human life: eugenics.
In short, her beliefs mirrors those of the Pope. Your's mirror those of the Nazis.
So please go to a support group for Downs Syndrome parents and tell them all about your beliefs. Curbstomping Nazis is a great way for people having a difficult time to get out some frustrations.
So global warming is heating up the planet as evidenced by when we have years that are hot. Then when we have years that are cool, it's something else. When we have average years, that's yet another thing. But because of global warming (and not any other natural cycle in action), we're bound to eventually have hot years again. At some point.
Yeah....
Or maybe observing temperatures and weather patterns for 50 years out of the 4,500,000,000 years that the planet has existed with only moderately accurate methods and instruments doesn't give us enough information to reach a scientific, actionable conclusion about a massive, open system like planetary climate.
That 20 seconds is costing them maybe 1 additional phone call, which probably has a purchase through rate of something like 1/500.
If you really wanted to screw them, you'd listen to the whole message and then do whatever's necessary to connect to an agent, and then have them explain each and every aspect of whatever it is they're trying to sell in the greatest possible detail, forcing them to repeat themselves as often as possible in order to tie up real human beings (in addition to the line) for as long as possible.
Ideally, you would repeatedly ask insightful questions which give the appearance of interest in the product or service being sold, but which require the operator to consult with multiple people (such as supervisors) in order to answer.
Of course, with offshore calling centres and VOIP, you could keep them on the phone for an hour and probably cost them about $7. Is it worth your time? Maybe if you had nothing better to do. It could certainly be helpful in hurting these guys financially if you and a hundred thousand other people did it for each and every call for a month or two straight.
"If call centres disobey all the previous rules and obligations, what makes you think they're going to adhere to this one? Especially call centres in India where these laws have little jurisdiction?"
Because the new rule says that if you call after 9pm, a B-2 Spirit will drop napalm on your call centre.
There's a sizable portion of the general public that doesn't want to be bothered having to remember any passwords for anything. They simply want to click a button and have it work.
You'd have better luck explaining the security implications of such a system to a chimp.
My suggestion would be to gain a better understanding of how our global environment and global climate function and self-regulate before we make concerted efforts to modify either.
As it stands, it's still widely debated whether our actions to date have had much of any effect on the environment, or whether we're seeing natural patterns and cycles in motion, or whether we're seeing events triggered by unknown influences.
Stopping all emissions would be a wonderful thing if it were feasible. Certainly even if it had no effect on the global climate, it would have a definite effect on the localities where pollution is most rampant (hello there, Beijing). However, as that is not feasible, we need to guage the importance to each place in the world, and to the world at large of reducing pollutants. To do that, we need to have a solid understanding of the effects on each place in the world and on the world itself. We have a pretty decent understanding of what different pollutants will do to the local environment, especially as it concerns humans. We understand that certain chemicals in the air, soil, and water will do us, our crops, and the local wildlife more harm than others. As such, it's up to the people living in that particular region as to whether the types and amounts of things being emitted are too high a risk for them. If so, it's up to them to reduce or stop those emissions.
Where we get lost is in figuring out how a factory in Beijing affects a farm in Kansas. Some have said it will cause less rain; some have said it will cause more. Some have said it will cause both. Some have said it will cause temperatures to drop, more now lean toward them climbing. Some have said that so long as the total emissions throughout the world stay below x, the farm will feel little to no effect. Others have said x is much lower (or higher) than those before them claimed. Some have said the coasts will feel the greatest effect, so perhaps the farm will experience nothing any time soon. Others have said that we're 10 years away from a disasterous turn where we'll see massive climate change overnight due to feedback loops which will form. Still others have said that we're at least 70 - 100 years away from seeing a more than two or three degree difference in average global temperatures.
In other words, we have no understanding of what effects we're having (if anything) on the world's climate, and we have no idea if we're headed in the direction. We have no idea if there's an outside influence causing the slight change in temperatures we've observed over the past ~80 years of decent weather tracking. We're looking at a 2 second slice of a movie we've never seen before and trying to determine the entire plot from start to finish using some fuzzy storyboards we found lying around. What's more, without a solid understanding of how the world's climate operates in the first place, we have no way to know what effect a major effort to change the climate would have.
So what I would suggest for now, rather than blow our economies trying to force some nations (ie the US) to finance some huge operation that may or may not be helpful or harmful to the world's climate while others continue doing business as usual and even increasing their emissions on grand scales (ie India and China), that we work harder to understand the world climate while looking for more efficient, cheaper, and less polluting ways to get done what we need to get done. When we come up with new technologies, let's test them to ensure they actually work correctly, don't create more problems than they solve, and that they don't create more pollution than what we had before (hey Prius owners, what are you going to do with all those batteries when your cars die? toss them in a landfill? of course you are - and exactly what went into making those things vs a simpler car? did you bother looking into that?). Once that technology is shown to be safe (hello, nuclear power), let's introduce it into the world marketplace (ie CANDU reactors) and let's make an eff
You're suggesting that with no formal training and very little observation of its functioning, we jump onto the steamroller and start pushing and pulling every button and lever in sight in the hopes that one or more of our actions will result in a positive outcome.
Me? I prefer we calmly read the manual, locate the brake, and apply it correctly.
Of course, I'm probably just being silly. Yes... on second thought, wrecklessly tearing at the controls of poorly understood, highly complex, and extremely dangerous machinery is definitely the wiser choice when considering the longterm survival of the human race.
If it moves, tax it If it keeps moving, regulate it If it stops moving, subsidize it
Tell you what, you want to hike taxes on gasoline? From now on, for every gallon you pump into your car, send the government an additional $4 directly. You can do that, and you'll be doing your part! (your part to making the absurdly inefficient and useless beaurocracy slightly richer)
No, Social Security is doomed (not in trouble), because it's built on a faulty concept of consistent inflation/monetary devaluation and consistent population/workforce growth patterns, and because it is drained of all its excess capital by law at the end of each fiscal year in exchange from Treasury Dept IOUs.
The collapse of Social Security is inevitable and always has been, and no amount of 'reform' will change that. What remains to be seen is whether we'll allow our national credit rating to go down with it. That would be the death of our economy as we know it, and would bring about a worldwide depression the likes of which has never been seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if players were fairly evenly dispersed, Eve could handle 500,000 players without a problem. Based on personal experience, with a fairly even distribution of players among all available systems (about 5200), Eve would do alright until it hit around 1.5 million players. At that point, every system would begin to experience some lag, and getting any kind of large-scale battles off the ground would be painful at best.
Regarding the graphics issue, that comes down to individuals' computers. Playing with the high-end graphics makes everything gorgeous, but it also reduces your FPS on anything but brand new (within the past year) mid to high end hardware. If you have a middle-end PC from two or three years ago (fairly common), the new graphics will be fairly slow for you. If you have a middle-end PC older than that, it's unusable.
One of my computers is a Core 2 6600 with an nVidia 7300 graphics card. It's not a powerhouse gaming rig (it's primarily just a coding workstation), but it's probably around the average of what your typical gamer has when you account for Eve's worldwide distribution. On the new, high-end graphics, I get fairly decent performance, but things get choppy when there's a lot happening at once. On the older graphics engine, everything runs great all the time.
So would you prefer to be forced into the high-end graphics when you're in the middle of fleet combat? I'd rather have the option, myself.
Something you wouldn't understand without having played it for a long time is that Eve actually does ease you into it.
It has so much depth that if it eased you in at the kind of rate you're looking for, you'd still be learning basic mechanics when you've been playing for 2 years. It's a very unforgiving world in which you can experience loss like in no other game I've ever played, right down to the skills you've spent so much (real life) time training. It's a game where success or failure can depend on how quickly you can adapt to a radically changing environment with a vast array of competing counter-measures and strategies. Gaining a deep understanding of how everything stacks together and how to counter all kinds of various tactics and tools on the fly requires that you learn at an incredible rate constantly. And just when you think you're getting the hang of it, a new expansion comes out (at the rate of two per year) that vastly changes the balance of things such that new tactics and ideas emerge.
Really, if you don't make it through the tutorial, Eve probably isn't the game for you. That's fine, as no game should try to be perfect for everyone as it will end up being poor for anyone. Eve is really for those who want to be constantly challenged in new and different ways by intelligent adversaries using skills and tools that work together in extremely complex ways. It has within it the ability to play as openly as any life simulator, but with far more danger than anything else I've seen before it.
If the challenge of the tutorial turns you off, then the game itself will almost certainly turn you off as well. In that sense, I think the tutorial does a great job of both educating those who truly are interested in Eve's world view and in pushing away those who ultimately won't enjoy themselves anyway.
I've long since lost my sense of humour for users. I'm to the point now where I think about 90% of the human race needs to be exterminated, about half of the rest banned from using any technology, and the rest can call me with any problems they're having.
Truly the best state motto ever.
New Hampshire's state constitution is also the only one which recognizes the right of the people to rebel against their government.
Let's hear it for New Hampshire!
It seems to imply that a citizen can commit a crime and a bureaucrat cannot.
Sort of like when police officers fly down the road at 40mph+ higher than the speed limit, change lanes without signalling, run stop signs, cut people off, tailgate people on the highway, and generally drive like the biggest bunch of suicidal assholes the road has ever seen but will pull over the rest of us for stepping even slightly out of line without a second thought?
Sorry, I just spend a lot of time on highways, so it just really bugs me.
avatar.outland.org:3000
Does my dlink nat/router do it? What about my dlink voip box?
D-link? Seriously? Why - because tapping out morse code 1s and 0s with a telegraph was too reliable?
Get out.
Seriously, anyone on Slashdot should be of a technical level to know that even in the worst of times, purchasing complete and utter garbage equipment just isn't worth it. If you're strapped for cash, go with Zyxel or US Robotics. Heck, even Belkin or Netgear is better off than the useless crap shipped en masse from the likes of D-link and Linksys. If you have a little money in hand, do yourself a favor and invest in a Sonicwall or cheap Cisco device. At the lower end, they're roughly the same price these days: around $300.
In my high school, there was a kid in the class that graduated the year before my class came in as freshman who only showed up to classes for quizes and tests all four years. He graduated with a B or B- average.
After he graduated and it was brought to the attention of parents and school administrators, a new rule was put in place that any student absent from a class more than a certain number of days during the year (I think it was 20 or so) for any reason could (at the discretion of the teacher) be failed.
Anyway, the point is, there are kids who'll use something like that to skate by while doing even less work. Those kids shouldn't be skipping school; they should be found out and set aside for advanced studies that can actually push them. Otherwise, we're giving up the notion that we're actually trying to teach anything and accepting that all we're looking for is some basic cookie-cutter standards for well-disciplined automotons.
Cool, now if I'm really good in that subject (math comes to mind), I can just skip the entire first half of each semester and still get a B in the class!
Fifth child, defective, and she kept it anyway? Daaaaaaaamn. That alone would keep me from voting
from McCain - I prefer sensible, intelligent leaders, not broodmares.
A child with Downs Syndrome is "defective"? I'd love to see you say that to some parents who have kids with Downs Syndrome just so I could watch them curbstomp your ass.
And someone who doesn't abort children without a perfect genetic profile is automatically not sensible or intelligent? Her beliefs state that abortion is murder. Therefore, your line of thinking would have her murder children who are imperfect genetically. There's a word for terminating apparently inferrior human life: eugenics.
In short, her beliefs mirrors those of the Pope.
Your's mirror those of the Nazis.
So please go to a support group for Downs Syndrome parents and tell them all about your beliefs. Curbstomping Nazis is a great way for people having a difficult time to get out some frustrations.
We really would be better off as a society of a couple generations of people who thought that way were quietly sterilized.
So global warming is heating up the planet as evidenced by when we have years that are hot. Then when we have years that are cool, it's something else. When we have average years, that's yet another thing. But because of global warming (and not any other natural cycle in action), we're bound to eventually have hot years again. At some point.
Yeah....
Or maybe observing temperatures and weather patterns for 50 years out of the 4,500,000,000 years that the planet has existed with only moderately accurate methods and instruments doesn't give us enough information to reach a scientific, actionable conclusion about a massive, open system like planetary climate.
That 20 seconds is costing them maybe 1 additional phone call, which probably has a purchase through rate of something like 1/500.
If you really wanted to screw them, you'd listen to the whole message and then do whatever's necessary to connect to an agent, and then have them explain each and every aspect of whatever it is they're trying to sell in the greatest possible detail, forcing them to repeat themselves as often as possible in order to tie up real human beings (in addition to the line) for as long as possible.
Ideally, you would repeatedly ask insightful questions which give the appearance of interest in the product or service being sold, but which require the operator to consult with multiple people (such as supervisors) in order to answer.
Of course, with offshore calling centres and VOIP, you could keep them on the phone for an hour and probably cost them about $7. Is it worth your time? Maybe if you had nothing better to do. It could certainly be helpful in hurting these guys financially if you and a hundred thousand other people did it for each and every call for a month or two straight.
"If call centres disobey all the previous rules and obligations, what makes you think they're going to adhere to this one? Especially call centres in India where these laws have little jurisdiction?"
Because the new rule says that if you call after 9pm, a B-2 Spirit will drop napalm on your call centre.
(Boy, wouldn't that be satisfying...)
Sounds great in theory.
Now what do you do when the automated calling software sucks and if you don't wait x amount of time before hanging up, it calls back 2 or 3 times?
I get those calls all the time.
At work.
Idiots. I guess they'd rather you and your friends take a car next time you go driving.
Yeah, idiots.
And also because it is "nuculear" the government doesn't want to touch it either.
Remind me to dip my wallet in Carbon-14 before April 15th.
It's someone who manufactures a problem using only working solutions.
You might also know them as: "politicians".
There's a sizable portion of the general public that doesn't want to be bothered having to remember any passwords for anything. They simply want to click a button and have it work.
You'd have better luck explaining the security implications of such a system to a chimp.
I would just like to give myself credit yet again, considering I came up with her defense in 2003.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=77984&cid=6926062
Your welcome, Ms Anderson.
RIAA? Die.
My suggestion would be to gain a better understanding of how our global environment and global climate function and self-regulate before we make concerted efforts to modify either.
As it stands, it's still widely debated whether our actions to date have had much of any effect on the environment, or whether we're seeing natural patterns and cycles in motion, or whether we're seeing events triggered by unknown influences.
Stopping all emissions would be a wonderful thing if it were feasible. Certainly even if it had no effect on the global climate, it would have a definite effect on the localities where pollution is most rampant (hello there, Beijing). However, as that is not feasible, we need to guage the importance to each place in the world, and to the world at large of reducing pollutants. To do that, we need to have a solid understanding of the effects on each place in the world and on the world itself. We have a pretty decent understanding of what different pollutants will do to the local environment, especially as it concerns humans. We understand that certain chemicals in the air, soil, and water will do us, our crops, and the local wildlife more harm than others. As such, it's up to the people living in that particular region as to whether the types and amounts of things being emitted are too high a risk for them. If so, it's up to them to reduce or stop those emissions.
Where we get lost is in figuring out how a factory in Beijing affects a farm in Kansas. Some have said it will cause less rain; some have said it will cause more. Some have said it will cause both. Some have said it will cause temperatures to drop, more now lean toward them climbing. Some have said that so long as the total emissions throughout the world stay below x, the farm will feel little to no effect. Others have said x is much lower (or higher) than those before them claimed. Some have said the coasts will feel the greatest effect, so perhaps the farm will experience nothing any time soon. Others have said that we're 10 years away from a disasterous turn where we'll see massive climate change overnight due to feedback loops which will form. Still others have said that we're at least 70 - 100 years away from seeing a more than two or three degree difference in average global temperatures.
In other words, we have no understanding of what effects we're having (if anything) on the world's climate, and we have no idea if we're headed in the direction. We have no idea if there's an outside influence causing the slight change in temperatures we've observed over the past ~80 years of decent weather tracking. We're looking at a 2 second slice of a movie we've never seen before and trying to determine the entire plot from start to finish using some fuzzy storyboards we found lying around. What's more, without a solid understanding of how the world's climate operates in the first place, we have no way to know what effect a major effort to change the climate would have.
So what I would suggest for now, rather than blow our economies trying to force some nations (ie the US) to finance some huge operation that may or may not be helpful or harmful to the world's climate while others continue doing business as usual and even increasing their emissions on grand scales (ie India and China), that we work harder to understand the world climate while looking for more efficient, cheaper, and less polluting ways to get done what we need to get done. When we come up with new technologies, let's test them to ensure they actually work correctly, don't create more problems than they solve, and that they don't create more pollution than what we had before (hey Prius owners, what are you going to do with all those batteries when your cars die? toss them in a landfill? of course you are - and exactly what went into making those things vs a simpler car? did you bother looking into that?). Once that technology is shown to be safe (hello, nuclear power), let's introduce it into the world marketplace (ie CANDU reactors) and let's make an eff
If government taxation is a "market-based incentive" where you live, I want to help your people learn English.
You're suggesting that with no formal training and very little observation of its functioning, we jump onto the steamroller and start pushing and pulling every button and lever in sight in the hopes that one or more of our actions will result in a positive outcome.
Me? I prefer we calmly read the manual, locate the brake, and apply it correctly.
Of course, I'm probably just being silly. Yes... on second thought, wrecklessly tearing at the controls of poorly understood, highly complex, and extremely dangerous machinery is definitely the wiser choice when considering the longterm survival of the human race.
Such a typically liberal response...
If it moves, tax it
If it keeps moving, regulate it
If it stops moving, subsidize it
Tell you what, you want to hike taxes on gasoline? From now on, for every gallon you pump into your car, send the government an additional $4 directly. You can do that, and you'll be doing your part! (your part to making the absurdly inefficient and useless beaurocracy slightly richer)
No, Social Security is doomed (not in trouble), because it's built on a faulty concept of consistent inflation/monetary devaluation and consistent population/workforce growth patterns, and because it is drained of all its excess capital by law at the end of each fiscal year in exchange from Treasury Dept IOUs.
The collapse of Social Security is inevitable and always has been, and no amount of 'reform' will change that. What remains to be seen is whether we'll allow our national credit rating to go down with it. That would be the death of our economy as we know it, and would bring about a worldwide depression the likes of which has never been seen.