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How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

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Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#21

Post by adrr »

rauljara wrote: post #8

The report of the battle they link to ( http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/ ) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getti…

It risk vs reward. To own the resources that generate large amounts of ISK/Resources, you'll need to risk your ships to defend it. You can grind all day long in places which has little to no risk to your ship, but it will take a long time to earn enough resources for a nice ship.

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#22

Post by [deleted] »

fatbird wrote: post #20
baddox wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the point of having all this cool stuff if no one else even gets to see it and you don't get to use it?

If you spent six months grinding the ISK to buy and outfit a carrier, how willing would you be to take it into a battle where any of a hundred things could destroy it, including server lag or a random disconnection?

[deleted]

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#23

Post by dholowiski »

lflux wrote: post #16
dholowiski wrote: post #9

tl/dr: Sharding and slowing everything down.

Eve isn't sharded in the common MMO sense.

No, but they talked about disconnecting the battle from the surrounding solar system, and the negative consequences. Essentially sharding.

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#24

Post by EarthLaunch »

This was particularly interesting for me. I've already built a scalable MMO server architecture in Erlang, which hosts all players on one world, using server nodes that can be moved between machines. I calculate that my server architecture can handle up to 10,000 moving players in a local area. That's characters, not EVE-style ships (characters are heavier).

If anyone is interested in talking about this, helping, or funding me, please get in touch. My server is called Proxima and my game is First Earth (you can find it if you're interested). I've been slowly bootstrapping it for 3 years.

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#25

Post by outworlder »

EarthLaunch wrote: post #24

This was particularly interesting for me. I've already built a scalable MMO server architecture in Erlang, which hosts all players on one world, using server nodes that can be moved between machines. I calculate that my server architecture can handle up to 10,000 moving players in a local area. That's characters, not EVE-style ships (characters are heavier). If anyone is interested in talking about this, helping, or…

Have you got more details? Links?

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#26

Post by snogglethorpe »

vmind wrote: post #14
rauljara wrote: post #8

The report of the battle they link to ( http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/ ) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getti…

The risk element, to me, makes EVE a much more fun game than many others when it comes to combat. The pay off in fun, excitement and stories to be told is so much greater when there was a risk involved.

Kinda like real life...

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#27

Post by incision »

outworlder wrote: post #15
incision wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? I wasn't sure how to interpret that either. I've always been a bit surprised that the the backend systems for these MMOs aren't a bit more flexible. Though, EvE did launch nearly 10 years ago and it has never had a huge numb…

400k+ active players IS a huge number. Specially considering they are in the same logical server. Other MMO's handle this by having copies of the world and splitting the population - which is the same approach used by Ultima Online back in 1997. So actually, EVE is way ahead of the rest, technology-wise.

>So actually, EVE is way ahead of the rest, technology-wise.

That doesn't seem like a sensible comparison considering how much the gameplay of EvE differs from the typical MMO.

In any case, I'm not making a dig at EvE, rather acknowledging that the game has had a long life and has never been a multi-million subscriber behemoth. Therefore, they might make concessions, or allowed the persistence of previous limitations / decisions in design/infrastructure for lack of resources [1][2].

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5135873

2: http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/09/28/eve-evolved-eve-onli...

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#29

Post by redthrowaway »

rauljara wrote: post #8

The report of the battle they link to ( http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/ ) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getti…

Nobody actually "earns" titans. It's simply not something that an individual would ever fly. Titans belong to the biggest corporations, alliances, and coalitions, and are essentially floating cities that support fleets of other ships. They're a strategic resource that individual players would never use.

In the case of this particular battle, CFC lost 3 titans. This alone is several thousand dollars worth of real-world money, but it will barely be noticed. CFC has hundreds of titans, and the pilots who lost ships will simply have them replaced by their corps. So no one actually lost anything; the coalition will have to drag a few titans and a few dozen supercapital ships out of its reserves to re-arm its pilots.

Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle

#30

Post by mephi5t0 »

rauljara wrote: post #8

The report of the battle they link to ( http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/ ) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getti…

Not just that. You will train over a YEAR to fly a titan, and by flying I mean not just be able to undock it but actually be useful in it. The books costs hundreds of millions to learn so Titan is not a solo adventure it's is always a corporation's operation.

Oh, and since you cannot dock Titan (it won't go inside the station) you will need to park it somewhere, most likely near POS. And if you plan to do something else with your pilot - you need to have TWO pilots to be able to pilot Titan because once you exit ship - someone can steal it. So you need an alt who will be always sitting in the Titan when you log off :)

That's why ppl fly blops in cruisers and battlecruisers. Fun. Fast. Cheap.

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