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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

#71

Post by alex_c »

RickHull wrote: post #36

Fun facts: This fight was between the Honeybadger Coalition (HBC) and the Clusterfuck Coalition (CFC). The core of the Honeybadger Coalition is TEST Alliance, and the core of TEST Alliance is Dreddit, the "original" Reddit-based corp (there are / have been several, some of which predate Dreddit and have since folded). HBC routed the CFC, which has Goonswarm as its core, which is organized around the Something Awful f…

Admittedly I haven't followed Eve politics for over a year, but I would be very surprised to see Test and Goons get in a "real" fight (e.g. over sovereignty or revenue-generating moons). They both treat the game in the same way (a strange mix of competence, incompetence, and irreverence) and have too much shared history. I suspect the only reason they're even hostile right now is because they have absolutely no external threat and are bored.

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

#72

Post by taligent »

redthrowaway wrote: post #49
jcrites wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have so many Titans, why not bring out ten of them and sweep the battle?

They already had more than 10 titans. There were almost 3000 ships in the battle at its height. Also, this battle is a bit different in that it happened in low-sec space, where certain rules are enforced by the game's NPC Empire. So you can't use the Titan's most powerful weapon, which makes it vulnerable. Conversely, you can't use area denial interdictors, so many of the CFC's ships were able to escape when it becam…

Excuse my complete ignorance but I can't resist.

Why was everyone trying to stick it to Something Awful ?

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

#73

Post by alex_c »

mbell wrote: post #64
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…

To be fair, most people who are using the high end ships aren't getting their funding by grinding anymore. Its much easier to play the market and/or prey on new players moving expensive stuff in areas they think are safe. Incidentally, probably the most fascinating part of Eve is really the economy. It's by the closest thing to a 'real' market ever created in a virtual setting.

Most income for large alliances comes from mining moons and from taxes on members' income. Ships lost in these alliance-level battles are usually (at least partially) reimbursed by the alliance.

Incidentally, this is what makes some territory more valuable to hold for an alliance, and worth fighting over - some areas can generate much more income than others. Most of the high-level metagame happens over who controls what moons, which is actually invisible to the average player.

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

#74

Post by romland »

taligent wrote: post #72
redthrowaway wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already had more than 10 titans. There were almost 3000 ships in the battle at its height. Also, this battle is a bit different in that it happened in low-sec space, where certain rules are enforced by the game's NPC Empire. So you can't use the Titan's most powerful weapon, which makes it vulnerable. Conversely, you can't use area denial interdictors, so many of the CFC's ships were able to escape when it becam…

Excuse my complete ignorance but I can't resist. Why was everyone trying to stick it to Something Awful ?

Goons are pretty much well-known for being trolls in every game. Sort of their trademark to be annoying, so... :)

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

#75

Post by EarthLaunch »

jere wrote: post #53

[Edit: this comment turned out not to really be about Eve and more about the difficulty of real time MMOs] This blows my mind. I've been thinking about writing a small multiplayer game for a few weeks. And today I was actually doing back of the napkin calculations. The thing that quickly became clear is bandwidth is O(n^2) where n is the number of players in the same location, since you have to share the location and…

I'm a game developer bootstrapping an Erlang-based game server that attempts this.

You don't have to send 48 bytes each frame (you can usually send only delta), and 30/sec is only necessary in a reaction-based FPS type of game. Hosting players in a local area, local meaning they can see each other and interact, is n^2. My calculations a year ago came up with a per-minute cost for the amount of AWS hardware it would require to host 1,000 and 10,000 'local' players. Basically, it wouldn't be affordable to have a huge gathering/battle more than a few times a month. It would be VERY expensive. Plus, each player has to have enough download bandwidth.

This type of thing will definitely happen in the future. Clustering is still in its infancy, and it's picking up steam. And there are smart optimizations to be made, such as sending more frequent data about nearer players. You can also design around it by not making players usually local to each other even though there is a single seamless game world. I'm doing that.

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

#76

Post by saraid216 »

taligent wrote: post #72
redthrowaway wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already had more than 10 titans. There were almost 3000 ships in the battle at its height. Also, this battle is a bit different in that it happened in low-sec space, where certain rules are enforced by the game's NPC Empire. So you can't use the Titan's most powerful weapon, which makes it vulnerable. Conversely, you can't use area denial interdictors, so many of the CFC's ships were able to escape when it becam…

Excuse my complete ignorance but I can't resist. Why was everyone trying to stick it to Something Awful ?

Hopefully someone can give you a better answer, but you might have heard of 4chan? Something Awful is where they came from.

They're actually a major cultural force in EVE. ("Shoot blues" "Little bees") They're a bit like America in international relations, except there are fewer redeeming qualities.

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

#77

Post by alex_c »

OmegaHN wrote: post #18
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…

One of EVE's sayings is "Don't fly what you can't lose." In general, you get that kind of ship especially for these types of fights. There isn't much base-building or PvE inside of EVE; it's all about the PvP. Being able to say that you flew a Titan into a battle is a major accomplishment inside of the EVE universe, so you don't care as much if you lose it (of course, you want to keep it safe, but only to fly it into…

Right on the money, but titans are also arguably most valuable for logistics - "jumping" large amounts of ships over large distances. Some may never see battle because the corp or alliance needs them for this purpose and doesn't want to risk losing them.

(Unless, that is, the pilot presses the wrong button and jumps the titan itself into battle, rather than the fleet it was trying to move. Which is what started this whole fight.)

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

#78

Post by runn1ng »

Khoa wrote: post #43
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…

Here's a much more in depth report of the battle. http://themittani.com/news/asakai-aftermath-all-over-cobalt-... It's a very fascinating read.

Except I don't understand a single word of it.

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

#79

Post by DigitalJack »

trout wrote: post #61
stingraycharles wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how these types of problems are solved. Local clients run simulations based on known locations/directions, and are synced with the central server at a specified interval. This allows a client to have a light-weight "cached" view of the reality, and the only trade-off is the occasional discrepancy from the reality. However, if you send updates about changes in speed/directions in real time, you get a p…

Depending on the game (it's been 10 years for me) one 'hack' was to head in one direction, pull the network connection for 3-4 seconds, head in the opposite direction, and plug back in. This allowed you to escape or hide in the terrain fairly reliably. With higher bandwidths and server capacities I'm guessing these timeouts have been reduced, but never underestimate the player's ability to abuse your trade-offs.

There was an exploit in eve sort of like this. What you did was start warping toward a planet on the far side of the solar system and then kill the application as you got close to it.

The effect was to allow you to sling shot past the destination at warp speed, and if you logged back in at teh right time (seconds later) you could setup a waypoint far outside the outermost celestial body.

(Normally you can only warp to planets and moons, etc... you can't just pick an arbitrary direction and engage warp).

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

#80

Post by gizmo686 »

trout wrote: post #61
stingraycharles wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how these types of problems are solved. Local clients run simulations based on known locations/directions, and are synced with the central server at a specified interval. This allows a client to have a light-weight "cached" view of the reality, and the only trade-off is the occasional discrepancy from the reality. However, if you send updates about changes in speed/directions in real time, you get a p…

Depending on the game (it's been 10 years for me) one 'hack' was to head in one direction, pull the network connection for 3-4 seconds, head in the opposite direction, and plug back in. This allowed you to escape or hide in the terrain fairly reliably. With higher bandwidths and server capacities I'm guessing these timeouts have been reduced, but never underestimate the player's ability to abuse your trade-offs.

That problem is not because of the trade off. The problem is that the server believe the player's client when it provided an updated location. The 'correct' behavior in this case would be that the server resyncs the client, and the player observe's his ship jump to where the server thinks it should be.
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