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

Hey, I used to be a games networking programmer, and your estimate is pretty good. A few corrections that bring it down to something not entirely unaffordable:

* You can bit-pack your structures a lot more efficiently - let's say 2 bytes for a local player ID, 10 bytes for each of velocity/orientation (quaternion represention and heavily quantizing the theta component), and 10 bytes for the location. Clients are never allowed to determine the canonical physics simulation, so all of the above are really just for display purposes, and can be trimmed down as appopriate - we don't need to worry about desyncing (as I'll explain in a bit)

* 30 packets-per-second is way too high for network play, with a game of EVE's mechanics you could probably get away with something perhaps as low as 1 pps. Intermediate simulation of the player entities is done by a technique called dead reckoning that's linked earlier (though in practice you'd use a slight improvement on it to stop entities leaping around the world).

* Sometimes game mechanics allow you to strongly cut down the number packets you send. For example, in EVE, it might be desirable to not send information about a ship if it's completely occluded by another ship, or to only send information about ships that are in a frontal cone ahead of you. This usually doesn't affect the bandwidth function (though sometimes it does), but you can almost always cut a constant factor of (rule of thumb) 50% off the bill.

So that ends up being 32 * 1 * 3000 * 3000 ~= 250MB/s, which looks about right to me. One thing you didn't account for is that you don't typically allow MMO game clients to connect to each other, but to multiplex everything through a server. So it ends up being twice as large as that - 500MB/s.

Good luck with your game! 100 interacting players in an MMO is a challenging target but not an unreachable one for a single-developer game, and it's definitely a very interesting project to undertake.

The environment EVE creates in almost every aspect of the game is just fascinating.

It is the only game I ever played I actually felt an enormous thrill and adrenaline rush when playing pvp. It doesn't matter if you're pvping alone or with a fleet. The fact that you actually lose/gain on a fight differentiates the game from any other MMO. Events that you may have experienced in-game can be recorded forever and actually impacts the whole game universe.

I really hope more companies invest into having one persistent world in their MMOs. Instead we see this segregated servers in which great players/achievements/events are limited to this little server. It ends up lessening the interest of many players, specially older ones.

Funny thing is that, normally, when the hit MMO stops being a hit they end up merging lots of servers anyways. Which IMHO end up lessening even more the time people have spent on that game.

They play to have a fun laugh and how much you expend is upto you. Like any big entity at the top then they get haters and fans alike. But they do it basicly for shits and giggles and don't roleplay the honour card unless it suits them at the time for a laugh.

If you check the video you'll see it's very slow paced and the ships basically don't seem to move at all (maybe tiny unseen ones do I don't know)

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/

4chan might literally be "something awful", but the site Something Awful came FROM 4chan. As did half the "meme" sites on the internet, unfortunately...

Just reinforcing JonnieCache's point.

EDIT: Apparently SA was around before 4chan. grr. In any case, they are fairly independent cultures. One charges $10 to register, the other doesn't require a username/login...