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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

#101

Post by EarthLaunch »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #95
EarthLaunch wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Is AWS feasible for large scale game hosting? I would have thought co-location would be much more economical in this case.

AWS has lower upfront cost, doesn't require hardware management, and it's easier to provision consistent servers during growth or temporary peaks. Ideal for an unstable clustered system being run by a startup.

I'm mainly talking about EC2, since some other offerings aren't suitable for responsive games. I tried a SimpleDB backend to be hip a couple years back, but it has latency and designed failure rates that are impossible.

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

#102

Post by creamyhorror »

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…

I was looking for information on this too, because last I heard, TEST and Goons were closely-allied buddies, and here they are fighting each other in a relatively large way. Then again, I think Pandemic Legion and Goons used to work together against BoB, but then seemingly broke ties (and now PL+TEST, as part of HBC, have clashed with Goons). This article clarified things for me somewhat:

http://themittani.com/features/why-didnt-hbc-and-cfc-go-war

As far as I understand the article, the CFC and HBC are the two biggest coalitions in the galaxy, and war between them is a risky bet for either in the current conditions. There's not enough incentive for them to do it just yet, and old ties come into play. (Some commenters mentioned technetium moons as an underlying factor - very profitable sources of income which PL stands to lose in a war.)

From my outsider point of view, the political situation in the EVE galaxy has matured: the Allies (CFC) beat the Axis (BoB), some residual fighting has gone on, and everyone's trending either towards a Cold War or a United Nations. The ethos of EVE predisposes alliances to conflict, but there's a lot of territory and months of sleepness nights at stake when supercoalitions decide to go to war. And these supercoalitions used to be (at least in part) allied to each other against older enemies.

The pendulum might swing again, but this time it won't end as easily as BoB crushed ASCN in 3 months.

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

#103

Post by clarky07 »

I haven't played EVE in years, but I always love reading these reports to reminisce. It took a huge time investment but it was a lot of fun. Reading that CFC apparently has hundreds of titans and lost 3 just in this battle is crazy. I was playing when the first Titan was built, and I remember distinctly when the first one was destroyed.

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

#104

Post by jiggy2011 »

EarthLaunch wrote: post #101
jiggy2011 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is AWS feasible for large scale game hosting? I would have thought co-location would be much more economical in this case.

AWS has lower upfront cost, doesn't require hardware management, and it's easier to provision consistent servers during growth or temporary peaks. Ideal for an unstable clustered system being run by a startup. I'm mainly talking about EC2, since some other offerings aren't suitable for responsive games. I tried a SimpleDB backend to be hip a couple years back, but it has latency and designed failure rates that are im…

I haven't done the math but I'm guessing that with a popular game the costs of hardware and hiring someone to do server management would be wiped out by EC2 costs pretty quickly.

Not sure how spikey game traffic is, but it would seem unlikely that your game is super popular for a day and then drops right off the next as would be the case for many websites.

For example if your game business model is charging some nominal fee per month (say $10) you might find that heavy players can burn through way more than $10 worth of EC2 traffic in a month.

Anyone know if any popular games are hosted on EC2?

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

#106

Post by gamblor956 »

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…

Most RTS games, including Starcraft 2, only update the simulation every 100ms or more. Older RTS games like SC1 and AOE2 used "ticks" of 200-250ms. Essentially, every "tick", player input would be received by the server and distributed back to players after validation for processing or display on the next tick (depending on whether processing is done server-side or client-side). The lag is hidden by visual or auditory cues acknowledging the input (i.e., "Yes, sir!" or "For the Horde!").

This greatly reduces the bandwidth requirements because you have extra time to transmit the data to the user; you only send some of the unit data in each packet. Moreover, you can limit the data to units within X radius of the player/camera and simulate any ships outside of this radius, transmitting only major events like the destruction of a ship. (By simulate, I mean the game could just create random ships and explosions client-side to give the effect of a major battle without actually transmitting or receiving data about those ships; they would be eye-candy only.)

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

#107

Post by redthrowaway »

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 ?

They're the most powerful faction and have been for ages. They've also mastered metagaming and have pioneered some new, truly evil tactics.

For example, Sovereignty Wars in EVE (taking territory from others) is a long, gruelling process that can go on for months. So the goons started launching their attacks at 3 or 4 AM on a monday, to force their adversaries to wake up and go into work with no sleep. They'd do this daily, for a month. In the end, rather than defeating their foe militarily, the opponent would get demoralized and give up, surrendering all of their territory rather than have EVE continue to affect their real lives.

Beyond that, though, they're simply an incredibly powerful faction. There's a resource called technetium that's needed in order to build any of the massive ships, so it's vital for any sizeable corp to have. The Goons grabbed a virtual monopoly on it, and formed OTEC which is a cartel whose goal is to fix the prices of technetium to make it so other groups could never match the goon's strength in massive ships, while growing ridiculously wealthy in the meantime.

Basically, the goons are just really shitty to play against. Couple that with the fact that they and reddit (who used to be the closest of allies) own about 2/3s of everything there is to own in the game, and many players really, really want them to go to war and kill each other off.

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

#108

Post by bonzoesc »

redthrowaway wrote: post #107
taligent wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're the most powerful faction and have been for ages. They've also mastered metagaming and have pioneered some new, truly evil tactics. For example, Sovereignty Wars in EVE (taking territory from others) is a long, gruelling process that can go on for months. So the goons started launching their attacks at 3 or 4 AM on a monday, to force their adversaries to wake up and go into work with no sleep. They'd do this…

I played Eve prior to Goonfleet, and I get a similar impression: they're an entity run by adults who are smart and find meanness hilarious, instead of the usual Eve alliance management of European teenagers.

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

#109

Post by baby »

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…

Can't you do a P2P system when a lot of users are interconnected and then send some information to the prime server?

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

#110

Post by Lewton »

bmohlenhoff wrote: post #97
saraid216 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Something Awful (~1999) was around way before 4chan (2003) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Awful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan

That's what he's saying. 4Chan came from SomethingAwful
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