News - Over 2,600 spaceships destroyed in huge Eve Online space battle

[MainDrain]

Amazing MMO, so MMO they have to turn the game speed down to 10% for the servers to cope with a massively multiplayer online fight..........

I guess with a game this boring, any thing that happens that isn't boring is news worthy

Jesus, im replying far to often to this thread now.


They slow the time down because the tech they have can not support 4,000 people active in one system. It is designed to level the playing field. Previously there was incredible lag which may effect on person more than another, this way it effects everyone equally. Ideal? No. An improvement? Yes

[MainDrain]

I wonder if they have insurance policies? I'm not an EVE player but this is certainly a gripping story of war with consequences for the players.

Give me a direct mail and ill set you up with a couple of week trial for Eve. It's one of those games that you should try, but definitely is not for everyone.

[kalniel]

Anyone can get a 14 day trial at the eve website or via Steam. You can also get a 21 day trial via buddy invite, for which they will get referral rewards if you buy game time in the future. If interested in that I'd recommend asking as we've got several long standing Hexus members who could benefit - beware people signing up just to try and get your referral reward

[Agent]

Amazing MMO, so MMO they have to turn the game speed down to 10% for the servers to cope with a massively multiplayer online fight..........

I guess with a game this boring, any thing that happens that isn't boring is news worthy

There is no other MMO in the world that can come even close to supporting 4000+ players at the speed of Eve with the complexity involved.10% or not, it's an amazing technical feat that 4000 real people are fighting against each other.
Each to their own, but it's been far from boring for me. It's been some of my best gaming time I've had over the last few years.
The biggest mistake people make is signing up and then playing solo....sure is boring then. But so would a multiplayer Quake server with one person on it.

There are plans for a comic book based on players stories, and there is rumours of a TV series

Not a rumour - it was confirmed at Fanfest 2013

Anyone can get a 14 day trial at the eve website or via Steam. You can also get a 21 day trial via buddy invite, for which they will get referral rewards if you buy game time in the future. If interested in that I'd recommend asking as we've got several long standing Hexus members who could benefit - beware people signing up just to try and get your referral reward

And us long standing members will fill your wallet as a result of using one of our links and offer endless free help and advice.

Pretty much every Eve player on HEXUS is / has flown together. While I won't pimp it here, most end up in the same corp as we're very laid back and all sit in the same timezone.

[shaithis]

There is no other MMO in the world that can come even close to supporting 4000+ players at the speed of Eve with the complexity involved.10% or not, it's an amazing technical feat that 4000 real people are fighting against each other.
Each to their own, but it's been far from boring for me. It's been some of my best gaming time I've had over the last few years.
The biggest mistake people make is signing up and then playing solo....sure is boring then. But so would a multiplayer Quake server with one person on it.

Got a number of friends that play/played it, some admit it's boring yet feel peer pressure and emotional (possibly even financial!) investment to carry on playing.

All of them have relayed the same story as well, the one of watching a piece of space for 4+ hours for their guild (or whatever they call them in eve) without a single thing happening. Others talk about being given a craft and having it destroyed in seconds, then getting the wrath of the owner.

Back in the day, when people were still using dial-up and servers had a fraction of the power they have now, I was involved in many EverQuest raids were there were upwards of 500 people involved without any major issues (and without servers being slowed down to a snails pace)......I fail to see how 5x-8x that figure is a major feat, especially over 10 years later with end-user connections 100 times faster than they were, backbones 100x+ faster and servers costing a fraction of the cost per GFLOP.
Planetside 2 manages 2000 people lag-free currently....and that's an extremely poorly optimised game.

[Jay]

gotta love eve and the dedication of the players, if you get into the correct corp, have the right amount of free time its really good fun.

Trying to compare planetside and eve is probably not a good comparison.

[Gerrard]

Been quite a while now since I last played. Should still have a couple of bil and a carrier (plus that couple of bil I gave the corp! ). The small corp was good, but I have to agree that when we joined an alliance it did become like work. Having to report at certain times to do certain things. Not really the alliance's fault as such, it's just the way the game seems to be at the top end to be productive. And it spent a lot of time either ganking, being ganked or mostly at a standoff until one side could get the upper hand. Wormholes without the local might have been good if I had bothered putting the time into it. Haven't really been following it since I left (T3 had just been introduced), and don't have the time to put back into yet either.

[HalloweenJack]

maybe they should upgrade some servers then? or have 1 huge (and recently decommissioned) CRAY or something....

[Agent]

Got a number of friends that play/played it, some admit it's boring yet feel peer pressure and emotional (possibly even financial!) investment to carry on playing.

What financial reason could they have?
On the peer pressure front, if you're talking about playing / looking after mates, then that's the same with any MMO (and even real life). It's not exclusive to Eve

All of them have relayed the same story as well, the one of watching a piece of space for 4+ hours for their guild (or whatever they call them in eve) without a single thing happening. Others talk about being given a craft and having it destroyed in seconds, then getting the wrath of the owner.

Eve is a sandbox. You can do what the heck you want in it. There is literally no requirement for you to take any route.
Not that I can think of any reasons you'd stake a system out for 4 hours when nothing was happening....but if they did that, then they only have themselves to blame If nothing is happening....you do something else. That's not a fair representation of what happens in the game at all.

Why go to the fair ground and sit on a bench all day?

Back in the day, when people were still using dial-up and servers had a fraction of the power they have now, I was involved in many EverQuest raids were there were upwards of 500 people involved without any major issues (and without servers being slowed down to a snails pace)

I played EQ for a bit, although not very long. I can't remember anything of that size though. This shows the raid sizes as:

EverQuest developer Clint Worley announced on his blog that in the upcoming EverQuest expansion, raid sizes will be cut from the current level of 54 characters -- 9 groups -- to 42 characters -- 7 groups. No changes will be made to existing raids, which means raids currently doing 54 character raids on current content will have two extra groups when doing the newest content. Since instituting the formal raid system with the Planes of Power expansion, raid sizes have dropped consistently from a high of 72 characters to its current level.

I can't find much on EQ1, as most things seem to be talking about EQ2, but I can't find anything which suggests sizes that big where people can fully interact and PvP against each other.

......I fail to see how 5x-8x that figure is a major feat, especially over 10 years later with end-user connections 100 times faster than they were, backbones 100x+ faster and servers costing a fraction of the cost per GFLOP.
Planetside 2 manages 2000 people lag-free currently....and that's an extremely poorly optimised game.

It manages no such thing
Sure, it had a 2k+ battle, but it wasn't lag free and the restrictions that were placed on clients was huge. Viewing distance of other players for example was dramatically reduced, which meant you could only see a short, immediate distance around you. You simply couldn't see, nevermind interact and shoot at people at range. As more players joined, this got worse.
There is a video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TckhRhctoI

Some quotes:

You'll see strange stuff start to happen as the population density goes too high - your client can only render so many units at once. In medium sized battles, that doesn't take effect, but in huge battles you start seeing fewer and fewer infantry further away.

This battle was so ridiculously huge that the rendering distance at times becomes like 15 feet, extremely close. So there's never a moment where you can peek over the edge and see 500 enemies - you can only see the ones close to you. But they were all fighting there.

Wow. UES starting having really severe latency issues towards the end (or at least towards the end of your video). A whole second before hit confirmation? grenades popping up everywhere and not exploding immediately, soon, or ever? debris hanging in air everywhere? people doing the dead man shuffle across the floor? and the extremely short render distance at times!

......

Yeah, it really started breaking apart. Normal gameplay, even with hundreds of people, still stays responsive - but when you have 2000 people with all sorts of tanks and aircraft too crammed into the same place it understandably put a big load on it. This was a special event though, you don't see that many people in one spot under any normal circumstances.

So lag free? Not a chance - not that I don't think it was awesome.

The reason it's so much better in Eve is that those 4000 people can fully interact with each other. Every single person can target each other, fire, assist (and so on) another ship. Multiple modules can target different ships, with possible combinations that go into thousands. As good as EQ/EQ2/ Planetside are, they have no where near the complexity of Eve. Complexity = resources (see my example of interactions below). Once you actually understand what's happening in one of these battles, you'll understand why it's a technical achievement
If it was Pac-Man online, sure, you could get higher. But the second you add complexity in it, it becomes harder to manage.

It's also worth noting that the 10% speed was only when needed. It changed as the battle happened. In some cases it was 80%, sometimes 50%, in the worse case - 10%. It's better than the server crashing.

Been quite a while now since I last played. Should still have a couple of bil and a carrier (plus that couple of bil I gave the corp! ). The small corp was good, but I have to agree that when we joined an alliance it did become like work. Having to report at certain times to do certain things. Not really the alliance's fault as such, it's just the way the game seems to be at the top end to be productive. And it spent a lot of time either ganking, being ganked or mostly at a standoff until one side could get the upper hand. Wormholes without the local might have been good if I had bothered putting the time into it. Haven't really been following it since I left (T3 had just been introduced), and don't have the time to put back into yet either.

We're still in an alliance, but it's a true "do what the hell you want" alliance. As we're in wormhole space, it's mostly a group of people that can batphone each other when it hits the fan. We have no one to answer to really and we're all good friends in it. Many of us went to Fanfest this year and it was awesome
Got to try it though - I don't think we'd go back into a nullsec alliance now.

maybe they should upgrade some servers then? or have 1 huge (and recently decommissioned) CRAY or something....

The servers are constantly being upgraded. They are on the cutting edge. It's not a case of 'upgrading' them, they work very closely with companies like IBM to make the servers for them. They *use* a super computer now.
Have a read of: http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/06/15/eve-online/

If this were the Discworld, the Tranquility server would be the Great A’Tuin, the Giant Star Turtle on which all existence rides. But, this is Eve Online. Entombed within what is recognized as the gaming industry’s largest supercomputer is the ruffian-riddled, single-shard universe of New Eden. According to its creators, CCP, the monstrous London-based server cluster has 3,936GB of RAM, 2,574GHZ worth of processing power and even military-grade hardware.

The biggest reason that so much power is needed is that it's single-shard. Everyone can interact with everyone, without any restrictions. There is no "What server are you on?".

Also keep in mind that as numbers grow, the number of interactions that can (and do) happen will grow logarithmically. For example
2 players, A and B. A can attack B and B can attack A = 2 interactions.
4 players, A, B, C, D. A can attack BCD, B=ACD, C=ABD, D=ABC, which = 12 possible interactions.

And so on....
You can quickly see how many possible interactions are going to be happening at 4000 people. Damage, movement, remote effects, chat, and endless amount of other data has to be updated on each engine tick (which is one second for Eve). It's a blinking lot - It's hard to compare it to other MMOs from a technical standpoint.

[HalloweenJack]

wow so using a CRAY would be a downgrade! learnt something today!!

[Butuz]

Military grade? Ah so they use MSI motherboards then?

Butuz

[Agent]

Military grade? Ah so they use MSI motherboards then?

Butuz

LOL

Did you see the bit about military clearance?

“The funny thing was that, at the time, the technology only existed in the military so we had to get military clearance to go into a bunker in Texas to evaluate the hardware because the company, back then, had only just started looking into commercializing this thing that they made for the US army. We were one of first clients and they thought it was really funny that they went from building things for the army to something that’s so completely light-hearted.”

With a grin, Halldor adds, “Of course, we told them that the Internet spaceships are serious business.”

It's crazy how CCP has influenced the makers of the hardware. They spilled loads of good info at Fanfest if you're into this kinda thing . The videos should be on Youtube.

[HalloweenJack]

would have used SLC SSD`s I bet - uber money 5 years ago

[najiro]

WOW! I'm amazed how virtual stuff in games actually hold that much value...

[The Hand]

@MainDrain
Thanks for the offer, but I'm likely to be going for Elite: Dangerous when it comes out next year and I did back it on Kickstarter, so its already paid for me. EVE does look interesting though judging by these kind of epic battles.