Eve Online Hits 100K Subscribers

CCP Games' Massive Title, Eve Online, now boasts 100,000 subscribers. Though there are many games with more users Eve Online is a very different title, set inside ships in the depths of space. They currently hold the record for most concurrent users, set at 23,178 simultaneous users on a single server. From the article: "To help accommodate its growing population, CCP will complete a hardware overhaul, allowing the game to handle more users, expand its universe, and run smoother." Ethic, over at Kill Ten Rats, has been writing about Eve a lot lately. His posts cover intergalactic war and courier missions, and might give you a sense of what gameplay is like. If you're interested in that sort of thing.

Re:EVE-Online, not just for everyone

[Corbu Mulak]

I don't think it will. EVE takes a lot of patience, preparation, and time (not necessarily in-game time, just time to build skills up), whereas the more popular games with the annoying communities (CS, WoW) are pretty much "pick up and play" type games. They have their rewards mostly at the beginning of the games, and as you continue playing them you start running out of new options and your fun decreases. What I've found with EVE is that the more I play, the more fun I have, because there are actually MORE things to do.
The people who make up the majority of the community are people who stay with the game. There may be a few hundred accounts or so that are 14-day trial people that act like they are still in WoW, but the majority of the gamers will be players who have been playing the game for a while. It just happens that those people tend to be less annoying and "OMG I PWNED J00 N00BZ0RZ LOLOLOLOL."

Re:23k a record?

[Anonymous Coward]

In EVE, there is only one universe that everyone inhabits. It'd be more like imagining 23k people in a single game of Diablo II.

Re:23k a record?

[TopSpin]

Do they mean 23000+ people on one server?

Yes. EVE has only one "server", which is a cluster of IBM hardware with a large Texas Memory Systems solid state disk. I'm not certain what operating system is running on the cluster nodes, but I know the database is MS SQL Server.

The game is implemented in so-called "stackless" Python. I believe they are using a now rather obsolete version of stackless. I continue to wonder when and how they will address that problem. Perhaps they have been maintaining an internal stackless Python fork...

Re:EVE-Online, not just for everyone

[Corbu Mulak]

You can grab it here [eve-online.com]. The client is free, and if you want to continue it is $30 (american) for a "real" key (30 free days), and something like 13 or 14 bucks a month after that (standard MMO fare)

Re:Diversity in gameplay

[Tallon29]

Does tricking investors have anything to do with assasination? "After a months-long infiltration operation, the Eve Online corporation Guiding Hand Social Club managed to work its agents high into the ranks of the Ubiqua Seraph corp (corps are Eve's version of guilds), from whence they pulled off what is being called the biggest heist/coup/assassination in Eve history, making away with $16,500 worth of virtual goods-and all within the letter of Eve law. The PC Gamer article linked above is a fantastic narrative retelling of the operation. And this writer feels that beside being a good story, the fact that such a sophisticated operation is not only possible but actually took place is testament to the success of Eve's design." Check it out [dragonscoveherald.com].

Re:No way.

[Quaoar]

Except that EVE is one server. Let's see you get 2,000 concurrent users on a WoW server and have it run smoothly, let alone 20,000.

Re:Loved this game...

[coolGuyZak]

Most if not all of the flaws in the PvP system have been removed at this time. With the release of Red Moon Rising, CCP finally got around to implementing a system for ore rats as well. If someone steals ore out of your can, you get kill rights. :)

Of course, the podkill zones are still infested by griefers... but that is the entire point of those areas. CCP engineered that mechanic into their game specifically to increase the risk of traversing those systems.

Re:EVE-Online, not just for everyone

[willfe]

Actually, you can get game time a *lot* cheaper; it's $14.95 a month, or you can grab a game time code off eBay (I paid $38 for three months of game time). The cool part is if you do subscribe (by paying them directly or by getting a game code), they still let you have the first 14 days free (they don't cancel/kill the free time you have left when you become a paying member).

Re:Diversity in gameplay

[Yst]

The perpetrator was a corp called the Guiding Hand Social Club, the victim was another corp, Ubiqua Seraph and its CEO, Mirial. It got coverage in PC Gamer. The relevant thread chronicling the heist is here. [eve-online.com]

WoW Fans: EVE Uinverse = Single realm

[Organic_Info]

For all the WoW fans having trouble understanding what is so special about this, the EVE Universe is one big single realm (hosted on a cluster of servers).

So where as a single WoW realm (hosted on a cluster of servers?) can accommodate about 2000 concurrent online players the EVE Universe(realm) has now supported over 23000 concurrent online players.

Now that is something special.

EVE-Online is mostly time-sinks

[Aceticon]

I've played the game for almost a year, and from my experience the biggest single problem with EVE online is the enormous amount of time you waste doing boring things in between the fun things:

• Travelling takes enormous amounts of time. Going through any single start system takes several minutes and common trips via the highway systems (a group of important solar systems which are relativelly far from each other but have direct connections - the fastest way to cross the EVE universe) take at least 15 minutes. Traveling from a far from the highway system in one area to another in a different area can take up to 1h. Going all the way to deep 0.0 space will take several hours. When i was doing trading, i would wake up in the morning, fire up EVE on my PC and send my ship to pick-up some goods in a far system. While in real life i would shower, dress and eat breakfast the ship would be traveling. With a bit of luck the ship would've arrived when i was ready to go to work. I would then pick-up the goods and start the ship on the journey back and then would leave the EVE client on and go to work.
• The base of the EVE economy is mining asteroids. In order to have the means to buy the most basic ship (newbie ships are free but they suck bigtime) you have to mine ore from asteroids. Mining asteroids is an incredibly boring activity - hours and hours looking at your lasers hitting some asteroids and your cargohold filling with ore. Since cargo holds aren't that big, one has to periodicaly (about once a minute) MANUALLY move the ore to an external cargo container. This hour after hour after hour. After you filled enough external containers you go a pick a different ship (transport ship, big cargohold, few mountpoints for mining lasers) and spend the next 30m moving ore from containers in space to a local starbase. On top of this, if you're not mining near a main system (where typically ore buyers and sellers meet - note that asteroids at main systems only have the worse quality ore), you will have another (multi-hour) session of transporting ore from the out-of-way system to a main system.

If you don't believe me, just trail the EVE online forums. You will see many people casualy talking about how they read a book or watch television while their ship travels/mines-ore.

In the end, even though I was quite wealthy for EVE standards (i stumbled early upon a mixed trading/manufacturing market arbitrage possibility introduced when a new type of ship components was made available in the game), i eventually left when i came to the conclusion that after all the time i had invested in it, most of the time playing EVE was composed of boring tasks, NOT fun.

Re:Big Deal?

[AntiDragon]

I'd have to disagree.

Rendering terrain (or not) is a function of the game client and has no effect server-side.

Everything in the game is merely a list of data - object type, stats, position, vector, state/animation etc. How that looks graphically is down to the client.
EVE's concurency *is* impressive since it implies they have a server farm capable enough to access a single database at high speed .

In contrast, the idea behind seperate "realms" (like WoW) is to limit the size of each database for speed purposes.

The bigger the database, the more entities it contains and the longer it takes to cycle through each one and update them. So WoW's server farm contains lots of smaller databases. I would expect it makes maintenance and backup easier.

Of course, this is just a rough impression - there's a myriad of ways to design such systems but you'd probably find something akin to the above if you ever went to work for either company, I'd guess.

Re:23k a record?

[inquis]

This post is mostly correct. The IBM cluster forms the proxy layer. The Texas Memory Systems box is a cache between these systems and the SQL servers. The hardware upgrade is on the proxy layer -- basically, they are replacing 1U SP 32-bit boxes with blade DP 64-bit Opteron boxes.

As far as Stackless goes, they aren't doing the coding themselves -- last I heard, they have the creator of Stackless at CCP doing the work. Going to 64-bit is a huge win though -- systems like Jita and Lagsulert (whose real name is Oursalert, but you get the idea) are now approaching 500 people in that system in prime time. Considering the number of agent missions they are running, and all the market activity that goes on, you've got to start getting close to your 32-bit architecture memory limit.

Re:EVE-Online, not just for everyone

[tibike77]

There's a limit of max 3000 "trial" accounts online on the cluster, but I never saw more than maybe 1500 online.
Yes, the game tells you how many players are logged in at the moment, and how many are trial accounts (if you are a trial account yourself, that is).
Not that you would stand a chance to do anything decent in the 14 days you get for a trial account.

AND, actually, there are 100,000+ accounts with fees paid for "NOW".
That's what "active game subscribers" means to me, anyway.
Well, not bad, 1.5 mil $ per month (actually, less, as most active players paid for the entire year).
The average "online users" load on the cluster is around 10k-15k during the GMT day, and peaks at around 20+k each and every day.