EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) 308
captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."
Kinda Cool (Score:5, Interesting)
I still don't think I'll sign over my credit card to a MM online game, but a game that lets you destroy THOUSANDS of dollars of stuff that other people value for the sheer malicious joy . . . well, that's perversely COOL!
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Oh yeah, they do treat it as a game.
Re:Kinda Cool (Score:4, Funny)
Ummm... who do I write to for a bailout for my lost ships? Hey, my alliance sure is too big to fail!
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I still don't think I'll sign over my credit card to a MM online game, but a game that lets you destroy THOUSANDS of dollars of stuff that other people value for the sheer malicious joy . . . well, that's perversely COOL!
Destroy thousands of dollars of stuff? You mean donate it to CCP games don't you?
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I still don't think I'll sign over my credit card to a MM online game, but a game that lets you destroy THOUSANDS of dollars of stuff that other people value for the sheer malicious joy . . . well, that's perversely COOL!
I noodled about in EVE years ago. It's got the harshest cost factor of any MMO out there. It can take weeks of grinding to get a good ship and you can lose it in seconds if you're not careful. You have many, many hours spread between the ship you buy and your pilot and the pilot has both XP and implants that boost stats. You can buy clone insurance for the pilot but implants are always lost upon death.
There are a lot of chinese farmers in the game as well as OCD no-life guys who amass virtual fortunes. You
Why Am I Not Surprised (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Why Am I Not Surprised (Score:5, Informative)
Only in EVE would you try and have thousands of players meet in a single location to fight.
From the sound of it, the number of people who were in that particular star system (or trying to get in) exceeds the number of players on many WOW instances. Yet, all in all, that was probably at most a few percent of the players online at the time, and they're all connected to the same game world.
That said, a single star system on EVE is hosted by a single physical server. Less-used systems can be grouped together to save on hardware, but for a big fight like this CCP fires up their most powerful hardware and puts the relevant system(s) on dedicated servers. While they're getting good at this - a few years ago 200 ships was a big fight, these days it's a common occurrence - it's still going to be an awful strain on the server to support that many players in combat. In a situation like that, the players need to take the limitations of computer hardware into account, and plan accordingly.
Re:Why Am I Not Surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
In a situation like that, the players need to take the limitations of computer hardware into account, and use it to gain an edge.
It's EvE, after all.
Re:Why Am I Not Surprised (Score:5, Informative)
In this particular case, there were 1340 people in the same star system at peak. A star system is handled by a single server, due to code limitations - CCP have stated that they want to improve the code so that a single system can be managed by multiple servers, but they are not yet there. About a year ago, this number of people fighting in the same system would've been next to impossible. CCP later improved their code to be able to handle fleet fights of 1500+ players with reasonable responsiveness (IE, lagged but playable). Due to the fact that eve is more of a tactical simulator than an action sim, lag is not always such a big issue. A five or ten second weapons activation lag is actually playable in a fashion, unlike many other games.
Now, keep in mind that this is actually 1340 players fighting on a single physical server, with upwards of 50,000 players logged in at the same time on the single world shard of eve. Compare this to many other MMOs, where you may have 1340 players total on a shard cluster.
Now, EVE is not designed for 1340 players. The fact that that many players are able to play in a single solar system at all is a testament to the sandbox nature of eve, where the developers have decided to try to avoid hard limits as much as possible (IE, no 25-man raids or maximum players on the server), but instead allow the players to use as much as they can and want. This obviously results in situations where the servers cannot cope, which is a known problem with fleet fights. CCP's response has traditionally been "Yes, we allow you to do this, but be aware of the potential consequences - we won't reimburse you for lag or poor server performance". The alternative would've been hard limits on the number of people on a node, which would've favoured those who made it in first, with the most people on their side - there are no defined sides in eve, so you cannot for instance let in 100 red and 100 blue.
The battle that the OP refers to was one of those cases. It was well known that server performance was unreliable after the Dominion patch. In many cases, this would prevent fleet fights from occurring, and when they did occur, they were often one-sided massacres. Knowing this, and despite being warned by their allies numerous times, the opposing force still decided to enter the system. Not only that, but they also decided to jump in at the same time, instead of staggering their jumpins - something that has been proven to reduce lag and avoid people getting stuck in loading - or jumping in to different "grids". In fact, leaked logs indicate that they did this knowingly with the intent of crashing an already overloaded node, so that they'd be at an even footing when the server came back up.
In the end, this backfired and they lost their entire fleet as a result.
Once again, CCP allows fleetfights with no hard limit on the number of participants, but their stance is "Yes, we allow you to do this, but be aware of the potential consequences - we won't reimburse you for lag or poor server performance".
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Actually, a year ago, there were even larger battles that were functional. The problem is CCP apparently not having synched development trees. So for example, every other expansion, drone AI gets old bugs back, that were fixed in the release in-between. The Bloodlines expansion was the worst in terms of that though
Re:Why Am I Not Surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
True, but CCP also has a long history of favoring the Band of Brothers. People can quite reasonably accuse CCP of continuing to favor BoB's playing style here.
A fleetfight should simply not become unbalanced. If players are lagging out, they should cull players evenly from each side, ideally offering non-culled players the option to give their slot to a culled player.
Re:Why Am I Not Surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
CCP's favoritism of BoB is something that gets trotted out every time they accomplish anything. It's years in the past.
In this engagement, BoB (IT) won. The people who jumped in were dumb. They knew this might happen.
In a previous engagement (check the corporation alliance and org forum for post by SK Rooster), BoB/IT jumped in to someone else and lost 40 dreadnoughts. Favoritism? Not so much. Whenever BoB loses, it's cause they suck, whenever they win, it's because they are getting help from the Developers and GM's. Right?
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"Note that "single server" does not mean 1 computer, but could be several working together on that 1 star system."
Wrong. EVE is not parallellized. One system is limited to one CPU core, though a core can run several systems.
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While the above is fact, my opinion is it is an extremely boring game except for the people who can dedicate a lot of time to it. It is quite tedious to play as someone who only plays like 8 hours a week. I have tried to get in to it a few times and just die of boredom after a week or two.
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Only in EVE would the players decide that network failures are a factor they should take into consideration.
EVE is a fairly intense game.
It can take you literally years to train enough skills to fly certain ships. It can take weeks to manufacture a piece of equipment. It can take months to recover from a loss.
Yes, of course, it's only pixels... But they're pixels that take a lot of time and effort to acquire. Because of this, people take things fairly seriously.
In this case - everyone knows that CCP has some issues. There are known problems that people just work around - like Jita on the weekends. You know
I'll take that ... (Score:2)
It was their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
It's well known and not even contested that the forces bridging in to the system black-screened and never got to fight.
However, they got what they deserved. The node in question was not reinforced due to the unexpected nature of the fight (as in; the notification system was not used to put the system on a dedicated server). And jumping into large fights was well know to be bugged since the expansion and the Fleet Commander was made aware by an alliance member that the specific way in which they were going to enter the fight would trigger the bug.
They ignored all those warnings and decided to go ahead. Sources claim the intent was to crash the node and get a more even fight once it got up, multiple accounts even got banned for spamming local chat. Funny thing is the bug seems to be in the simultaneous transfer of 100+ ships into an overloaded system, and doesn't affect people warping around within a system once they are there. This being the worst possible situation for the attempted rescue of the system.
Re:It was their own fault (Score:5, Informative)
For those who don't know, there were already 750-800 players in the system when the defending forces decided to jump into the system. It was a stupid move on the part of the commanders, and they deserved to be shot down like they were.
EvE has many thousands of systems, and many have very few players in them a large portion of the time. CCP requests that when large alliances are going to have a large fight that they notify them so they can put the system in question on a more powerful server to support the large number of players.
Goonswarm, PL, and SOT knew that the system in question was going to be attacked and failed to inform CCP. After they lost the race to get players in the system first, they decided to attemp to crash the node by spaming the local chat channel and jumping everyone in at the same time, and then beat IT alliance back into the system when the server came back up, but they failed, and lost a record dollar value of ships for one fight. Before that fight there had only been about 15-20 titans killed across the whole game, and they lost 4 in one fight. Pretty epic.
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Seems the next project for the EVE programmers is dynamic reallocation of their solar systems based on number of people in local to a smaller set of high-performance systems.
Either that -- or the server whose load goes up (people in local climbing over treshhold) should start offloading lower priority solar systems it also hosts to other servers to reduce its CPU/Memory usage.
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Maybe. Dynamically moving systems to faster CPUs will raise the ceiling a little. The game is growing; the big alliances have 4000+ players. Eventually they'll break the fastest CPUs CCP can get their hands on.
The servers use "cooperative multithreading" (their term, not mine) which means it can't be distributed across cores because the system isn't thread safe. Read about it here [slideshare.net].
EVE just doesn't scale. Microthreads, green threads, whatever you want to call them, are elegant and efficient while your p
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Well, since you didn't even bother checking my /. nick against in-game characters I guess you didn't really care what 'side' I'm on.
And yes, you should just have stayed docked and figured out alternatives. Losing that kind of assets on a reckless move is never worth it. Especially when you know it has a very high risk of failing.
Reminds me of the recent Star Trek film... (Score:2)
The scene where Kirk is facing off against Spock's unbeatable scenario and shuts down the servers temporarily, disabling the shields all of Spock's ships, before blowing them up.
Blaming the servers? (Score:2)
"annihilated amidst controversy"? When has there ever been any significant battle in Eve that didn't feature people blaming server issues for their loss? (often correctly, I might add)
EVE Online. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not trolling, but I fail to see the point of EVE for several reasons. I used to play EVE myself for a few months but quit...
One, why play a game that takes you at least a year to be able to do anything fun and useful? That's not a game at all, that's a job.
Two, CCP has shown themselves in the past to be shady and unreliable, having developers specifically favor certain alliances and otherwise abuse their powers for their own in-game corporations.
Three, the amount of bugs and inability to cope for server stress for large battles (which is the meat and potatoes of this game--large space wars!) has apparently been evident for quite some time now.
I understand that EVE online fills a niche few other games do, and EVE is probably the only one that even attempts what it does, but, IMO, that in no way means the CCP has displayed what I would consider a necessary amount of competence or good game design to make me want to play it. I mean, if Age of Conan (no, EVE is nowhere near the mess that game was at) was the only MMO out there I still wouldn't play it even though I like MMOs.
It's pretty poor form when CCP will claim that subscribers need to account for their own ineptitude when playing their game and not take responsibility for their own, and not even fire the developers that gave unfair advantages to their own corporations way back when. And I hear the game masters are incompetent jerks, too...
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Re:EVE Online. (Score:5, Informative)
2) This has vastly improved with the creation of the internal affairs department. The problem with CCP is more incompetence (mostly on the part of the low-level GMs) than outright malice.
3) The Reinforced node system helps, but is too limited. This is honestly the biggest issue with the game. The servers need to be able to support the player base.
I play EVE because I enjoy small scale combat with meaningful risks. If I wanted to have epic battles with thousands of ships I'd probably be disappointed in it, but for 10-20 man roaming gangs it's very fun.
Re:EVE Online. (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod parent up!
You can have enough skill points to be useful in 0.0 (the unsecured space where players make all the rules and large alliances carve out empires) before the end the free trial. Sure, you won't be able to kill the most valuable NPCs or take on almost anybody in a solo fight, but you can make more than enough money to support buying the ships and gear that your skills allow you to use, and you can certainly be useful in a roaming gang or defensive camp. Heck, you might even get lucky and find some idiot with a hauler full of valuables and nobody escorting him (happened to me once) in which case you really only need a warp disrupter (cheap and easy to train for) and enough firepower to overcome the hauler's shield recharge rate (which you could get by your second day of playing the game).
EVE and CCP may never completely live down poor decisions on the part of several employees, but the game itself goes on and for most people such events are scarcely newsworthy for a week. While we'd certainly prefer if such things had never happened, they're old news - almost irrelevant by now - and the CCP has taken some fairly solid steps to prevent such things from happening again.
From the sound of it, this fight was executed wrong in almost every possible way, perhaps most importantly in that CCP wasn't notified ahead of time so they could put the system on high-end dedicated hardware. Consider also that having hundreds of people in the system used to be enough, by itself, to cause atrocious lag (even if they weren't fighting one another), a problem which is very rare today. Now, while fights with nearly 1000 player/side might still be a bit more than the game can handle, a few hundred per side is commonplace and a thousand total is well within the capabilities of the "reinforced" (with dedicated servers) nodes.
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I never said you can't be useful in low level ships, you can--but your job basically is slowing other ships down. Not fun.
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You know we can all read what you just wrote, right?
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A year to do anything useful? That's what you got from playing for a few months?
I don't really see any difference between that and say WoW where what everyone tells you the first goal is to get to level 80. How long does that take you assuming you don't have a pal leveling you through everything or you were not so devoted that you went out and found a leveling guide and followed it to the letter. All games like this take HUGE amounts of time. I don't see how eve is any different.
The major problem with eve
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Yup.
and don't confuse endgame WoW with being able to do anything useful in EVE. EVE is complete apples and oranges--there is no raiding, nothing like battlegrounds where you are matched up in level tiers, etc...
Re:EVE Online. (Score:4, Interesting)
IMO, these two issues are caused by CCP's location. There's not a vast number of high-quality programming talent in Iceland. (Simply because there isn't a vast number of people). CCP has had a "Senior Programmer" open position on their web site for a couple of years now.
Frankly, the reason I left EvE is that the quality of the already mediocre code was heading downhill rapidly. My personal tipping point was the bug where in-game browser bookmarks were not properly imported by their new in-game browser. If the Devs can't even do that right, then how can anyone expect much from the rest of their code?
Re:EVE Online. (Score:4, Informative)
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I said FUN and USEFUL, not fun and/or useful. Big difference--swarming the enemies and slowing them down is not fun, it's mindless and tedious.
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I'm not stupid, I used to be in Goonfleet. I just don't consider only really slowing other ships down for months to be "fun" because I have to wait for my skills to slowly gather over time.
As someone who did WoW + its endgame years ago, I disagree.
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And you can't really do all of those things, you have to specialize in one of them, at least to some degree.
And mining? You might as well get an online job or something, because mining is probably the most boring thing in the world.
Here is video of the battle... (Score:5, Informative)
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I have no clue about how this game work, but judging by the video the big vessels clearly should have gone into Ludicrous Speed mode!
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Re:Here is video of the battle... (Score:5, Insightful)
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That really looks terribly boring. After decades of big budget sci-fi movies, not to mention epic space battle video games like Homeworld, this is the best space combat system that EVE can offer? There didn't seem to be any maneuvering involved at all... might as well be a text based game.
That's because you don't see any interceptors or for that matter any other small craft flying around. That might be a matter of scale or maybe their display is turned of to prevent the death of the graphics card. What you SEE is a big lump of imperial star destroyer sized ships and some death star sized ships which shouldnt move fast.
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It was basically a one sided battle, shooting fish in a barrel because the other side was caught in lagland (server transition isn't so great in EvE when a few hundred ships are already in the system). So I guess if you're expecting to see a "battle", you have to end up disappointed. It's a bit like shooting sitting ducks that had their wings cut off.
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Look again.
There are what? 300+ huge ships all clustered together in a box that appears to be no larger than maybe 10 ships on each side. It's absolutely cramped. Where should they go? If you're in the middle, you're fucked, because if you start moving about, you've just turned yourself and the ships around you into kinetic missiles.
Those on the outer edges of the box could move around, sure. They can back away. But if they have to turn around to face their engines towards the centre mass and their weapons
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The explanation for it being "boring" is the same explanation as to why an two elephants walking across an anthill looks boring - you're not watching the details.
One of the Titans they talk about in the summary is an Avatar [eveonline.com]. It has a volume of 155,000,000 m^3. If they were completely completely spherical, they'd have a radius of 333 meters.
In the opening of the battle (post jump I suppose?) I see at least 6 titans on "our" side of the camera. I'm guessing the distance between the closest ships on either sid
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You're looking at effing HUGE ships. There isn't much movement sensibly possible for them, they are slow and turn even slower. Battles in EvE are at this scale less a matter of maneuvering and moving yourself in position (ships that depend on that instead of huge hulls exist, too, and they serve a vital role, too). Battles of this size are highly influenced by actions before the battle even starts, they're more a matter of good logistics and efficient group management before, as well as good coordination of
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You can try and convince yourself about all you want, but "logistics" means joining the biggest gang, then getting into the system first and chewing up the attackers piecemeal. If that's your idae of "efficient group management", then sure, it's undeniably effective.
Funny that you should mention screensavers; I've lost count of the number of people who have described EvE as a very pretty screensaver.
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Personally I see it as Excel with better graphics. But then again, I'm in resources...
Logistics is much more than that. Like, making sure you actually have what you need when you need it. Just having 2000 people in your alliance means jack if they have no resources, which means no place to produce, which means no ships. Likewise, it means jack if they're scattered all over the galaxy. Logistics is about having what you need where you need it when you need it.
This may not be a concern to alliances that shrug
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Ships in EvE can fire at any angle, I dunno where my post gave you the idea they couldn't. Also, retreating is only an option if you have control over your ships, something that appearantly they didn't have. Imagine your expensive ships duking it out while you're afk for, say, an hour.
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As others have noted, you're watching the equivalent of aircraft carriers fighting each other - those don't dodge or pivot much.
More exciting action is much scale, 5 on 5 or fewer. In those type fights, one person will try to slow a ship (web stasis field), prevent it from escaping (warp disruptor), make it more visible electonically (target painting), scramble it (electronic scrambling), drain its energy (nosferatu modules), etc. Though set in a sci-fi game, smaller scale battles play out reasonably real
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This gives you an idea of the size of the ships involved:
http://www.gossipgamers.com/images/eve1.jpg [gossipgamers.com]
Anyway, yeah, Titans are huge, and the rest of the ships there are dreadnoughts mostly (they're also huge). Check the chart - in my opinion, most of the fun combat is in cruiser sized ships. Find the Caracal or the Rupture or the Vexor to see a size comparison. There's lots of maneuvering with those kind of ships.
Something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aeyt-T_U2Vg [youtube.com] gives you a better idea, but even th
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Offline alternatives ? (Score:4, Informative)
Gamers with a tighter schedule (work, studies, family etc) or a lagging connection to online servers should really consider an offline alternative that goes with their own pace and allows time speed adjustment. Without time speed adjustment (which is by definition incompatible to large online games) space games can be extremely time consuming.
X3 Reunion + Xtended mod (I didn't like TC very much) is a good alternative but I'd be willing to know more.
Their server software uses python (Score:2)
Props to CCP for contributing to the development of "stackless python", but maybe they should write their server code in a different language.
Ohhhhhh... Let the Drama begin! (Score:2)
The allegations that IT (the victorious side in the battle) was the "successor alliance" of BoB (to inform the ones not caring too much about EvE: The alliance that allegedly had undue and "illegal" help from CCP insiders) and that it's the whole BoB inside job deal again are already starting.
I love EvE. It's one of the few games where just watching the metagame, rumors and drama around it can be at least as entertaining as playing the game itself.
Bobbechk's EVE on a Strip about the event (Score:2, Informative)
OP is a bit lame as it fails to even mention Pandemic Legion who
lost the 4 titans.
Pandemic Legion loses 4 titans [kugutsumen.com]
( contains teamspeak recordings of the attack, screenshots, chatlogs, etc...)
Bobbechk's comic strip about the event [kugutsumen.com]
EVE-O Uncensored Daily Political Updates [kugutsumen.com] (reliable source of information about EVE Online politics, updated daily.)
Clarification (Score:4, Informative)
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You do know that an isk is not worth a dollar right?
Consider either the cost to buy 60B isk from currency sellers, or take the total man-hours needed to make a Titan and multiply by minimum wage, and then you'll have a much more useful figure representing how my *real* value was invested in those ships.
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You do know that an isk is not worth a dollar right?
Consider either the cost to buy 60B isk from currency sellers, or take the total man-hours needed to make a Titan and multiply by minimum wage, and then you'll have a much more useful figure representing how my *real* value was invested in those ships.
If you google 'buy ISK', there are a ton of ads from places selling - if you buy 60B, even with the bulk discount, it will cost about $2200 at the places I checked..
Re:Thousands? Far from accurate... (Score:4, Informative)
Hmm... last time I checked a PLEX was about 300m for 30 days. 15 USD=300m, so a Titan would "cost" about 3000 USD, the equivalent of 200 months of play time. So I guess the description could well be correct.
Re:Thousands? Far from accurate... (Score:5, Interesting)
Very basic overview, with time requirements attached to give an idea how how much work goes into it.
Materials: 30 man or more strip mining fleet running through some nullsec systems for materials.
Time: Two three weeks of a few hours of mining every day.
Skilltime: About three months of skill trainning to be able to do this job.
Blueprints: 3 or 4 people needed to do Research on the blueprints and make copies of needed components. A player owned structure is needed for this with all maintenance done. Usually but another group of players.
Time: Three to Six months of minimal research and development on blueprints to make them useful.
Skilltime:Four to Six months minimal time needed to make an effective researcher in eve.
Building: One Two or Three players depending on how you build to make a Titan.
Time: Takes about two months to build components and then a full month to build the full ship.
Skilltime: Nine months Minimum skill training time to have an effective industrialist.
Flying: One person, usually a dedicated player that does nothing else.
Time: Hours of sitting around waiting for something to happen followed by a few minutes pure terror as you take your alliances Titan into battle and hope to hell you don't lose it.
Skilltime: One year of dedicated training minimum required to actually fly the thing.
This is a very basic overview, and the support structure needed to make this all happen tends to take at least a few hundread people activily playing the game to make it happen.
Re:I'm not sure about their policy... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I'm not sure about their policy... (Score:5, Insightful)
But it did take a lot of time to build up the in game credits to buy those ships. And you do literally pay real money for time in game.
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Not only that, time you spend playing has also intristic value for yourself, as you could be doing something profitable. If you transalte time needed to get those ships to dollar/per hour of, say, fast food dummy, you get quite impressive numbers too.
You can choose not to play and insted use money you gain by working isntead to actually buy ingame credits (players can buy one monst subscription for real currency and resell it for ingame gold.).
So yeah, You could very well have literally bought those shiny s
It may have cost -real money- (Score:2)
You can accumulate Interstellar Kredits (ISK) by gaming, or you can actually BUY it with real money.
After all you can sell PLEX (Pilot License EXtentions, essentially game cards) in game (for ISK) bought outside of the game with real money.
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Well, especially in EvE, you might claim that indeed thousands of dollars were lost.
You see, it is possible in EvE through in-game means to sell game time card to other players for money. I.e. you buy a GTC for real money and can then sell that game time for in game money to other players. One could claim that it's not literally thousands of dollars but instead years of game time, but essentially, since it's a pay-to-play game, the effect is quite similar. Players could have used that money to buy game time
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A life! A life! My Kingdom for a Life!
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If a player played for a year to build up your ship and treated it all as a horrible chore as merely an investment for possible future fun, then the fault is that of the player. If instead the player had fun while building up those ships, then the money is already well spent and thus isn't "lost".
So if I enjoy my day job then boss shouldn't have to pay me?
Anything can have value if people deem it to. Just look at gold - much less useful than steel or copper for almost every application, but for some reason people pay lots of money for it. By the same token, people pay money for the right to control one of these ships in this video game. You might think that's a silly use of their money, but it's a use of their money so the ships have value. If they're destroyed, that value is lost.
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The fact you're comparing a game to a job says loads about how fun EVE is.
Re:I'm not sure about their policy... (Score:5, Insightful)
My girlfriend doesn't 'get' what 60 billion isks means, but if you look at the exchange rate (which last I checked was about 300 mil for 20$?) quoting $4000 is something that
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I never got refunded when I lost ships due to Goons and their lag inducing tactics. Why should they get any refund when they get lag pwned?
Re:I'm not sure about their policy... (Score:4, Informative)
Because we didn't get lag, we got a failure of the game system. We stared at a black screen for 2 and a half hours. My killmail is dated 30 minutes after I logged off.
Lag is expected in a fleet fight of any size. You expect to be able to see that someone is present though, even if you're not sure if they're shooting you or not.
Whether you like the Goons or not, that's not a fun game to play for either side. Hell, when IT and the Goons agree things are broken and need fixing you know there's either a problem or it's the end times.
Re:I'm not sure about their policy... (Score:4, Insightful)
EVE is a ruthless game that encourages players to be ruthless; and apparently, exploiting bugs in the codebase, trying to crash servers etc. are considered acceptable tactics.
EVE is a sandbox game that provides an environment and a permissive attitude as to what goes on within the sandbox. If people choose to be ruthless, great. If they choose to co-operate, great. But CCP have long been pretty clear that exploiting the game engine is out of bounds, despite all the Band of Developers history the old Goons like to rant about over the space-campfire.
If someone can play the metagame and infiltrate Goonswarm and disband them, good luck to them! But when CVA was disbanded via an exploit recently, CCP rolled it back.
I'm only a foot-solider, so don't take this as gospel, but my understanding is that the intention was not to exploit by crashing the server. It was acknowledged over TS however that a crash was a real possibility - they had a real large fleet, as did we. But admitting we were pushing the boundaries of the capacity and preparing for it is a very different kettle of fish to actively setting out to attack CCP's infrastructure.
I still don't get your analogy, mind - I lost a group of pixels. It hurt me no more, nor anyone else on either side, than losing a pawn, or an evening of wiping in WoW. The only participant with a potentially broken nose is CCP, as they're the ones who'll suffer if people in 0.0 get bored with pre-emptive blobbing as a tactic and stop paying their monthly subscriptions.
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Next time you play chess I'll come over, shake the table and make one of your pieces fall down and roll under the couch. Then I'll cry "Oh noes - I just lost an imaginary soldier! I want someone to blame someone now!..."
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The problem is that, in this case, all the people outside tried to enter at the same time instead of forming a queue, and expected the door to break. It didn't, it only jammed, so they got screwed. Too bad, but they had it coming.
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Why did they attack if only 5% of the fleet was present?
If they had no effective communication, they deserved pwnage.
Re:I'm not sure about their policy... (Score:4, Interesting)
My educated guess is that they tried to bring the server to the knees with the load, then be assembled and ready for the restart and get an edge that way. Because even with a reinforced node, a group jumping in sync does not necessarily appear at the other end simultanously. Instead, my guess is the idea was to pop in, crash the server, log back in together and be actually assembled and battle ready while the other side is still trying to muster and/or log back in.
Unfortunately, the node didn't crash.
Re:I'm not sure about their policy... (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. Other posters have said that there have been leaked logs confirming that this was indeed the case. And they were warned--repeatedly--that if they *didn't* crash the node, they would almost certainly fall victim to the bug that in fact killed them, and were advised not to try it. But they did, the node didn't crash, the bug occurred, and they died.
Re:I'm not sure about their policy... (Score:4, Interesting)
So... excessive introduction of mass in a single locality causes unbalanced time dilation effects and even loss of consciousness? Sounds like an interesting game mechanic to me.
"Oh dear, I think you will find reality is on the blink again." -- Marvin
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Especially Goons in this fight, most populous, third most populous, and a rather small alliance ganging up on an alliance that is still not up to full strength, I think the numbers in the fight were around 1000 - 500 in favor of Goon's side.
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Eve is operated with a very laissze faire policy. Fraud, taking advantage of weak code, and other forms of "cheating" only get punished if repeated after explicit announcements. Piracy and fraud attempts are one of the interesting learning aspects for most new players.
The game is treated as something to be played as it is, not as some perfect environment where you should be compensated for deviations.
This is to my taste, as is the extreme PVP orientation. Playing a carebear game instead of Eve is a more
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Piracy or fraud in-game is one thing: that's part of the game world. But service interruption resulting in in-game loss is something entirely different. It's not like with piracy or fraud where someone's gaining something; the only thing that is going to happen is you're goign to lose something, and the other parties involved are going to get the (unsatisfying) feeling of destroying an empty fleet.
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Oh stop with the tears ... that kind of emo-rage might work on eve killboards, but not here on slashdot.
There's a difference between one user pressing a button innocently, and 700 all users all deliberately pressing their buttons at exactly the same moment, KNOWING what will happen when they do.
It's the EVE equivalent of slashdotting a webpage, in more insidious circles it's called a DDoS.
Now stop playing innocent, you're kidding no one, especially here.
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Is it effectively a DDoS? Only if the servers can't handle it.
Agreed 100%. Which is exactly why CCP put a system in place whereby large fleets could notify them in advance to put it on a server that *can* handle it (which certain fleets choose to ignore in favour of trying to take down the whole server).
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If it was easy, don't you think it would have been done already? Even Blizzard can't handle the load of an entire server in one area and had to create a random queue to let people into Wintergrasp.
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"Even Blizzard"?
Just 'cause they have the largest subscriber numbers doesn't mean they know anything about server load balancing and handling hundreds of players in close vicinity. There's a reason why they opened auction houses in all the starting areas, ya know...
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Is it the internet connection? Or is it the throughput of the NIC, the loading time of the HDs, the processing time necessary, or is it...
Not always it's easy to identify the bottleneck. Throwing more resources at something is not always an option, there are physical, and technical, limits.
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I think they have stated that their bottleneck is the database (microsoft btw), everthing in the are has to be tracked and eve does most of the work on the server, its a very light client.
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Well, like basically any MMO client. Like any MMO client has to be.
You can't really let the client do much more than take input and display the result. Anything besides that opens you to a lot of abuse.
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If money and sheer 'raw performance' could solve the problem, I'd bet that they would have already done that. The (salary of the engineers + server downtime + crashses (resulting in bad reputation) + etc.) are much more expensive than the hardware cost.
The problem in this situation is that they are trying to put too many people inside a small region.
For example, if you develop some kind of chat server, which can have 10 people inside a single room, and assuming that each person types one message per second
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Buy more servers, indeed! I'm also told that nine women working together can have a baby in one month.
No you can't (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem ain't like a webserver where you can seperate users, this about a LOT of users needing to interact with each other as they are in the same battle in the same area. You then run into the problem that for every person added you need 1+N more data being handled.
Imagine a battle between a B17 bomber and a single fighter aircraft. The game needs to handle direction changes by both players AND their firing action BUT while the B17 can generate a LOT of fire data (10 or so guns) it won't actually be d
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Sorry to be blunt, but an event that affects multiple hundred people is more newsworthy than one that affects only one. But thanks for your participation.
To be more sensible, certainly we're talking makebelieve money here. Then again, given the current economy, I'm not so sure the stuff we use to buy goods and services is anything better.
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What's a "real dollar value"? Oh, what other people consider it worth? Ok, then ISK are basically like USD, just for a smaller group of people.