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How does EVE handle so many players on at the same time?
Mud_Monster
Member UncommonPosts: 229
I was reading the recent PC Gamer and saw that EVE got MMO of the year. Not really sure how that works since I thought "Game of Year"s were games that came out that year, but I guess since MMOs change/have new content regularly, I can kinda see how that is kinda ok.
Anyways, It mentioned how EVE has had over 50k people online at one time on the same server. I knew it was a single server game, but I'm curious as how does it handle that many people all at once. Is it instance based? I didn't really think it was. I would try the game myself, but I just don't really like space flight games. Can the game actually handle 50k people all in a relatively close spot, or does it have something that encourages players to stay spread out? But what happens when new content is added and everyone flocks to the same spot to check it out. Like in old WoW when The Gates of AQ opened? Or does EVE just not really have stuff like that since its sandbox and not at all themepark?
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I have no idea. My best guess? Magical pixie dust. Whatever it is, it works well. Even though Jita can get a little laggy, but even with 1300-ish players in the area its still playable. Well, I say area, but I mean solar system. Space is very, er... spacious =P
Edit - as far as content releases goes, cant say with my limited time so far. But it seems that when CCP releases content, its done across the board and not just in one area, like WoW for example.
If you stand VERY still, and close your eyes, after a minute you can actually FEEL the universe revolving around PvP.
Because while they may all be on the same server, they are not all on the same "shard". I don't know if that is the technical term for it, but that's basically what it is. You have to think of each solar system or constellation as its own "shard", like it's very own server. This is a very rudamentary and probably highly oversimplification of it, but basically, that's it.
EDIT: And no, not all 50,000 people can be in the same place at one time. I think their current max per system is around 1500 ish.
Maligar Kelison
Threat Removal
This article may be slightly outdated, but might answer some of your questions about how it's done:
www.massively.com/2008/09/28/eve-evolved-eve-onlines-server-model/
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
i may be wrong, but I thought while it is one big server it breaks things down into smaller shards that hold much more people per server. So as people use jump gates they enter another little mini server for that area. This would be why some of the busier areas like jita have issues because those servers have a larger load on them.
My best guess? It's in space. Without having to load hundreds of tree, ground, building, and other textures like other MMOs, there's a lot of free server capacity that can be reserved for players. Furthermore, space's vast distances mean that most ships don't have to be rendered (unless you get very close to them or use the Look-At function). For the most part, they only exist as brackets in the Overview.
I highly doubt a traditional fantasy game or a sci-fi game that's not based in space will ever achieve the same thing EVE does. With our current technology, anyways.
Something like that I think. But I still prefer the term 'magical pixie dust'. =P
If you stand VERY still, and close your eyes, after a minute you can actually FEEL the universe revolving around PvP.
2nd'ed
Maligar Kelison
Threat Removal
The graphics and associated rendering have very low overhead compared to most games. No, I'm not bashing on them, I love EVE, but ships, planets, and gas clouds take much less processing power than highly articulated human avatars and varying terrain.
...
it is their version of phaze but event if it is ,on one map they can have a lot of ship still .not many can have those amount
of player on a single map ,phase ,dungeon,shard ,instance or whatever they want to call it!
any game that pass the 1000 player /map is considered a mmo ne it instanced or not!
Another aspect besides those that others have already mentioned that cuts down on the amount of info being communicated between client and server is the fact that EVE is point and click. Using WASD for movement sends an incredible amount of steaming info, which point and click really cuts down on it.
Joined 2004 - I can't believe I've been a MMORPG.com member for 20 years! Get off my lawn!
aika will support 1000vs1000 fight men 2000 player in one area .this is a very select club
i think i can count on one hand the amount of game that do that!
While EVE is based on a single server (World) it is made up of dozens if not hundreds of server clusters which handle different area's, generally when there are very large gatherings then CCP will divert additional resources to those nodes so that they can still handle the strain.
But essentially the nature of EVE is that there is so much space available that its rare for a huge percentage of the server to assemble at a single location because it would be chaos, EVE is a very territorial game, and is basically made up of not only 5 NPC Empires, but dozens of player ran Empires(Alliances of Corporations) that all have there own enemies and allies, it is rare for any of them to not have atleast one sworn enemy.
With that level of violence and hostility it is almost impossible to get the sort of gatherings that you are thinking of without it basically becoming a virtual armageddon, because no one could possibly win such a fight, there would merely be losers on all sides.
New content does draw people in, but most of the ones who are drawn in, are the neutral people, or small groups of people from the larger alliances. because if any of the alliances as a whole want a territory, they plan it precisely, they will stake out the area, find every weakness they can before they commit to a potential multi-billion isk endever, that could destroy them if they dont do everything by the numbers.
The main difference between EVE and games like WoW in this respect is that in those games, when you go to war, you gain little and lose little. In EVE it is closer to how things happen in real life, you either win big, or you lose hard, and most of the time it is just the luck of the draw that can decide it.
that is I think EVE's greatest charm and its most offputting feature. the fact that thousands of players can work years for something, and have someone else who is bigger, badder or just better than them come along and decimate years of there work in mere days or weeks. That sort of thing causes the grudges that have ran for years.
I've been playing on and off since 2003, and it is always the Wars that have dragged me back to the game.
Think I have gone a bit offtopic, but to answer your question, I dont think it would be feasable to have 50'000 people online in a single system, and there wouldnt be very many reasons for it, the only one that I could think of would be if they allowed access to Jove space via a single jumpgate, if that were to happen, then I think every Empire/Alliance would struggle and fight to the death to control it and deny it to their enemies.
I think that the record for people involved in a fight is about 1600, in the recent battle for D-G.
While EVE is based on a single server (World) it is made up of dozens if not hundreds of server clusters which handle different area's, generally when there are very large gatherings then CCP will divert additional resources to those nodes so that they can still handle the strain.
But essentially the nature of EVE is that there is so much space available that its rare for a huge percentage of the server to assemble at a single location because it would be chaos, EVE is a very territorial game, and is basically made up of not only 5 NPC Empires, but dozens of player ran Empires(Alliances of Corporations) that all have there own enemies and allies, it is rare for any of them to not have atleast one sworn enemy.
With that level of violence and hostility it is almost impossible to get the sort of gatherings that you are thinking of without it basically becoming a virtual armageddon, because no one could possibly win such a fight, there would merely be losers on all sides.
New content does draw people in, but most of the ones who are drawn in, are the neutral people, or small groups of people from the larger alliances. because if any of the alliances as a whole want a territory, they plan it precisely, they will stake out the area, find every weakness they can before they commit to a potential multi-billion isk endever, that could destroy them if they dont do everything by the numbers.
The main difference between EVE and games like WoW in this respect is that in those games, when you go to war, you gain little and lose little. In EVE it is closer to how things happen in real life, you either win big, or you lose hard, and most of the time it is just the luck of the draw that can decide it.
that is I think EVE's greatest charm and its most offputting feature. the fact that thousands of players can work years for something, and have someone else who is bigger, badder or just better than them come along and decimate years of there work in mere days or weeks. That sort of thing causes the grudges that have ran for years.
I've been playing on and off since 2003, and it is always the Wars that have dragged me back to the game.
Think I have gone a bit offtopic, but to answer your question, I dont think it would be feasable to have 50'000 people online in a single system, and there wouldnt be very many reasons for it, the only one that I could think of would be if they allowed access to Jove space via a single jumpgate, if that were to happen, then I think every Empire/Alliance would struggle and fight to the death to control it and deny it to their enemies.
ty very much for the insight!very informative!so ingame its not cuddly at all there are literally war going on ingame because of the stake and the cost!(men people must tread very carefully everywhere they go in that game.(AWSOME)
Very true. Having the largest supercomputer in the MMO industry and military grade equipment also helps.
A good article on the EVE servers can be found here.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
the biggest one is terrain, there is no ground in space and you would be surprised at how much effort your computer uses in order to render the ground and to make your character walk along it.
That and it's quite instanced, each solar system is one instance and there is at least 500+ solar systems. As someone pointed out earlier, Jita is the laggiest but even then it's not that bad and thats due to the fact that lot's of people are inside the station (very little rendering needed) or around the warp gates (you don't render what you can't see and each of the gates is quite far from each other, further reducing the lag).
So yeah basically if it's a single server it either uses lots of instances and increases system performance by making a few sacrifices or it uses the old shard system where each zone has its own mini-instance of X players and you can flick between em.
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
No it is not.
Eve, like most other old school mmos, uses a lot of zoning. The population is spread over a huge amount of zones, aka solar systems. That way the load can be handled by a big cluster.
It can become a huge problem, since when players do assemble in one place, the lack of instancing can make the game unplayable for everyone in that system. The battle in d-g for example wasn't a battle of 1600 players, but a battle of 500 slaughtering 200 with only a small portion of the players actually able to do anything. Anything above 600 in one system can be completely unplayable, anything above will probably crash the node it is happening on.
Eve has very fanatic players and im sure alot of them opened account for just to vote fo eve ,it is how eve got title.
how eve handle 50.000 players ?answer is dont (the way you are thinking) , eve is hosted on a cluster and every system is on a node (some has seperate ,some share with other systems) .Eve always had and always will lag problems if you put certain amount players in a system like mentioned DG ( it was an anomaly but take a look )www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp see what happened there .
Problem is eve dont have dynamic resource allocation ,if you move x amount player to a system youll lag to death (until downtime , eve relocate resource from downtime to downtime to systems ) funny thing they could not think about weekends (most crowded time ) ,another problem is sovereignty (system ownership ) mechanics .CCP didnot design game with sov in mind ,added later and put stupid mechanics forced players to blobbing than changed with dominion expansion but it is still stupid and forcing ppl to blobbing (and reduced/shortened timers also giving another headache because no dynamic resource allocation. )
This is why vets leaving 0.0 and moving to low sec and/or npc 0.0
Very true. Having the largest supercomputer in the MMO industry and military grade equipment also helps.
A good article on the EVE servers can be found here.
outch 55803 player online outch .no wonder they got the world record.
That is because your activity on the server is 'sliced' into layers.
1) Load balaning layer - so called traffic lights for incoming connections
2) Proxy layer - responsible for connection between client and SOL servers
3) SOL server layer - sol servers process your activity like firing your guns
Also each SOL server runs EVE instance - some SOL are dedicated to specific systems like Jita to guarantee maximum capacity available
4) Database layer - that is what holds everything together
While this architecture favours holding really massive and persistant world, it is powered by top technology used in gaming industry.
New content in EVE generaly means no new place to go but new stuff you can do.
EVE can accomodate about 1500 players at single place at a time but what is important is the persitance. 300k players are logging into a game and whatever they do stays there because in EVE, players affect each other more or less directly. That is what makes it a sandbox game, this huge persitance and interaction.
The solar systems of EVE are not instanced. One can argue that they seem zoned because of the gates, but they are definitely not instanced.
BTW I am in Jita right now. There are over 1300 ships in the system and there is no lag. Awesomeness
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
The solar systems of EVE are not instanced. One can argue that they seem zoned because of the gates, but they are definitely not instanced.
BTW I am in Jita right now. There are over 1300 ships in the system and there is no lag. Awesomeness
hey men say ty to eve and they STACKLESSIO!
http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=584
Server cluster of course use dynamic resource alloaction.. ie. SOL servers process computations regardless your node or proxy your are connected to.
While I am not 100% sure and won't go into details, I think the issue is the code since you can run 1 instance per core.
Game mechanics have little to do with forcing people into blobing. Outnumbering your enemy is just efficient tactic and you will see it in any game with unrestricted PVP.
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I have no idea.
I think CCP went into the future and grabbed some tech no one has yet.
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