Something that EVE Online repeatedly makes headlines are the massive battles that occasionally occur between players. It is clear that developer CCP Games would like to see more of this.
Thousands of players participate in the battles. During the siege of M-OEE8 in December 2016, 5,337 players fought against each other. This forced the servers to their knees, which were not designed for this many players in one place.
On January 23 of this year, an even larger battle was supposed to take place. About 6,100 players wanted to participate. However, the battle was only short-lived due to the severe so-called “Time Dilation”. This is a form of “intentional lag” which slows down time to relieve the servers. But this makes a battle of this magnitude impossible.
Battles are analyzed to improve performance
There have been complaints from players who wish to engage in such space battles. They are the highlight of EVE Online. Sometimes ships worth several hundred thousand dollars are destroyed. The development team stated that they continuously monitor these battles, collect data, analyze it, and then work on methods to improve performance. However, each battle is larger than the last, bringing new problems each time.
The last battle, for instance, made it impossible for the attackers to destroy the Death Star-like Keepstar of the opponents due to “Time Dilation”. Because it could repair itself faster than the attackers could inflict damage.
CCP Games stated that they were able to collect important information during this engagement. This is supposed to help enable larger space battles in the future that run more smoothly and do not need to be canceled due to server performance.
Software solutions are coming
CCP already has an idea of how this will be implemented:
- Work is being done on software solutions
- Calculations and services that are less critical will be outsourced to external cloud servers
- The “Main Cluster” of the servers will be relieved
- This is intended to lead to better performance in large battles
- Further ideas are currently being discussed
CCP Games wants to enable players of the space MMORPG EVE Online to engage in gigantic battles. They are the flagship of the game, and more will definitely be done to continue providing players with such experiences.
