Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Serious topic : Can Eve hardware handle the sustained growth?
fizzle322
Member Posts: 723
in EVE Online
The userbase just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
I'm having trouble understanding how they plan to keep everybody on 1 shard.
I mean its just sick, you have 400 people sitting in Jita, 400 people ratting in Rens, 400 people trading in Oursalert.
Its just...
People wanna come together, they want community, they want social interaction, they wanna play together and have big fights.
Nobody wants to be in bumfuck egypt mining alone on their own node.
I'm just having a hard time seeing how Eve can sustain its growth without hitting the technical limits of their hardware.
Yes they can keep upgrading, new processor, more memory, faster storage, but there comes a point that even the best equipment in the world will choke.
That goes for the network hardware as well.
Just how many users can 1 network segment handle?
If it was 5000 users each server, you could put each server on its own segment, how the fuck do you plan to have 30,000 + users on the same segment?
Even if every region has its own item database, theres freighters coming into Jita loaded with thousands of items. Three year old players flying around with 20,000 bookmarks.
The Forge market prolly gets more transactions than the commodities market on Wall Street.
I'm just at a loss, as an IT guy, I really can't see this kind of user
growth be sustainable in a single shard environment. At SOME point
they're gonna have to multi-shard.
What happened to Eve in China? Are they on a seperate shard already?
Comments
As to EVE China: Yes, it's on a separate shard because the Chinese Govt' required that EVE stand up a separate set of servers with special policies just for China. And that cluster is *just* for china. All other asian players who play EVE will play on Tranquility with the rest of us.
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Sig image Pending
Still in: A couple Betas
"reached as 28020 EVE Players were logged in at the same time. The dream of reaching more than 30K simultaneous users is closer to becoming a reality."
They want more than 30k people online at the same time, so they are ready for a bigger userbase.
First of all ccp are pretty good at handling numbers like this and in the end one senior dev once said concerning this that one day if it did get too much they MAY think about creating a second shard. However this would be a reluctant decision and the last thing they would do to fix things.
As for EvE china it was needed because china has some new online internet rules largly due to there draconic sensorship rules such as yuo cant portray too much democracy [gilent] and the server has to be located in china and run by a chinese based company so ccp had to fors a company and a server base in china. and they had to alter eve to suite the goverments standards.
The good thing of this i guess is that eve gets lots more cash for future upgrades now. Oh and the devs will be staying here so they wont be splitting there time between servers because ccp - china has its own devs now.
I remember when everyone was like "OMFG!!! 10,000 people are online right now!" and EVE ran fine.
So I don't think 30,000 people is an issue. If you remember that not all 28,000 people are in the same sector at once, so that does help a lot. I bet if you put 1,000 in the same place all going ape sh*t shooting each other, etc... then I think EVE would have issues.
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Sig image Pending
Still in: A couple Betas
any game with a large number of people in one "sector" is going to have MAJOR problems.....
While EVE is growing it is not growing explosively, CCP is doing a EXCELLENT job of maintaining thier game after three years, if they followed EA's business model they would have shut EVE down last year, then again EA sucks.
I think that CCP has planned for a lot more than 30,000 players online at one time... what is the max that the china shard has seen? With 300K subscribers they have to have seen more than the main server....
Witty saying to amuse you goes here.
The platform is experimental in terms of any mmo, and being a pioneer comes with hiccups. Their business goal is to provide a competitive service at lower costs compared to standard sharded servers. Their ideal goal is to make a game that follows their aesthetic preferences of one shard. The theory is that lower costs in providing the service will allow a better margin that can be reinvested either in improving the game, and/or buying lamborginis.
I think that technologically, the current schema works well on paper. If CCP was dealing with ordinary users or data packets, they could distribute the load. However, they are contending with risk-avoidant and advantage seeking behavior on the part of the clients. Also, they are dealing with a combination of the two which you might call laziness, which is something no machine can properly emulate.
CCP are pretty enthusiastic about open-ended environments, but they constrain it just enough to not make the accountants despair. In my experience though, where they do attempt to cajole or manipulate player behavior, they could be a little more suave.
Most of their efforts at subtlety seems to go into the relationships between typical ship fitting restrictions. There are patterns upon patterns bred into the relationships between ship classes and roles. Some are obvious, some take awhile to fathom, and some only emerge when one has a deep understanding of ship systems, razor thin performance margins, a kinetic aspects of ships.
CCP have spent little to no effort in using tools like the market or taxes or concord or factions to influence player behavior. It's all very general, and affects people in either the most even-handed of ways, or with zero ambiguity or room for finagling. That's probably just how typical programmers look at the world, so doing social engineering might require outsourcing.