Eve: Online, Battle of Asakai

[Kirkendall 1st MRB]

While I never got too into Eve, I thought it was worth sharing:

An operation group went haywire in Eve: Online when a titan-class ship accidentally jumped into an enemy system instead of bridging. As enemies piled on to attack the stranded titan, a cry for help went out. They received a response from a staggering 700 Corporations across 250 Alliances. As the titan's reinforcements jumped into the system, so did more enemies. Anywhere from 2800-3200 individual players took part in the largest online battle ever created. It looks like at the end of the battle, the CFC has lost ~44 Dreads, 29 Carriers, 5 Supercarriers and 3 Titans to 10 Carriers, 6 Dreads, and one Supercarrier killed: a complete rout. Early estimates are putting damage costs into the 700 billion ISK range.

[Brown]

Lol, the screen shots look like a complete shit storm. Looks like it would have been a memorable fight!!!

[Gardiner 1st MRB]

My brother and his roomate play EVE, I'm 99.9% sure they are apart of Something Awful (Goonswarm). Not sure if they were apart of this. But holy shit balls.

[Armstrong 1st MRB]

Geez, that space battle put Star Wars to shame. I've seen some pretty big EVE Battles, but that looked crazy.

[Berg 1st MRB]

Thats me in the center. or my clone i mean

[Cast 1st MRB]

Wonder how long it lasted for

[Gardner2]

Imaging the lag.....

[Griswold]

Well what is weird is that EVE Online isn't separated at all, no realms, no worlds. No Different Servers. It is all one server and for how many people play the game a one given time i pretty sure there would have been no server lag. It would have been all visual lag toward the players.

[Cutts]

EVE does suffer from server lag... sort of.

For any interested geeks:

Although its all "one server" that is really a big cluster of machines, so busy star systems that have a few thousand players

on them will be run on one dedicated physical machine, but you'll have say 10-20 usually empty star systems run on another.

Imagine all the different WoW shards running different worlds, but being connected together via portals which allow your

unique character to step between those shards, connecting all the worlds into one big universe. You step through a portal, and

behind the scenes you are disconnected from that shard and connected to another one, and thus you're through to another world.

That is EVE, but with spaceships instead.

What used to happen (in simplified terms):

Anyway, they did used to have really bad server lag once too many people were in a single fight. The fight calculations would

take longer than the 1 second tick time, and so the server would process the first part of its "list of shit to do" and just ignore

stuff it didn't have time to process. As a result, people would lag out unevenly: some would carry on firing shots as they expected

but others wouldn't be able to move, shoot or anything, and would wake up dead 20 minutes later.

What happens now:

They introduced a feature called Time Dilation. They literally slow down the game time during massive fights, so that the server

has time to process everything, and everyone gets a fair game. They only need to slow down the system where the fight is

actually occuring however, so the rest of the universe gets to continue as normal.

So during a fight like THAT, time dilation will probably resulted in something like 10 seconds passing for every 1 game second.

Damn, I'm gonna have to start playing again, aren't I?