#Eve online time Pc#

It gave us a lot of data on where the boundaries of the technology, where it needs to be optimised.' EVE's players continue to break records for the size of the battles that take place in the game - and CCP's tech is creaking under the pressure 'It actually took over 300 CPUs to run it, and it more or less worked. '15 million missiles were fired, and it was all simulated to perfect accuracy,' Petursson said, with something that looked very much like glee. At its peak, 12,000 spaceships were engaged in warfare, double the size of any fight in the history of EVE Online. According to Petursson, around 4,000 human players logged into the staged battle, and CCP added 10,000 AI-controlled bots. The 'field' was GDC in San Francisco, less than two months before, and despite the scale of the simulation, EVE players were not able to break it. 'We said, 'Okay, let's partner up.' We devised this experiment and put it out in the field, to see how - in this case - EVE players could break it.'

It proved to be too great an endeavour for CCP at that time, but Petursson said that Hadean, 'had come through a different means to a similar outcome.' In its search for a solution, it partnered with a UK startup called Hadean, which is developing technology similar to a project CCP attempted back in 2013 - a project that, if it had come to fruition, would have drastically increased the number of concurrent players EVE could support without breaking under the pressure. 'Last year, I think about a million people came into our systems in one way or another for the first time' Continuing to do that while also adding more players in territories like Asia, however, may very well be beyond the capabilities of CCP's current technology. The key to sustaining EVE Online's community - which has 300,000 monthly active-users, around the same number of residents as Petursson's native Iceland - for so long has been about recognising and facilitating the ingenuity of its players. 'The technical feat it takes to make run on computers is way less than the social engineering feat on behalf of the EVE players that even makes this a problem to begin with.' It has taken EVE players themselves decades to develop the organisational skills, the leadership skills, the memes and the tropes to be able to orchestrate this. We did not set out to make this, we did not build the system to have this. 'This idea of having thousands of people duking it out in one huge space battle is something that EVE players invented. I think we can deliver a pretty good experience up to 3,000, okay at 5,000, but 6,000 is beyond the edge. 'The technology absolutely is at its breaking edge,' he said onstage at Reboot.

Despite being at an age that few games ever reach, EVE's players are still achieving new feats of collective will and organisation - like in January 2018, when 6,000 players set a new record for participants in a single battle.Īccording to Petursson, EVE's technology was never built with this kind of event in mind, and the user experience when the community pushes that tech beyond its limits is below the standard CCP finds acceptable. In the last couple of years, however, EVE's players have exposed issues that cannot be simply tweaked out of existence problems that relate to technological foundations that were first laid almost 20 years ago. 'This idea of having thousands of people duking it out in one huge space battle is something that EVE players invented' To dig into Petursson's own comparison, the mayor of a city only knows that the traffic light patterns need changing when there are one hundred citizens stuck in an unmoving line of cars. Much of the time, though, the dynamic between creator and audience is reactive the players expose problems in the game by simply trying to do what they want, which CCP Games then tries to address and improve.

#Eve online time Pc#

At its best, CCP Games proactively creates spaces and systems that help its players to generate the drama and intrigue for which EVE is justly famous - this PC Gamer article collects some of the more remarkable stories to come out of EVE, and it is by no means definitive. In an interview with at Reboot Develop earlier this month, Petursson attempted to communicate the experience of making and maintaining EVE Online to running a city. Ask CCP Games CEO Hilmar Petursson what keeps the 16 year-old MMO going, and he will only ever give you one answer: the community. The allure of EVE Online has never been found in its style or sheen or thrilling gameplay.