Also, Please Submit A Trouble Ticket Before Any Dupes

Posted on December 6, 2008 by Scott Jennings| 25 Comments

Eve asks its players to file a GM ticket to reserve server space before fighting any large battles.

Well, that’s new.

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  • VPellen

    “Please contact us ahead of large battles so that we may reconfigure our servers to provide a better play experience for you and your buddies.”

    Awesome.

  • Mercury

    This falls into the “bad solution” problem that’s so easy to ridicule, despite still being better than “no solution”.

    Consider these three options:

    1) Don’t request notification and don’t upgrade the server pieces to handle large battles. When there’s a large battle, bad things happen.

    2) Upgrade the server code and infrastructure to handle very large battles. How hard is this? Nobody outside CCP knows.

    3) Request feedback from the users before a large battle so that something can happen on the server which is, presumably, less effort than #2.

    It’s easy to mock the publisher for picking #3 over #2. But it’s sure better than them picking #1. And for all we know, they did #2 as well, but the work will take a long time.

    Even if they didn’t, #3 still beats #1.

    Cheap shot, boo on you.

  • http://antipwn.wordpress.com/ IainC

    To be fair to CCP, the server performance in large battles has come on leaps and bounds in the last few months. Large battles are now not only possible but fun. As I understand it there has always been an unwritten ‘let us know about stuff going down and we’ll try to allocate more resources to your part of space’ program. This essentially makes it more official and advertises it more widely.

    The fact remains though that the threshold for ‘large battles requiring server buffing’ is orders of magnitude higher than it used to be. Most players will never need to use this feature.

  • Pinwiz

    This made my day.

  • Nirgal

    Yeah, server performance in fleet battles has been quite good lately. It tends to go pear shaped when you get 1000 people in system though. Even in those situations though, it has been playable for me lately, which is a pretty big achievement compared to where they were a year ago.

  • http://bifftheunderstudy.wordpress.com Dan Gray

    You makes it sound a whole lot sketchier than it actually is, Scott. ;)

  • http://emergentufuture.com Arrakiv

    Huh, that’s interesting. Given my past experience with EVE, I understand why they’re making this announcement, but at the same time, hopefully they’ll get everything set up so that this little annoyance for players doesn’t need to exist.

    On the bright side, this won’t affect much of their population, as others have stated.

  • JayDub

    Doesn’t EVE have a history of their employees playing their own game and doing shady stuff?

    So if the Tranquility admin team wants to give a heads up to an employee that plays in an opposing corporation that there’s a big battle planned…

    If I’m understanding this correctly (which I may not be since I’ve never played the game) then this sounds like it could be a bad idea if there are still employees playing.

  • http://antipwn.wordpress.com/ IainC

    Jaydub, big battles are generally well anticipated by both sides in advance – which is why they are big battles and not just one fleet roaming around looking for something to fight. The defender gets to set the time of the big fights normally (within some limits) and so both sides know when the fight is going to happen.

    Also if the developers didn’t play their own game that would be a lot more worrying than the alternative.

  • Klaitu

    This process works extremely well. EVE is such a different MMO than any other MMO that things that would usually be weird aren’t really so weird.

    I think it has something to do with Iceland being involved.

  • Kade

    As IainC demonstrates with his bending over backwards to placate Icelandic developer cock, if you’re in the myopic bubble that is the poopsocking playerbase of EVE, this is business as usual.

    If you’re still possessed of a rational mind that wonders how people can stomach this shit, it’s pretty funny.

  • http://word-of-shadow.blogspot.com Melf_Himself

    As Mercury said, Kade, it’s better than them doing nothing at all. Not sure what the point of your comment was.

  • http://bifftheunderstudy.wordpress.com Dan Gray

    How is it unreasonable for developers to want to be informed in advance of population spikes? Their goal is clearly just to improve server performance, and you can blather until you are blue in the face but there’s no way that can be a bad thing.

    Sure, if your grip on reality is particularly tenuous you can argue that ‘the servers should just be able to handle it’, but I can only think of one or two MMOs where that is actually the case. Most turn into a slideshow when there is any kind of concentration of avatars.

  • http://antipwn.wordpress.com/ IainC

    What?

    It’s only ‘pretty funny’ if you basically don’t understand the issue.

    Almost no other game allows for fights on the scale of those in EvE, in pretty much every other game the population is compartmentalised to make it impossible to have <1500 a side combats. If you needed to do this for every fight in the game then yes it would be risible but as it is, the game scales well far beyond the point that other games’ design allows for.

    Also, the really big battles are triggered by events that are known to both sides in advance (player owned stations coming out of reinforced mode). This ‘service’ is basically aimed at a tiny handful of fleet commanders who are in the half dozen or so largest alliances in the game. Everyone else is served just fine with the standard server systems.

    /Icelandicfellatio

  • BrianJ

    The ‘tiny handful’ of fleet commanders who EvE is squarely and firmly aimed at, and everyone else is just fodder. :D

  • Raelyf

    Kade says: “As IainC demonstrates with his bending over backwards to placate Icelandic developer cock, if you’re in the myopic bubble that is the poopsocking playerbase of EVE, this is business as usual.”

    Wow. Why all the nerd rage? Were you molested by a rampaging icelandic game developer as a child?

  • Ebenezer

    So maybe one day they will figure out how to swap solar systems between server nodes on the fly.

    Until then, if they don’t know which normally-empty solar system is going to get zerged, how do they know which one to put on the supercomputer.

    Reserving space beats the alternative, which is everyone going there, the solar-system (and every other one on the same sub-server) crashing.

  • JayDub

    IainC wasn’t aware that these were known about ahead of time, so this makes a lot more sense.

    Also not opposed to devs playing the titles they work on, however I’ve heard so many stories of shady goings-on with that title this just seemed on the surface to be a very bad idea..

    I’ve never even played EVE and I know about their colossal screw ups with their devs playing and doing shady things, sort of thought everyone knew about it.

  • Freakazoid

    Given the metagaming that goes on (or used to go on, I haven’t followed the game politics in at least a year), forces could send a false report to the server people and show up somewhere else.

    How devs would handle that should be a little interesting.

  • michael, St E

    @JayDub: I assume that’s why the process is being watched by CCP’s Internal Affairs department. I only know of one concrete dev misconduct tale – the infamous t20 debacle from two years ago. Do you have something more recent in mind?

    @Freakazoid: banning, probably.

    There’s a video from Fanfest 2008 about the Tranquility cluster structure, and the changes coming soon(tm). It’s on the CCPGAMES youtube channel.

  • kildy

    This is now possibly the only pvp MMO wherein if you suddenly Stop lagging, you know hostiles are around.

  • harl

    JayDub:

    A lot of these large battles are around POS (player owned structures) that can be destroyed. First the POS must be put into reinforced mode. This is basically a stasis mode where nothing else can be done until it comes out of reinforced mode. This happens automatically after a known period of time. Anyone can look at the POS and know what time it’s coming out. Everyone knows what’s going on and when.

    Also large battles (hundreds per side) take planning. They don’t happen spontaneously. Hundreds to thousands of people know ahead of time. To think that none of them will leak the info but telling CCP will let the cat out of the bag is nonsensical.

    I understand CCP had an employee fuck up, as I’m sure every game has. Didn’t UO have a GM selling gold on ebay? CCP handled it poorly. I still have no clue why said employee kept their job. But they’ve addressed that and dealt with it. How long and what do they have to do to live down an isolated incident?

  • aet

    Mental Note: have the Dirty Tricks group submit bogus tickets when we don’t want large battles to take place.

  • =j

    To ask the obvious question:

    If large battles require large preparation by large fleets, why can’t CCP see what is coming through their internal metrics?

    System Foo has had a 300% increase in equipment production and a 1200%!! increase in defense construction. Organization Bar has been massing material too, but almost none of it defensive. I wonder what is going on?

    Repeat after me: It’s just a (fucking) database.

  • http://bifftheunderstudy.wordpress.com Dan Gray

    Yeah, I’m sure it’s that simple.