http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/planning-for-war-how-the-eve-online-servers-deal-with-a-3000-person-battle
An interesting read on how the Eve team deal with a 3000 person battle a few days back and how having a robust system you can shift around game parts to accommodate the impromptu devastation.
I am not an Eve player (though I have thought about it) so the game play is a bit lost on me.. but the gist is some guy was zipp'n around, warped into enemy territory, thought he could win by calling up all his friends, the enemy started to attack.. a bunch of other factions show up, and the original guy's group were used to mop the floor. I read it was mostly a 'something awful forum' group vs the 'reddit' group.
Side note - the initial guy's ship was worth $3,500 USD (in realz money), and when it was done somewhere along the lines of $24,000 USD (real money) was lost.
(more on the 'why' here: http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/)
As it was the Eve servers run pretty damn high all the time so they couldn't just juice up the machines' power so they did some tricks about actually moving in-game space around to less busy nodes of their network (which runs the risk of disconnecting players)... the other major tool is time dilation. They slow in game time down to 10% normal and this eased some of the lag and strain. It keeps server calls processed right and allows new players to get dialed down as well.
over all an interesting choice which may not work for all the games definitely seems to do the trick here.
I would be interested in seeing the other coping techniques other large mmos use to deal with massive players (outside of just having people suffer through it). Anyone have a favorite technique they use?
There's some video of the battle and explanation videos in the link as well.
An interesting read on how the Eve team deal with a 3000 person battle a few days back and how having a robust system you can shift around game parts to accommodate the impromptu devastation.
I am not an Eve player (though I have thought about it) so the game play is a bit lost on me.. but the gist is some guy was zipp'n around, warped into enemy territory, thought he could win by calling up all his friends, the enemy started to attack.. a bunch of other factions show up, and the original guy's group were used to mop the floor. I read it was mostly a 'something awful forum' group vs the 'reddit' group.
Side note - the initial guy's ship was worth $3,500 USD (in realz money), and when it was done somewhere along the lines of $24,000 USD (real money) was lost.
(more on the 'why' here: http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/)
As it was the Eve servers run pretty damn high all the time so they couldn't just juice up the machines' power so they did some tricks about actually moving in-game space around to less busy nodes of their network (which runs the risk of disconnecting players)... the other major tool is time dilation. They slow in game time down to 10% normal and this eased some of the lag and strain. It keeps server calls processed right and allows new players to get dialed down as well.
over all an interesting choice which may not work for all the games definitely seems to do the trick here.
I would be interested in seeing the other coping techniques other large mmos use to deal with massive players (outside of just having people suffer through it). Anyone have a favorite technique they use?
There's some video of the battle and explanation videos in the link as well.