EPTIgnoring the GBC damage control brigade, try looking up T20.
Metagaming in EVE - Page 27
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General Nuke Em
United States680 Posts
Ignoring the GBC damage control brigade, try looking up T20. | ||
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Aurra
United States469 Posts
EVE's server (Tranquility) is one of the top supercomputers in the world and it still struggles with the computing power necessary to handle thousands of players interacting with each other with rather basic input from the players. If player ships were controlled in a more personal / manual fashion the computing power necessary would be increased by several orders of magnitude and there isn't anything on the planet that could process such a large amount of damage in a time frame that would be playable. | ||
Bill307
Canada9103 Posts
On May 05 2009 06:56 Aurra wrote: EVE with a joystick style input system would be amazing. Unfortunately the barrier to a game like that isn't the coding, but current hardware. EVE's server (Tranquility) is one of the top supercomputers in the world and it still struggles with the computing power necessary to handle thousands of players interacting with each other with rather basic input from the players. If player ships were controlled in a more personal / manual fashion the computing power necessary would be increased by several orders of magnitude and there isn't anything on the planet that could process such a large amount of damage in a time frame that would be playable. That sounds like a design and coding problem to me, not a hardware barrier. Assuming what you wrote is accurate, they should not have designed their server to run on only one machine. They could have designed it to run on a cluster of machines. Clusters of everyday machines can easily surpass any supercomputer in terms of processing power. Really, there is no hardware limitation at all. | ||
KwarK
United States41991 Posts
On May 05 2009 08:32 Bill307 wrote: That sounds like a design and coding barrier to me, not a hardware barrier. They should not have designed their game to run on only one machine. They could have designed it to run on a cluster of powerful machines. Hardware limitations are no excuse. The "one server" is an intrinsic part of their marketing campaign. They like to stress that everyone is playing together and it's a complete open world sandbox. Even though there'd be little difference in practice (apart from several times the running costs) it'd really hinder the promotion of their image. | ||
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Bill307
Canada9103 Posts
On May 05 2009 08:36 Kwark wrote: The "one server" is an intrinsic part of their marketing campaign. They like to stress that everyone is playing together and it's a complete open world sandbox. Even though there'd be little difference in practice (apart from several times the running costs) it'd really hinder the promotion of their image. I didn't say "a cluster of servers". I said "a cluster of machines". There's no reason they can't have all the players on a single server while dividing the workload among a number of machines. It just requires their server to be programmed to run on multiple machines in parallel. Actually, judging by the way they describe "reinforcing" nodes or systems where a large battle is going to take place, I wouldn't be surprised if Aurra is wrong and that they are already using a cluster of machines to run their server: "reinforcing" would mean devoting more machines to that node/system. In any case, saying this is a hardware limitation because they "need" to run the server on a single supercomputer, is wrong. | ||
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General Nuke Em
United States680 Posts
http://www.massively.com/2008/09/28/eve-evolved-eve-onlines-server-model/ | ||
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Spike
United States1392 Posts
I'm sure this was went over somewhere in the 27 pages. Anyway, take this with a grain of salt but people always tell me that EVE's coding is atrocious. Dunno, maybe Nuke Em can comment on it being in PL and all. Major alliances are usually more knowledgeable of this stuff. | ||
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Bill307
Canada9103 Posts
On May 05 2009 09:04 General Nuke Em wrote: Its not a single supercomputer as far as I can tell, unless server cluster != cluster of machines? If you can be bothered to look up random CCP devblogs, they wax poetic every few weeks/months about how they upgraded their hardware. http://www.massively.com/2008/09/28/eve-evolved-eve-onlines-server-model/ Yup, looks like they use a cluster of "server" machines to run their single EVE "server" (hurray for homonyms). To make things even more confusing, that article refers to the cluster as "a supercomputer". =P | ||
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General Nuke Em
United States680 Posts
Dunno, maybe Nuke Em can comment on it being in PL and all. Major alliances are usually more knowledgeable of this stuff. At this point in time I'm just a grunt, and don't know a whole lot about how the server works anyway, so I'm not too useful to you there.  | ||
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Aurra
United States469 Posts
Tranquility's architecture is built in such a way that they can continually add and replace hardware with very little to no downtime. Tranquility's custom instruction set/operating system allows the load to be distributed automatically with any additional hardware added. When CCP "reinforces" a node they override the server balancing algorithm to essentially give a specific portion of the game more resources than what would normally be allowed by the server operating on its own. I believe they've even used Multiplicity's hardware to assist in this when they are given enough warning about large events that will take place. Despite the fact that there are hundreds of physical processors that make up Tranquility they all follow one instruction set and function almost identical to a multi-core processor that you find in most gaming rigs these days. Pretty much any decent sized MMO is going to use hardware similar to Tranquility, but they all function independently and if one goes down, that server is gone. Every other server is completely unaffected and you will never know if you don't play on that server. If a piece of Tranquility's hardware goes down, the game world stays up and running, perhaps a little more sluggish. The worst you ever see is a specific system biting it, and even then players generally get to stay in the game, they just can't do anything but chat until the server balances itself. It's extremely state of the art hardware, and calling it a computer is an accurate label Now, if you rewrote the software portion of Tranquility (EVE and TQ's OS) and replaced it with a version that has joystick style player input, allowing a player to input essentially random XYZ instructions, it could still function but not at the same scale of EVE. I would guess you could have fights ranging of maybe 100-150 people. 200 max? And even if you got a fight of that scale running smoothly for the players involved and the server wasn't bursting in flames, there wouldn't be much processing power left for everyone else connected. That "everyone else" can be upwards of 50 thousand users as of recently. EVE in its current form has the ships controlled by algorithms and the player just picks one (Go in a straight line, orbit at X) and nothing else. This is far more simple to compute. It's not a software problem, it's a hardware problem. | ||
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BeJe77
United States377 Posts
@Bill, I think there is a video floating somewhere on youtube of the "sovereignty map" from like 2005 to present....Been a while since I looked it up tho.. At the peak of BoB's power their territory was from Omist in the South East of the maps, all the way up to branch, basically one of the largest in EvE....They have conquered the most regions and lost the most regions in game to date :D. One of the most things I miss is to tell you the truth the Mercenary Coalition, in my opinion they were feared even more then BoB themselves....now those guys are somebody you did not want to run into during their prime  . -BeJ | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
In other news of the hilarious, it seems that Red Alliance, after crushing a mixed ED / IRC cap fleet, decided to willingly out one of its spies so that they could play the Russian national anthem over their enemy's teamspeak to twist the knife. Now that's my kind of psychological warfare. | ||
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motbob
United States12546 Posts
Here is the Teamspeak recording with all the silent bits edited out: [url blocked] Basically the recording opens with a small, brave support/BS fleet of IRC trying to hold off the massive 200 man dread-killing fleet of RA. They fail, partly due to a spy in Teamspeak. When the support fleets engage, the FC is immediately shot and killed, again, due to the spy. After the dreads are all dead, the spy plays the Russian national anthem. I like how the FC takes the whole thing in stride. "The dreads were all T1 ships, honestly." | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
I also like how the audio is like a Control tower/radar type conversation. Eve is so awesome. "Somewhere in the range of 10-20." "Awwww..." | ||
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General Nuke Em
United States680 Posts
Also that GBC killboard is hilariously incomplete in terms of both kills and losses and is basically worthless. edit - I like how the FC takes the whole thing in stride. "The dreads were all T1 ships, honestly." Yeah that's a failed attempt at damage control. Dreadnought insurance is kinda nice but it doesn't nearly cover the cost of the ship. | ||
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KlaCkoN
Sweden1661 Posts
On May 05 2009 09:15 Bill307 wrote: Yup, looks like they use a cluster of "server" machines to run their single EVE "server" (hurray for homonyms). To make things even more confusing, that article refers to the cluster as "a supercomputer". =P I am fairly certain the term "supercomputer" always refers to a cluster no? I don't think one single processor unit _can_ be faster than about 6-8 gHz. I know the cluster in gothenburg uses nodes of 4 gHz. | ||
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PH
United States6173 Posts
If I were to ever pick up an MMO, it would most definitely be EVE. | ||
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Khos
52 Posts
On May 04 2009 19:54 General Nuke Em wrote: The reason everybody and their mother that isn't sucking molle's dick hates BoB is because they have been and always will be a bunch of arrogant cheaters. And they lose anyway. Ignoring the GBC damage control brigade, try looking up T20. | ||
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motbob
United States12546 Posts
NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN HEAVILY EDITED TO REFLECT CORRECTIONS POSTED BY GENERAL NUKE EM. Thank you General. By the way, I think it's time to post another edition of "motbob's Probably Flawed Interpretation of the War." First an acronym section because it's damn confusing keeping track of all these alliances, and whose side they're on. NC stands for Northern Coalition; the following alliances do not technically make up the coalition but it's a handy way to refer to all the corps involved in Delve on the Goons' side: Goonfleet, MM = Morsus Mihi, KIA, PL = Pandemic Legion, RZR = Razor GKC stands for Greater Kenzoku Coalition; Kenzoku, EXE, BeachBoys, SkunkWorks, various other former BoB pets Other Goon allies: RA = Red Alliance, UNL = United Legion, XIX = xXLegion of DeathXx, TCF = Tau Ceti Federation Non Goon Allies, allied with Kenzoku: Atlas, AAA = Against All Authorities, ROL = Red Overlord Non Goon Allies, unallied with Kenzoku: IRC = Intrepid Crossing, ED = Ethereal Dawn "Cynoing" is a process in which a single covert ops ship moves into a system targeted for attack and opens up a cynosural field, anywhere in the system. This allows for ships with jump drives to move directly into the hostile system to that location. A "support" fleet can refer to a non-capital fleet, or a non-capital or -BS fleet. In the second usage, a support fleet would mostly consist of interdictors, ships that can create bubbles within which it is impossible to warp away. "Sov" is sovereignty. A system gains sov by being under control of any given alliance for a certain number of days. A system is "under control" by an alliance when it has POSes (player owned structures, also known as "towers") at more moons than any other alliance. With that out of the way... The last overarching post I wrote was quite inaccurate. I got many of the factions and conflicts wrong. However, one thing I believe I got right was the concept of the race to Sov 4. I concluded that the ongoing fight for 49- (which GKC/AAA was winning) was totally irrelevant to the overall war, since the retaking of Querious, let alone Delve, was progressing far too slowly, and that Sov 4 in Delve would soon finish. I saw this in terms of industrial strength, that since TItans produce much faster in Sov 4, Goons would be able to solidify their advantage over the GKC through production. Turns out that's a myth that I picked up somewhere. But what is important is that Sov 4 constellations are incredibly difficult to attack. In fact, to my knowledge, only one Sov 4 constellation has ever been taken while being defended by a non-defunct alliance. This happened this weekend, in Period Basis. Since I last wrote, lots of stuff has changed, everywhere in EVE. Most of it has been in the East. Since understanding of the Eastern conflicts is pretty integral to understanding of the war in Delve, I'll try to detail them all from the perspective of a Goon supporter who is attempting to be impartial. Before I get to that, I should talk about r64 moons. r64 moons are moons that, if mined, yield 7-14 billion isk per month. Obviously, they're very valuable and are often integral to funding a war. Over the last few months, the NC has made it a point to strip GKC of its r64s. They've mostly succeeded; GKC now only holds 3 in total, down from 14 three weeks ago. Of course, when you're down on cash, you can always sell the family gold: Kenzoku owns a LOT of assets that they can sell to fund the war, like unique ships that they won in Alliance tournaments. The first Eastern conflict is RA vs IRC/ED. It's the one on everyone's minds since IRC just lost a dread fleet. Remember that IRC/ED is also the faction that got its shit stolen a month or so ago by a Goonfleet spy. Goonfleet promised to give the shit back if IRC/ED stopped fighting their ally. They did, but then RA re-opened hostilities. Huh. To be honest I have no clue who is winning this war, but with the recent dread fleet loss, things might go RA's way. Perhaps someone else with more experience can enlighten us. Secondly, we have XIX/TCF/possibly UNL vs Atlas/AAA/ROL. I don't know much about this war, but much of it seemed to focus around a system named 46-dp, which recently fell to AAA/etc. TCF recently lost a Titan. XIX recently lost a mothership. You get the idea. Things are looking pretty bad for XIX/TCF. However, there was a recent corp theft in Atlas where a pilot defected to Goonfleet with a Titan and 3 other titan's worth of parts. There is some dispute over whether it really was 3 titan's worth (as reported by Mr. Mittani) or only 1. It shouldn't really matter either way. From what I can see, AAA/Atlas is decisively winning. Moving back to the West. AAA felt that, after capturing 46-dp, it was time to leave Tenerifis and head back to Querious. AAA and GKC decided that the next target for capture would be a system called H74, a cyno-jammed system under Goon control. Taking over Sov 3 systems is extremely difficult because they can be cynojammed, making cynoing fleets directly into the system impossible. And moving caps through normal jumpgates is impossible; they must jump in with cynos or Titans. So, to take down a Sov 3 system, an alliance must move in a large support fleet and take down the cynojammer in system. This usually involves jumping all the battleships through the jumpgates at once. And moving to the cynojammer. All at once. You can see where this might lead. Alliances that know a Sov 3 system of theirs is going to be attacked will often have multiple Titans in system guarding the cynojammer and/or the in gates. Well... the NC got wind of GKC/AAA's imminent invasion of H74 and prepared a welcome party. ![[image loading]](http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn108/amiablequinn/user23269_pic4633_1241021800.jpg) Those wrecks are almost all AAA. There were more than 100 BS kills from double doomsdays on multiple gates. Welcome back! AAA went completely quiet in the West after that. Completely. They haven't shown up at all since then. This has allowed the NC to begin to demolish EXE's Sov 4 constellation in Period Basis. Two systems have already been completely cleared of towers, with the rest almost certainly soon to follow. AAA showed up yesterday, though, in order to clear the NC out of 49-. It seems like Evil Thug (AAA CEO) is worried about an invasion of AAA space after this whole deal is over, and thus will defend 49-, which leads into AAA space, at all costs. In bad news for Goons, PL lost a Titan when the pilot forgot to be really, really sure that he had jumped out of 49- and that it wasn't just an illusion. Turns out, it was just an illusion, he logged when he saw the notifier of being in another system, and he got killed easily by GKC forces. He is being made fun of, publicly, by other PL members. It's a pretty big loss for an alliance that uses Titans often. They do have a bajillion isk, though, so it should be OK. That about sums up all the conflicts. You can sort of feel the impending doom of Kenzoku approaching. They can't make headway into attacking Sov 3 systems, even with AAA's help. They can't keep up a strong U.S. timezone presence. They can't keep calling alarm clock op after alarm clock op. In internal Goonswarm news, there has been a CEO change. Darius Johnson has stepped down to make preparations for the birth of his son. Thank you for reading this incredibly long post. Let me finish with a brief (edit: or not brief) talk about EVE and what makes it the best game ever made. 0.0 is what a lot of people call EVE's "end-game" material. It's what players strive for: the most expensive ship in the game is a Titan, which works only in conjuction with big fleets, etc etc. But there is so much more to EVE. EVE PvP is the most complicated online warfare you could possibly imagine. The possibility for setting traps, outmanuvering your opponent, using ship combinations in creative ways... is limitless. A fleet with good leadership and competent members in shitty ships that, though cheap, complement one another, can take down a fleet with many times its cost in isk. It is the same way in the market. It is entirely player driven. Finding a profitable trade route is simply a matter of time and intelligence. For example, the price of an item called "implants" recently collapsed in EVE. The perception of the cheapness of implants had not yet fully hit players who had not looked at prices recently. So I bought a bunch of them, took them to a trade hub, and advertised sets of them at prices that would have been low a few weeks ago. I made 15 million isk per set, an amount that it would take an hour to make running missions for NPCs, if you had the correct skills and know-how. You can see how this is an example of "market PvP." I used the perceptions of other players to take their money. Everywhere in EVE you can see signs of incredibly smart players using their wits to gain even the slightest advantage. An "invention calculator," a simple 3rd party program that allowed a single corp to make billions of isk by plugging in the costs and benefits of "inventing" different of Tech 2 items. People watching killboards for Tech 2 BPOs, of which there are only a handful per item in the game. Every time one is destroyed, the price of its corresponding item shoots up, and those prepared for the price surge can profit greatly. There are so many fools in EVE with money, just waiting to be stolen from. Imagine this scam: two collaborators go into a trade hub. The first (call him Joe) posts a public contract, a Want to Sell order, for a very expensive item at a stupidly low price, which is immediately bought by his partner (call him Jack) before anyone else can act. Joe advertises the contract in local chat, and everyone starts commenting on it since it is, of course, incredible that anyone would be so stupid to sell such an item at such a low price. Jack gloats in the chat at having won the item, and chides Joe for being so stupid. Joe defends himself, claiming that he's done his research and that he sold the item at a fair price. In fact, he's so sure that it's fair, that he has a few others to sell. Of course at this point, other members of local chat have jumped on Joe, calling him an idiot or worse, because people in local chat in trade hubs are horrible people who delight only in others' sufferings (you have to play EVE to know this.) Joe then posts another contract and advertises it in local, except this time, the contract is a scam; either the item is similar to, but worth much less than, the item previously sold, or the price is much higher than advertised. Either way, people are falling over themselves to take advantage of Joe's apparent stupidity, so they immediately open and buy the contract without taking a close look at it. You can see that this implements common street hustling tactics into a MMO. In what other game is this possible? Every day... there's something new in EVE that baffles me. Every day I open EVE and wonder what someone will do or say to make me hang my jaw open. And every day I, myself, am thinking of new ways to make money. Some of my ideas work, and some of them don't. But it doesn't matter. The pursuit of the next brilliant idea is what matters. The best part is that I'm in a corp with the sharpest group of guys I could ask for. Team Liquiders are obviously a smart breed, because in a few short months we've got a fleet coherence and a grasp of the game that a lot of the vets in corp simply don't have. When we joined our alliance (a non-factor in the current wars, BTW), we were amazed at the basic mistakes they were making on their PvP ops that we had figured out how to avoid long ago. It was then that we truly realized that we will be a force to be reckoned with once we get into more effective ships than tech 1 cruisers. If you want to test your wits against more than 30,000 other people, every day, in a hundred different ways, then for fuck's sake, join EVE. Other TL guys will help you grasp the tools the game provides you with. Once that happens, if you've got the right mind for it, the possibilities are endless. JOIN THE TEAM LIQUID CLAN IN EVE | ||
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General Nuke Em
United States680 Posts
(NC stands for Northern Coalition currently involved in Delve; Goonfleet, MM = Morsus Mihi, KIA, PL = Pandemic Legion, RZR = Razor) (GKC stands for Greater Kenzoku Coalition; Kenzoku, EXE, BeachBoys, SkunkWorks, various other former BoB pets) Other Goon allies: RA = Red Alliance, UNL = United Legion, XIX = xXShadow of DeathXx, TCF = Tau Ceti Federation Non Goon Allies, allied with Kenzoku: Atlas, AAA = Against All Authorities, ROL = Red Overlord Non Goon Allies, unallied with Kenzoku: IRC = Intrepid Crossing, ED = Ethereal Dawn NC = Morsus Mihi, Razor, TCF (kinda; they're historically a southern alliance that moved north) Goonswarm, Pandemic Legion, and KIA are separate from the northern coalition. I saw this in terms of industrial strength, that since TItans produce much faster in Sov 4 Titans don't produce faster in Sov 4. Sov 4 is important because it makes the control towers in a sov 4 system immune to attack. Titans can be only built in control towers. Thus, blowing up a control tower with a titan in build means you've killed a titan, just not the finished ship. Building titans in anything other than a sov 4 system is basically asking for somebody to come along and coat hanger it. See what happened to Unnatural Selection in Cloud Ring - they tried building a titan in a sov 3 system and had it coat hangered by Pandemic Legion, Sons of Tangra, and Goonswarm. Also, indigenous titan production capacity is basically meaningless for the short term current war. At this point in time acquiring a titan is basically no problem for any of the major powerblocs involved in the war regardless of whether they have sov 4 or not. r64 moons are moons that, if mined, yield 5-10 billion isk per month. The two types of valuable r64 moons in the game are dysprosium and promethium moons. At current prices a promethium moon is roughly 8.5 billion a month, a dysprosium moon is roughly 16. Price fluctuations means you can add or subtract a billion or two from those numbers. Kenzoku recently sold a Tempest Tribal Issue, of which there are only 4 in existence, to a player named Chribba. Kenny sold that Tribal Tempest long ago, don't remember exactly when. The first conflict is RA vs IRC/ED. Basically irrelevant as far as I'm concerned, no insights there really. Secondly, we have XIX/TCF/maybe UNL? vs Atlas/AAA/ROL They're fighting over Tenerifis (opposite side of the galaxy from Querious) which is basically lost to Bad Russians + Atlas at this point, freeing them up to intervene in Querious. Since they've gone back to Querious, Good Russians + Space French can push back into Tenerifis again. Forcing Bad Russians + Atlas to bounce around between the two places to wear them down is the obvious strategy. In bad news, PL lost a Titan when the pilot forgot to be really, really sure that he had jumped out of 49- and that it wasn't just an illusion. Turns out, it was just an illusion, he logged when he saw the notifier of being in another system, and he got killed easily by GKC forces. He is being made fun of, publicly, by other PL members. It's a pretty big loss for an alliance that uses Titans often. They do have a bajillion isk, though, so it should be OK. I obviously can't give you exact numbers but we could have easily bought him another titan (assuming we had exactly zero cash reserves at the instant of him losing it) within 2 weeks of the loss. And yes we've been calling him an idiot. In other titan related news, I survived a titan doomsday recently in an interceptor by jumping into the system 5 seconds before the titan set off the doomsday on a gate. The cloak you have upon jump in grants you complete invincibility and can't be broken except by you moving or it expiring, so I got to watch a titan blow up a fleet without going home in a pod. \o/ And, of course, moving caps through normal jumpgates is foolhardy, due to the obvious risk involved. Not just foolhardy; its impossible because capital ships cannot use normal jumpgates. Thus a jammed sov 3 system must be attacked first with a conventional fleet before capital ships can be used. On the flip side, a jammed system can't be easily reinforced with capital ships because it prevents all movement into the system. Taking down your cyno jammer to allow your own capital ships in also gives an attacker a window of opportunity to move their ships in as well unless you have a jump bridge network set up such that one of the jump bridge systems isn't cyno-jammed, allowing your capital ships to use the bridge network to get into the jammed system. Joe advertises the contract in local chat, and everyone starts commenting on it since it is, of course, incredible that anyone would be so stupid to sell such an item at such a low price. That scam could work except everybody is doing it nowadays in a much dumber format meaning that any advertising of contracts in local is automatically branded a scam. | ||
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