January 30, 2013 at 16:43Asakai Battle: How EVE Online Deals with Giant Battles
- Transfer
The Asakai battle was the second most colliding ship in EVE Online history (the comrade madmaxcorp wrote beautifully about this , you can watch the video of an eyewitness there without exaggerating the galactic beauty). The history of the battle is interesting in itself (human error), but we are traditionally more interested in what happened to the game servers during this crazy battle, how does CCP (creator of EVE Online) manage to cope with such loads?
“Our support team (game masters, GMs) is watching giant fights like these,” says one of the developers. “We have a web page with the status of a cluster on which large red numbers appear in case of overloading nodes in battles. So it's pretty easy to see what happens. ” More interesting is what is behind these numbers.
The most common answer is to do nothing. Almost all battles create a sane load on the server, or they are so fast that nothing can be done. Nevertheless, as soon as it becomes clear that something needs to be done, the team has several possibilities.
It is difficult to notice, but sometimes admins change the game space itself. “We are moving other solar systems from the battle node. "This temporarily disables everyone on these systems, but eliminates the symptoms inherent in an overloaded server." - explains the developer. “This helps the battle system a little, especially if reinforcements fleets pass through portable systems. This was done in the case of the last battle, but this rarely happens. "
There are more significant weapons to support the performance of servers under extreme load, but they are already compromise. “We have a couple of machines with the best iron, better than the average in the cluster.”
“These machines come into play when players need it. Unfortunately, the same thing happens here that was described above - all those in the system are disconnected during the transfer. Because of this, basically we never use such a move, ”he continues. “In this case, the battle will simply fall apart, as the Titan will come to a random position. If we went this route and transferred the system, Titan and his friends simply would not come back, interrupting the battle. So yes, we didn’t. ”
So, there really are few options for solving the problem. Servers are always 100% loaded, so nothing can be tweaked in the settings. However, the game has a built-in mechanism to solve the problem of big battles. She's slowing down.
This is a function familiar to veterans of EVE Online for a long time, but a curious way to deal with high loads and lags in a situation where the game should work. At a time when the load on the server reaches a critical point, the game automatically slows down the time by a certain amount to combat overload. Time in a battle for 3000 players is launched at 10% of the real time, which is the maximum possible slowdown. Here is a video that demonstrates time dilation in practice.
“This is a very elegant way to deal with lags in a situation where the servers of other games just melt,” the author writes. “In fact, the time in the system slows down so that requests to the server and its responses are implemented and implemented correctly. In this case, people entering the game get gradually slowing down to the maximum level of 10% - in fact, the world is slow, but quite functional in terms of gameplay and tactics. "
So instead of server crashes, slowing down time allows even massive battles to be realized, albeit at a slow pace. As a result, battles like this are possible, in which thousands of players with thousands of expensive ships participate.
“For the HoneyBadgers clan, the casualties were 6 Dreadnought, 11 Aircraft Carriers and one Super Carrier. For Clusters, things turned out worse - 4 Dreadnought, 29 Aircraft Carriers, 5 Super Carriers and three Titans, ”writes PC Gamer. The battle of Asakai is called total defeat.
Estimated losses amounted to 700 billion in game currency or $ 24,000. And that is why it is so important that such battles take place on stable servers. Fortunately, CCP was ready for such an event. And EVE Online continues to be an exciting game.
“Our support team (game masters, GMs) is watching giant fights like these,” says one of the developers. “We have a web page with the status of a cluster on which large red numbers appear in case of overloading nodes in battles. So it's pretty easy to see what happens. ” More interesting is what is behind these numbers.
Available options
The most common answer is to do nothing. Almost all battles create a sane load on the server, or they are so fast that nothing can be done. Nevertheless, as soon as it becomes clear that something needs to be done, the team has several possibilities.
It is difficult to notice, but sometimes admins change the game space itself. “We are moving other solar systems from the battle node. "This temporarily disables everyone on these systems, but eliminates the symptoms inherent in an overloaded server." - explains the developer. “This helps the battle system a little, especially if reinforcements fleets pass through portable systems. This was done in the case of the last battle, but this rarely happens. "
There are more significant weapons to support the performance of servers under extreme load, but they are already compromise. “We have a couple of machines with the best iron, better than the average in the cluster.”
“These machines come into play when players need it. Unfortunately, the same thing happens here that was described above - all those in the system are disconnected during the transfer. Because of this, basically we never use such a move, ”he continues. “In this case, the battle will simply fall apart, as the Titan will come to a random position. If we went this route and transferred the system, Titan and his friends simply would not come back, interrupting the battle. So yes, we didn’t. ”
So, there really are few options for solving the problem. Servers are always 100% loaded, so nothing can be tweaked in the settings. However, the game has a built-in mechanism to solve the problem of big battles. She's slowing down.
Time dilation
This is a function familiar to veterans of EVE Online for a long time, but a curious way to deal with high loads and lags in a situation where the game should work. At a time when the load on the server reaches a critical point, the game automatically slows down the time by a certain amount to combat overload. Time in a battle for 3000 players is launched at 10% of the real time, which is the maximum possible slowdown. Here is a video that demonstrates time dilation in practice.
“This is a very elegant way to deal with lags in a situation where the servers of other games just melt,” the author writes. “In fact, the time in the system slows down so that requests to the server and its responses are implemented and implemented correctly. In this case, people entering the game get gradually slowing down to the maximum level of 10% - in fact, the world is slow, but quite functional in terms of gameplay and tactics. "
So instead of server crashes, slowing down time allows even massive battles to be realized, albeit at a slow pace. As a result, battles like this are possible, in which thousands of players with thousands of expensive ships participate.
“For the HoneyBadgers clan, the casualties were 6 Dreadnought, 11 Aircraft Carriers and one Super Carrier. For Clusters, things turned out worse - 4 Dreadnought, 29 Aircraft Carriers, 5 Super Carriers and three Titans, ”writes PC Gamer. The battle of Asakai is called total defeat.
Estimated losses amounted to 700 billion in game currency or $ 24,000. And that is why it is so important that such battles take place on stable servers. Fortunately, CCP was ready for such an event. And EVE Online continues to be an exciting game.