[incision]

>It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time?

I wasn't sure how to interpret that either.

I've always been a bit surprised that the the backend systems for these MMOs aren't a bit more flexible. Though, EvE did launch nearly 10 years ago and it has never had a huge number of subscribers.

I have no idea whether more recent games have solved these problems.

[Goronmon]

I have no idea whether more recent games have solved these problems.

Most games solve this problem with completely separate servers and population caps. I know in Guild Wars 2 they actually stop displaying players past a certain number to improve performance. This works fine in calm areas like cities, but in PvP it causes issues with being killed by "invisible" groups that the game fails to load in time.

I may be remembering incorrectly, but last I remember reading CCP was basically in uncharted territory on the tech front as far as EVE Online is concerned. No other game developer has even tried to tackle this problem at the level they have, and I can't think of many applications in the world that could comparable in scale and complexity to what the EVE servers have to deal with.

Edit: To summarize, even being 10 years old, no game has come close to matching it in this context.

[xenophanes]

Guild Wars 2 is stupid about this. At least on release, they stopped displaying ENEMIES FIRST. So if you're in a big enough group, a couple enemies can walk up and none of you can see them b/c you hit the limit from displaying allies, but they can still see some of you guys and kill you while invisible.

If they prioritized displaying just party members (parties only go up to 5 people) and maybe people on your friends list, and then enemies, it would have worked better.

[saraid216]

They supposedly just fixed this in the patch yesterday. As a player who gets owned by unrendered thieves, I'm not convinced. -_- (OTOH, I'm also pretty bad at PvP anyways, so whatever.)

[outworlder]

400k+ active players IS a huge number. Specially considering they are in the same logical server. Other MMO's handle this by having copies of the world and splitting the population - which is the same approach used by Ultima Online back in 1997.

So actually, EVE is way ahead of the rest, technology-wise.

[incision]

>So actually, EVE is way ahead of the rest, technology-wise.

That doesn't seem like a sensible comparison considering how much the gameplay of EvE differs from the typical MMO.

In any case, I'm not making a dig at EvE, rather acknowledging that the game has had a long life and has never been a multi-million subscriber behemoth. Therefore, they might make concessions, or allowed the persistence of previous limitations / decisions in design/infrastructure for lack of resources [1][2].

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5135873

2: http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/09/28/eve-evolved-eve-onli...

[Goronmon]

That doesn't seem like a sensible comparison considering how much the gameplay of EvE differs from the typical MMO.

The "typical" MMO doesn't even try to handle large populations. The use of separate servers, population caps and login queues are how just about every one else deals with congestion problems.

Even from your second link there is the quote "Working with IBM, the EVE server cluster is maintained in London and is currently the largest supercomputer employed in the gaming industry." Sure that is from 2008, but newer MMOs are built using the same overall server architecture you saw back in the days of Ultima Online.

[vacri]

400k subscribing users is a great big pile of cash to work with.

[mmanfrin]

I wouldn't call over 400,000 players '[not] a huge number'. It's the 2nd or 3rd most popular paid-subscription MMO.

[flexd]

As you can see here http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility , there is about 44k people online at this point, probably a bit less since most people have more than one account.

That seems like a fairly substantial amount of users in a single world. Is there any other game world with this many active users in a single world?

[incision]

The specific, relative number of subscribers is not the point.

That said, I wouldn't call something huge when there are comparables (even if it's just one or two) which dwarf it and others which (at some point) exceeded it.

[namidark]

I can't think of any games that deal with PVP on this scale either.