The Ever Higher House of Cards

CCP really needs to wake up with large fleet battles in null-space. They are fighting a battle that they can never win for metrics that are as harmful as they are beneficial.  No other MMO that I am aware of competes with number of players in combat at one time and place with Eve.  I know that the battle at HED-GP on January 17, 2014 had more participants in that one battle then were in the entire game world of other MMOs that I have played.  For as much positive press as CCP gets from these events, when they fail or have profound system problems that make the contest unfair, CCP and Eve are harmed in the public eye.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on CCP’s hardware or how it works or does not work, but I can be certain of one absolute fact.  It is finite.  The server has limits.  But instead of treating this as a game design problem, CCP handles it more as a server problem.  The server solutions are finite as well.  The cluster can only handle so many calculations per second.  The servers can only manage so much data per second.  CCP's solution is to improve the hardware and server technology and they have succeeded at this improvement process since I began the game. 

My first major battle in Eve was during the siege of the Distillery in G7-WUF.  The server crashed several times and was extremely laggy.  There were less then 500 people in the system that morning and they were using gun and missile boats.  Fast-forward to this last weekend and the battle included around 4000 people with a large percentage of those being drone platforms and the server stayed up, but not without serious problems.  It has been approximately eight years between those conflicts and yet the resulting experience was still the same.  

CCP needs to change the paradigm from one of performance to one of design enhanced by performance.  That is the real challenge for CCP.   How do you take a game style that is freedom oriented and restrict it without losing that sense of liberty? You change the object of contention and you change how it is controlled.