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Minmatar captain's quarters coming to EVE Online test server this week
Get ready, capsuleers. Captain's quarters are coming, and sooner than you might expect. CCP Tanis breaks the news that a rough version of the Minmatar captain's quarters will be making an appearance on the Duality test server this Thursday, April 21st. That's right: Two days hence, all you Brutors, Sebiestors, and Vherokiors will finally be able to walk around on your own two legs inside of the EVE Online client. CCP's newest dev blog cautions that the test environment is a true work-in-progress, and Tanis states that "we're still at the chisel-in-hand-in-front-of-a-marble-form stage." Why make the environment available to the public at this point? CCP is mainly looking to gather feedback and general impressions on usability, since the captain's quarters interface is eventually slated to replace the current in-game hangar view. The test run will also feature new in-station and crash course tutorials as well as interfaces for planetary interaction, corporation management, avatar re-customization, and ship fitting. In other EVE Online news, the new Council of Stellar Management held its first fireside chat a few days ago, and an audio recording of the broadcast is now available for download on the official EVE forums.
EVE Evolved: The war on lag
It seems as though everywhere I go to read about EVE Online, someone is complaining about lag. Throughout the game's seven-year history, developers and server engineers have waged a constant battle against the lag monster. Frequent upgrades and code overhauls have ensured that the capacity of each server cluster increased at pace with the growing subscriber numbers. When the Dominion expansion came, something in it caused lag to get a lot worse. The issue has yet to be corrected and has even spurred some players to put media pressure on CCP to correct the issue. Until recently, the developers at CCP had been very quiet on the topic of lag and their efforts to combat it. Aside from the occasional fleet-fight mass testing event on the test server and the news that there was actually an entire team dedicated to lag, players were left largely in the dark as to what was being done to address the issue. In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, many players began to assert that EVE's developers weren't working on lag at all. Earlier this week, we posted that CCP was planning a series of devblogs on lag to showcase the progress it's made. In a surprisingly rapid turn-around, four devblogs on lag and another on CCP's core technology groups have already been posted. They cover such topics as server scalability, the results of recent mass testing events, and CCP's new "thin client" testing tool. In this week's EVE Evolved, I introduce each of CCP's four recent devblogs on lag with a quick summary.
Upcoming EVE devblog series to show CCP's lag-busting efforts
With EVE Online's single-shard universe, the server hardware and game code have to be continually updated to cope with the game's constantly expanding playerbase. Each time the server is upgraded, node stability and lag in large fleet battles improves significantly. Unfortunately, this trend of periodic improvements took something of a wrong turn when the Dominion expansion came along. Before Dominion, fleet battles took place with over a thousand ships on each side and no crippling lag or node deaths in sight. Since the expansion's release, however, fleets of only a few hundred have regularly experienced unplayable conditions. Frustrated by CCP's lack of visible progress in tackling lag, members of the EVE community have been making their outrage known. A recent appeal to the gaming media by a few players resulted in the issue getting very high exposure, which could be bad for CCP's public image. CCP issued a response explaining that lag is a high priority, and that there is even an entire development team dedicated to tackling it. Earlier this week, CCP Zulu expanded on CCP's lag-busting efforts in the first of a new EVE devblog series dedicated entirely to lag.
Help EVE's developers get to the bottom of fleet lag this Saturday
The down side to EVE Online's truly massive single-server design that puts all players in the same universe is that lag has been a constant problem since the game's launch. For the most part, the game runs smoothly and lag doesn't affect the day-to-day lives of players. It's when too many players congregate in one place that the server node they're on begins to grind to a halt. Circumstances can rapidly go from bad to worse, with server nodes collapsing under the strain and database failures occurring. It's been noticed by players that lag in fleet battles has gotten considerably worse since the Dominion expansion came out. To get to the bottom of the issue, CCP Tanis has been scheduling regular test-server events in an effort to replicate the conditions experienced on the main EVE server. By logging a fleet battle in action, CCP hope to find ways to resolve fleet lag and prevent further lag-causing defects from reaching the main server unnoticed. On Saturday 29th May between 20:00 and 21:00 EVE time, CCP will be running an important hour-long testing session. They're asking players to turn up and help out, as they need at least 300 pilots to begin testing and ideally would want over 500. For information on what the testing consists of and how to access the EVE test-server, visit the official mass testing sticky thread on the EVE forums.
EVE Online Sovereignty playtest to be held on Friday, Oct 30
CCP Games is holding a play test of the new Sovereignty system in EVE Online on Friday, October 30th at 17:00 GMT/UTC on the Singularity test server. The devs are looking for players to jump in and help them fine tune Sovereignty for the Dominion expansion release, which is very much focused on this particular game mechanic. Interested parties are encouraged to show up early, as the devs want to give players a short demo of the new Sovereignty system beforehand. Also, they'll need to divide players into two teams, Red vs. Blue. EVE Quality Assurance dev CCP Tanis writes, "We will be testing several aspects of the new Sovereignty system, think of this kind of like a 'king of the hill' game in EVE." EVE players interested in helping out (and getting a feel for how the new system will work) should read through the info the devs have listed in the playtest announcement. The developers have stated the testing event will take two or three hours to complete. (As an aside, they're putting the Sovereignty game mechanics through its paces on Mischief Night... what could go wrong?)
CCP Games seeking Dominion expansion play testers, Oct 15th onwards
The Dominion expansion for EVE Online will bring some major changes to capital ships and sovereignty when it goes live on December 1st. As that release date approaches, the developers at CCP Games are seeking feedback from the EVE playerbase on some of the changes being made to the game. They aim to do this through large scale fleet battles on the Singularity test server with a minimum of 100 pilots, although hundreds more would be preferable. The tests will first focus on open combat between large fleets and later switch focus to player-owned starbase (POS) sieges. There are three play tests (tentatively) scheduled, with more to be announced: Thursday, October 15, @ 17:00 GMT Friday, October 16, @ 18:00 GMT (this is specifically a Sovereignty test) Thursday, October 29, @ 17:00 GMT Read the full post from EVE Quality Assurance dev CCP Tanis for more info on the tests and how players can connect to the Singularity test server. Players are encouraged to bring out their capital ships and unleash plenty of drones during these mass-tests of Dominion.
EVE's call to arms: Thursday fleet battles on test server to help combat lag
EVE Online's latest expansion Quantum Rise brought some new features for the industry crowd, and a few enhancements aimed at PvP pilots as well. But some of the broad changes they've made to the game mechanics have triggered lag, and lots of it, which CCP Games is hoping to combat with the help of the players themselves. CCP Tanis says, "We take this issue very seriously and as a result, our engineering team has been in high-gear working on fixing the problem and we think we are close, but we need your help." The help CCP Games is looking for requires relatively little from players, aside from logging into the Singularity test server and entering the fray, blasting each other apart in battleships. The Wednesday tests were already underway when we got word of this, but they're looking to get a large group of pilots (200 or more) for the Thursday fleet engagements on Singularity. The test will take place on Thursday at 11:00 GMT, and another is tentatively slated for 15:00, dependent upon what CCP learns from the previous fights. CCP Tanis lays out how players can get involved:
The EVE Performance Group
"CCP fix lag nao!!" That's essentially what this writer has been hearing from players since he began EVE Online, and most assuredly it was being uttered long before that. Whether it's a typical forum whine or something much more clever, the message remains the same: Players really want to have fleet battles with several hundred people at once. After all, the shardless galaxy that players populate, in theory, should allow for that. But in practice, lag can turn such engagements into a slide show. Is it unrealistic to assume that 1000-player fleet battles will ever be a reality in EVE? Time will tell. Still, you'd think that CCP Games didn't care about wiping out lag from much of what you read on the forums. They're making some inroads with their new server technologies and ongoing initiatives to improve performance, but players still wonder what goes on behind the scenes. The latest in the recent blitz of dev blogs from CCP Games comes from CCP Tanis, "Introducing: the EVE Performance Group," and is an attempt to explain how this group of developers works to make EVE "run better, faster, and smarter." CCP Tanis lays out how they using monitoring, profiling, and debugging tools to try and reduce server load and increase performance.
