Quick update about Eve-Online (and I’m back as a subscriber as well).

CCP’s plan in September was to reach 70k subs by the end of the year but early this week Oveur announced they are already above 80k. Today the new record about concurrent users online was broken as well, going above 19k (19.486).

This means they gained more than 20k subscriptions just in the last seven months, corresponding to more than 25% in growth. Pretty outstanding. I wish they could continue with this impressive J-curve (Raph can write all he wants, but that’s just the market interpreted as a sexual metaphor) but I also believe that it’s too unrealistic to expect that 25% growth every few months. Still, they have gained the space to improve the game more consistently and secure a good number of loyal subscribers in the longer term.

The new major patch/expansion is planned to go live early this week (Tuesday?). The patch notes are already out but there’s also the possibility that the devs won’t meet the deadlines. In this case the patch will have be pushed to after the holidays.

Among the content aimed to the bigger alliances there are still many changes that will affect everyone, like the huge changes to the combat and a rebalance and power-up of the noob ships (details here). Plus the addition of four new bloodlines (one for each race) and a revision of the tutorial. It’s important to notice how they work and develop at all levels, from the network infrastructure to the higher level design.

It’s also noteworthy that they’ll finally display the “criminal flagging”. About which I ranted here in the past.

Between the other things I digged, I’ve been completely in awe for this flash tutorial. It’s really amazing even if it just explains how the turrets work in the game. Even if you don’t play the game I suggest to read it from the first to the last page because I think it really describes what Eve is at its core and why many love or hate it. Of course that’s the opposite of intuitive, visceral combat. But noone could negate the huge appeal that even that type of approach can have. Really, that little tutorial is incredible. Go toy with it now because it’s worth it. I’ve never seen something niftier and intriguing.

Finally an external program I found and that is extremely useful for me. It simply allows the game client to fill the screen while playing in a window so that you can multitasking without having to set the game client at a smaller resolution than your desktop so that the window can fit in. What it does in practice is remove the borders and the title-bar so that the window will fill the screen without leaving spaces or going off it. I tried it and it works perfectly.

Hey Lum, if I get the source-code can you port it to DAoC? :)

EDIT- I quote here the latest news since they are unavailable for non-subscribers.

We have been working hard on testing Red Moon Rising (RMR) – which is tentatively scheduled for deployment next week. Besides all the new content in RMR, we’ve been working hard on optimizations too, especially since the EVE universe continues to grow at a faster rate than we have ever seen before.

Recently, we deployed server optimization hotfixes seperate from optimizations made in RMR. One of the hotfixes performed beyond our expectations. We regained 25% of our CPU usage on all Proxies resulting in a noticeable lag reduction in most systems.

In addition to these optimizations, we started testing 64-bit server hardware last week on Tranquility. This is in preparation for our upcoming server upgrades – and the results are astonishing. A Proxy server previously running at 70% CPU, which came down from 95% CPU after the aforementioned optimization hotfix, is only using 25% CPU on the new 64-bit hardware.

Please note, only one of the many Proxies is running on 64-bit hardware, the testing is to make sure the replacements we are considering investing in actually give a performance increase. We feel the results speak for themselves and are moving forward in the testing and upgrade process.

—
On the RMR side of the news, we are still testing the current candidate for deployment. If testing goes as well as the hardware and software testing, we will break our Tuesday deployment cycle and RMR will go live on Thursday, 15 December. If we are not satisfied with the results of testing this deployment candidate, RMR will go live in January.