I just noticed a sticky message on the forums.

It seems that Eve-Online has now more than 100.000 legit subscribers:

This Saturday the 100.000 subscriber mark was broken. As you can imagine this is a major milestone for both EVE Online and CCP. So we wanted to personally thank you for all the support and input into the game. Tomorrow we are going to find out who holds the honor of being the 100.000 subscriber and pod him a few times.

Again, thank you all and we look forward to having the new server hardware in place for you later this month. That hardware will more than triple the performance of EVE Online and provide you with an unmatch game experience.

Big, huge congratulations!

You truly deserved this success. I hope you’ll continue to support this game even more than before. Push the boundaries!

And now Eve-Online is growing too fast:

Max Headroom

Red Moon Rising is out and as you have probably noticed we are still dealing with issues from the deployment. RMR is a rather big change, in many aspects close to Exodus in scope, especially at the lower levels. RMR contains many optimizations and improvements behind the scenes to deal with EVE’s continued success (BTW thank you so much for that, EVE owes much of it’s success to you the EVE Player community).

As the game grows and we stubbornly maintain our goal of one cluster, we have to take a more drastic approach to platform management than before. The gradual addition of hardware and on going software optimizations are not able to keep up with EVE any more. Oveur recently did an excellent blog describing our efforts.

The urgency of the situation becomes evident when we do updates of the scale of Red Moon Rising. The margin of error is virtually non-existent as we are already so close to the glass ceiling of our current cluster architecture that the smallest mis-configuration leads to us banging against it. This causes effects which we just witnessed at 15:00 GMT today.

We have been doing research into how we can considerably increase our headroom, the first step was the Ramsan, the next step involves a move to 64 bit architecture. We have brought Christian Tismer, the godfather of Stackless Python to Iceland and him and porkbelly are here at the office busy figuring out how to squeeze all potential power out of the x64 AMDs we are planning to build our next major cluster upgrade on.

Next to them Papasmurf and Dr.J are feverishly calibrating all pistons of our current cluster to focus all computing resources in the right areas so that RMR will hold the 25.000 PCU we seem destined to achieve before we manage to have the new super cluster hardware assembled, delivered, installed, tuned and tested.

The hardware needed to increase our headroom isn’t something you can go to the store and buy. We have world experts assisting us and after everything has been completed the EVE cluster will probably be the first game related cluster site to rank on the Top500 list.

Anyway I wanted to offer my small reassurance that we are focused on backing our commitment to single cluster for the world wide market (The China cluster is a whole different ballgame which warrants a separate blog) and we fully realize that seriously increased hardware and R&D investment is required to back it and that will be done.

In the short term we have world leading experts in MMO development working around the clock here at the office, ignoring all other commitments (which understandably are considerable this close to Christmas). I remain in constant amazement how committed our developers are to make sure we pass each hurdle, commitment that is only matched by the understanding of their families.

In the long term we will build a completely new cluster utilizing all modern day technology to construct something at the scale needed to simulate nuclear explosions or the earth’s weather system.

So this is blog is our plea to you, the EVE Player community, to yet again give us a chance to resolve these matters and to explain that we have long term and short term goals to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.

Of course EVE Online is a commercial venture but seeing what we have achieved together often makes you think otherwise. We here at CCP remain committed to keep up our end of the bargain. With your help we’ll take MMOGs to the next level.

Maybe someone still remembers all the claims about the support for more than 100k “PCU” (aka “Peak Concurrent Player”, CCP’s definition for the maximum number of accounts logged in at the same time) back in beta. Heh…

The subscription numbers are growing at an impressive rate. Really, I expect a collapse because this is going beyond every expectation. Basically *everyone* is now giving it a try or discussing it. If anything, this confirms how important is our community and the true impact we can have on these games. This market is starting to belong more to these communities. We decide who succeeds and who fails and I’m not sure game companies are going to like how unpredictable (and unfaithful) we are.

EVE has over 100k active accounts, including trials. Active subscriptions are now over 86k.

This Sunday the number of contemporary logged in accounts was above 20k.

The 100k mark could be reached much sooner than expected. I’m actually hoping things will slow down, or this may burn both CCP and the future of the game.

Commercial success is corrupting.

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.

That it is pretty it’s out of doubt.

Red Moon Rising is the upcoming free half-expansion to be released in December. The original plan was to have all features packed in Kali, the next one now scheduled for Q2 2006, but the devs decided to split the project in two in order to keep everything under control considering the sheer scope of the ongoing development.

The new screenshots just released are wonderful and finally show the “Titans”, the biggest ships you will be able to control in the game.

The focus of this further step is on the warfare and PvP action but there are many more features and enhancements that are being added, starting from the client optimization to the addition of four new “asian” bloodlines (one per race) to appeal the eastern market where the game is going to be launched (and it will be truly interesting to see how it goes).

While the hugest ships aren’t going to be accessible if not for those long-time and organized players that accumulated an insane wealth and the support from the largest corporations and alliances, still they reinforce the “sense of wonder” created by the absurd unbalance in the scale of the vessels. And this definitely is what a game also inspired to the Golden Age of the Space Opera should aspire to reproduce.

If at some point you’ll see a Titan passing by during your travels, you’ll surely remember that moment. It’s something real. Those ships ARE insanely valuable and if they are destroyed they are gone. This creates a sense of ownerships and self-consistence in the game-world that sweeps off the “arcade” mood of other games with faked, trivialized environments and rulesets. In Eve things truly exist. The space is huge but in the hands of the players. And it’s undeniable how all these elements are truly appealing and fascinating despite the very slow pace of the game for most of the new players and those not deeply involved in the PvP scene.

It’s not surprising, considering also the steady and ambitious development, that the last press release announces nearly 80k active subscriptions even before the launch of the new expansion and the release of the game on the eastern market. (waiting for proper source)

EVE ONLINE: RED MOON RISING

CCP Announces Major Upgrade to EVE Online

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND – November 18st, 2005 – CCP Games, an independent developer and publisher of massively multiplayer online games, today announced the public release of “EVE Online®: Red Moon Rising”, a new expansion to its highly successful and fast-growing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) “EVE Online®: Exodus”. Red Moon Rising is scheduled for release this December, and will be provided to subscribers free of charge.

“Red Moon Rising is the last of the EXODUS chapters and is the precursor of the Kali expansion,” said Magnus Bergsson, CMO of CCP Games. “Players will see new ships and features in Red Moon Rising created explicitly to augment warfare, so those who crave the adrenaline rush of action-packed PVP will really enjoy this release!”

With nearly 80,000 active subscribers and over 17,000 simultaneous users on one server, “EVE Online” is the largest independently developed and published MMORPG on the market.

“The introduction of these new components is analogous to adding rooks, knights, and the mighty queen to a galactic chessboard,” said Nathan Richardsson, Lead Producer for EVE Online. “Fighters, carriers, and titans are going to take combat to a scale that the MMPORG genre has never seen before. In addition, the sheer economics required just to produce these leviathans will create great opportunities for industrious-minded gamers to take advantage of.”

EVE Online®: Red Moon Rising is the march towards an epic clash between the empires as the tentative peace presiding over the galaxy continues to slip away. Nations begin to conspire against one another, secretly preparing for the inevitable conflict that threatens to redefine the borderlines of EVE forever.

Some of the key features of this upgrade are:

* Titans: The largest, most fearsome space faring battle vessels ever created
* Carriers: Front line capital ships providing fighter coverage and support for fleets
* Bloodlines: The addition of Asian bloodlines available to each of the races
* COSMOS Constellation Expansion: Addition of constellation missions to Gallente and Amarr territories
* Fighters: The main offensive and defensive weapon of the Carrier
* Starbases and sovereignty: Additions of roles to improve control access of services and improved calculations of player-determined Sovereignty
* Next-Generation Manufacturing & Research Facilities: Mass-manufacturing enabling and remote industry management.
* Performance Optimizations: Optimizations to core systems to provide even better performance.
* Mining Industry Upgrade: New equipment, ships and skills for miners
* Combat Enhancements: Varied improvements to combat, enhanced defenses and configuration overhauls
* Jettisoned Canister Flagging: Removing the contents of a jettisoned canister that is not your own will flag you as a thief
* Drone Enhancements: New drone capabilities and improved performance
* An Eye for an Eye: You are allowed to revenge the unlawful destruction of your ship
* Tech II: 23 new Tech II ships, including destroyers, battlecruisers and mining barges
* New Corporate Logos: Corporations have more options to create their own identity
* NPC Changes: New NPC’s featuring elite ships with advanced capabilities such as cap draining
* UI Improvements: Need info from Hagen. (lol?)
* Full Unicode Client: The EVE client now supports any language in the universe

This while they speak about “growing pains”:

What you guys need to be aware of, however, is that due to CCP’s ongoing growth spurt, we’ve presently hit the absolute limit with regards to how many people we can fit in our current housing. We physically cannot add more people until we move to our new facilities (a move currently scheduled for next month). Therefore, to meet current production schedules with available manpower, our focus needs to remain squarely on static content for the time being.

Our company’s having growing pains, but once they’re past us we’ll be better equipped to bring you a more well-rounded gaming experience.

And fancy projects to spare some space for the exponential growth:

64bits

A common cause for node deaths is memory exhaustion. Sometimes this is due to some memory-eating monsterbug, but often the virtual address space of 2GB in a 32-bit process simply fills up with legitimate user data. No matter how much memory is installed on the machine, each process can only address 2GB of this.

In order to alleviate this and to buy us more room for growth, we have been working on porting the server binaries to the new x64 architecture and have them run as 64 bit processes under Windows 2003 server 64, or even XP 64.

The ~150k subscriptions of City of Heroes aren’t that far away. We’ll see for how long this will be considered “niche” or “outlier”.

The GoonFleet may also help:

It’s a completely different game than it was in beta/launch.

What the hell…I’m game. I’m sick of WoW. And since I’ve been busy at work lately, this sounds like a good game to get stuff done while I do work with the mining and all.

As new people can see, the devs maintain a very active and responsive relationship with the player base. They frequently post on the online forums in response to threads commenting/complaining about changes, and make an effort to justify their decisions in a way SOE never would.

Btw, they added an into movie to the game with a voice narrating the backstory and mostly-static beautiful art screens to illustrate it. It sets the mood rather well.

Fascinating, indeed.