“We need to continue improving our servers and our software to be able to, you know, grow this. “We need to continue the march that we were on,” Finnbogason told Polygon during an interview on Tuesday. But the kinds of changes needed to allow for 12,000-plus player battles are still years away. Throwing up your hands is not the same as throwing in the towel, explained creative director Bergur Finnbogason, also known as CCP Burger to the community. Imperium and PAPI forces fight in the Battle of M2. 4, just hours after the fateful battle, CCP Games essentially threw its hands in the air, saying that it can no longer “predict the server performance in these kinds of situations.” It’s a kind of exponential increase in player concentration, the team tells me, that no one at the Icelandic studio ever expected. Prior to that, the record was slightly more than 5,000. Had the servers held up, it would have shattered the previous record of more than 6,500 - which had only been set just a few months before. So that’s over 12,000 players attempting to enter a single system.” “Some 35% of those players were in just three systems attempting to join this fight. Known to the community as CCP Aurora, she is Eve Online’s community developer. “All of the players combined, there were approximately 35,000 online that day,” Jessica Kenyon told Polygon on Tuesday. Now that Eve is experiencing a kind of renaissance - in no small part because of its move to a free-to-play model - there are simply too many people showing up to fight. For nearly 20 years, the game’s marketing has promoted these kinds of massed fleet battles as the pinnacle of the in-game experience. The developer of Eve Online is suddenly very much the victim of its own success. There’s another group with a slightly more serious problem, and that’s CCP Games. “If your forces fall below a certain point, do you really have them trapped, or are they just lurking? At some point, it’s unexploded ordnance.” “I would feel a bit more comfortable if I had something like 200, 250 of their titans trapped,” Gianturco told me in a telephone interview on Wednesday. Because the battle could flare back up at any moment.Ī cluster of PAPI titans show up at the Battle of M2, only to get obliterated as the servers buckle. Gianturco and his allies in the Imperium continue to sweat it out until 5 a.m. So both sides are stuck here in what’s known as a “hellcamp,” and it sounds about as grueling as it does petty.īut hellcamps are not against the rules in Eve Online, and so the strange sort of siege goes on. But, if Gianturco’s forces in the sector fall below a certain number, those enemy players can log in and tear his own fleet to shreds. If the players controlling them log back in, they’ll quickly be obliterated. More than 330 titan-class enemy ships - some of the most powerful and expensive weapons in the game - are floating, invisible in space but intermingled with Gianturco’s own fleet. The players who control those ships are forced to stay logged out of the game. In fact, they’re all still there, present but invisible.
Meanwhile, the smaller half got stuck on the battlefield. The larger half was left lingering outside the battlefield, waiting for its leadership to give the next order. When Eve broke down during the Battle of M2, it effectively split the massive enemy fleet in half. But there were hitches aplenty, and that’s how Gianturco won.Īnd see, that’s the real problem. Had the Battle of M2 gone off without a hitch, it would have been more than twice the size of the largest conflict that has ever been fought in the game’s nearly 18-year history. The reason that Gianturco won the Battle of M2 (as it’s being called) is that so many people showed up for the climax that Eve Online literally broke down. Turns out that the enemy fleet wasn’t actually destroyed. So you can excuse him for still being a little jazzed about that. A little more than a week ago, the Imperium won a controversial victory in the spacefaring MMO, one that broke the back of the largest in-game fleet ever assembled. Eve Online’s most famous warlord has been pressed up against the edge of the in-game map for nearly seven months now, his Imperium faction the target of a massive and well-funded coalition of his enemies, called PAPI. Alex “The Mittani” Gianturco is usually energetic when I chat with him, but today he sounds downright manic.
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