EVE fix-squad has "carte blanche" - CCP

By Robert Purchese Published 29 July, 2010

Thousand-strong battles are top priority.

CCP has given a "specialised" EVE Online dev-squad "carte blanche" to tackle in-game lag issues that have the community up in arms.

"CCP has invested significant time and resources throughout EVE's history on increasing the performance of fleet fights. We've always had a team of developers devoted to improving our technology and in recent years we made exponential headway through massive server upgrades and initiatives like 'Stackless IO'," the developer told CVG.

"Currently, unsurprisingly, this effort is our number-one development priority and we have given the specialised team carte blanche in re-attaining 1000 player fleet battles that EVE is famous for.

The problems appear to stem from the recent Tyrannis update to the game.

Developer CCP appears to enraged the community further by asking for their vote for EVE Online: Tyrannis in the European Games Awards.

"You actually believe you deserve a reward for this bugfest?" asked one commenter. "Hahahahahahahahaha."

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (22) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Trikk #1 2 years ago

    ***body?

  • Bertie Verified Senior Staff Writer, Eurogamer.net #2 2 years ago

    Sorry. Something from the draft.

  • djed #3 2 years ago

    lol

  • WrongShui #4 2 years ago

    Best bit

    2010.07.28 10:56:26

    Victim: EVE Online
    Corp: Crowd Control Publications
    Alliance: NONE
    Faction: NONE
    Destroyed: Faith
    System: Broken
    Security: 1.0
    Damage Taken: 60,453
    Involved parties:

    Name: EVE Playerbase (laid the final blow)
    Security: 5.0
    Corp: Various
    Alliance: Crusaders for Excellence
    Faction: NONE
    Ship: Subscription
    Weapon: Subscription Cancelling Autocannon II
    Damage Done: 60,453

    Destroyed items:

    Reputation II
    Customer Satisfaction I (Qty. 4)

    Dropped items:

    Ball
    Edited by 1 at 29/07/10 @ 17:02

  • Spekingur #5 2 years ago

    And they will fix this issue. Is anyone doubting that?

  • NimbusTLD #6 2 years ago

    I have no idea what the first 4 comments mean. In English please??? I want in on the joke!!

  • Macross #7 2 years ago

    and lol wrongshui

    thats awesome ;)

    and for nimbus: post#4 at least is an eve kill mail (that you get when you destroy another player) except its been doctored to say that the player's faith in CCP is whats been destroyed
    Edited by 1 at 29/07/10 @ 17:25

  • Turrican #8 2 years ago

    I thought the notorious fleet lag problem had reared its head in the previous expansion, Dominion, rather than the latest Tyrannis? I'm sure a more experienced capsuleer than me will come along in a moment and confirm that.

    Anyways, as I posted in another thread about Eve recently, its this lag at the endgame of fleet vs fleet warfare that dispirits me most about continuing with my membership. I'm also not clear based on this news item whether they've assigned more developers to the problem or its the existing minor team when compared to the major teams they've got working on 'features' for upcoming expansions and FPS spin-offs....

  • redhex #9 2 years ago

    turrican

    it was dominion. tyrannis didnt fix it. i have faith that it can be fixed. not much faith that it will be though, or not in a timely enough fashion to avoid cancelled accounts. one 'team' (probably 3 guys) wont do it. they need to hire a phalanx of optimisation specialists for a year and take the server down for half the day every day. then everyone would cancel though. you see the problem.

  • telboy007 #10 2 years ago

    Nice wrong, thanks for posting that as I would have missed it.

  • Kerome #11 2 years ago

    It's tough shooting at moving performance targets...

  • President_Weasel #12 2 years ago


    "It was mentioned by CCP that the data does not seem to support that polished quality sells better than new features."
    They seemed surprised that the EVE players were annoyed by this comment, or by the information that they're using almost all their development resources on Walking in Stations (vapourware that nobody really wants anyway, designed to attract the "hang around Dalaran in my raid gear on my rare mount" crowd and Second Life players. Second life? If we had a first one we wouldn't be playing EVE) and on Dust 1066 or whatever it's called, a console FPS that's meant to tie into EVE.

    At least they're trying to walk back from that statment, although since they also said their stats showed that EVE is less laggy than it's ever been, despite player experience showing the exact opposite, I'll take their "this is our number one priority and we have a specialised team on it" with a pinch of salt. I bet the "specialised team" is some intern called Olaf Bjornisson.

    Also, CCP caused that volcano. Fact.

  • onestepfromlost #13 2 years ago

    ok couple of points i think incarna and dust will be great things that will change eve for the better forever.
    Now before x and bara and dodgy hit me with bricks, I think that these amazing things should most definetly not come at the expense of fixing the shit that is broken just now. Lag i havnt had affect me as i dont live in 0.0 but all those thousands of players that do cant possibly be making it up. Its not like its one alliance saying its fucked up ccuase they lost its pretty much the whole 0.0 playerbase, now if this does not make it a priority for CCP then i dont know what would.

    Im not even gonna touch the whole ccp CSM thing( but i do kinda think people are up in arms about nithing, were lucky to even have the csm)

  • Velios #14 2 years ago

    This is horse shit, I was in a 700+ fleet battle the other week with no lag issues what so ever (Daisho vs IT in Providence) Sure there are lag issues from time to time, but show me a game that puts this many gamers in the same arena and works at all. EVE has by far the most epic pvp situations I have ever encountered. With every patch, the apple cart seems to get upset a little, but it's usually resolved within a month or two.

  • InfiniteFury #15 2 years ago

    Velios I think CCP's main problem is that, while the vast majority of players undertake either solo or small gang play (be it PVP or PVE), they pretty much base their marketing agenda around the fact that Eve provides 1000v1000 space battles, unparalleled in gaming terms. I totally accept that you've had large scale battles and it worked but it doesn't seem to bear out across Eve fights taking place anywhere, anytime.

    The PR cat has been let out of the bag here and CCP have not made a very good job of containing it. They've had - rightly - a loyal subscriber base who admired the scope of their vision but CCP have, perhaps inaccurately, given the impression that their current subscribers are merely a means to an end towards bigger, more profitable fish.

    Hope that makes sense.
    Edited by 1 at 29/07/10 @ 22:11

  • DodgyPast #16 2 years ago

    This is horse shit, I was in a 700+ fleet battle the other week with no lag issues what so ever (Daisho vs IT in Providence) Sure there are lag issues from time to time, but show me a game that puts this many gamers in the same arena and works at all. EVE has by far the most epic pvp situations I have ever encountered. With every patch, the apple cart seems to get upset a little, but it's usually resolved within a month or two.

    LOL no, couple of weeks out I was in a 150 man fleet on a roam, took on average 2m to get through each gate and up to 5m at it's worst. Even with a 25 man gang on Sunday it was painfully noticeable, including forcing us to take an alternate route when our scout was unable to load on jumping into a supposedly quiet system. Had nights in Stain when there was fighting going on elsewhere which meant there was no point going anywhere because you'd be loading the next system for minutes, or rather getting killed by anyone who might be there.

    It is possible that a 350 vs. 350 would work on a reinforced node, but plain fact is that before Dominion 1000 vs. 1000 was just about playable on a reinforced node, dropping to maybe 500 vs. 500 when not reinforced. Now when anyone tries stuff like that the servers go crazy and you're completely unable to control anything that's happening for 99% of the time. The rest of the time even gangs of 40 can run into annoying lag that makes roaming painful.

    Biggest problem is that with Dominion they also introduced huge HP structures and massively boosted the HP the Super Capitals ( Titans and Super Carriers ), while removing the area effect doomsday, meaning that for any ownership of player owned space to occur the fleets have to be huge. As a result player owned space has become rather stagnant with 0 changes amongst the larger powers... and those super powers getting bored and dropping these huge toys on any small gang they can find.
    Edited by 1 at 29/07/10 @ 22:35

  • Macross #17 2 years ago

    Velios, its highly likely that some bright spark in one of the fleets notified ccp in advance of the battle and they moved the system(s) the battle was in to a reinforced server.

    you can clearly see when this happens as when it doesnt the game is basically unplayable when you have anything more than a hundred or two players in a fight.

    fingers crossed that one day part of a sucessful fleet engagement isnt letting ppl know a day in advance (i still have my suspicions on where PL gets all their intel :p)

    Edit: im also looking forward to incarna / dust... i just want to see what theyve done to expand incarna since they realised it was a bit pointless and went back to the drawingboard :)
    Edited by 1 at 30/07/10 @ 01:40

  • mingster #18 2 years ago

    Weirdly i haven't noticed any lag at all and the systems i've been in are much, much busier than they used to be.
    Edited by 1 at 30/07/10 @ 09:15

  • Spekingur #19 2 years ago

    This lag issue must be node-specific then.

    @redhex: You don't need 20 people doing optimization. If anything 20 people is way too much and they would just get into each others way.

    @President Weasel: Your words echo somekind of hurt. WIS is something that the community has been wanting for a long time. And DUST 514 is being developed by a completely diffirent development unit (as in, elsewhere in the world - or CCP Shanghai).
    The name you wrote is also wrong. You would never put an 'i' in there, it would be Bjornsson (or more accurately, Björnsson).

    Plus, the volcano was a distraction. Another one, a larger one, can apparently be set off at any moment :-o

  • DodgyPast #20 2 years ago

    @President Weasel: Your words echo somekind of hurt. WIS is something that the community has been wanting for a long time. And DUST 514 is being developed by a completely diffirent development unit (as in, elsewhere in the world - or CCP Shanghai).

    This is one of the interesting thing, the people complaining the loudest are the ones that know there is nothing out there to replace Eve and after a brief moment of sunlight when the wars rolled and the entire economy ticked over healthy we're now experiencing a massive period of stagnation that affects every. I guess the hi-sec missioners think it's wonderful picking up all that x-type gear cheaply, but at the same time the things they sell are also starting to plummet rapidly.

    What most people don't understand is that Eve revolves around the destruction that happens in null sec, it touches every player, and when that becomes impossible the knock on effects will also effect everyone. The people complaining are the ones that operate in hi sec, low sec and null, the ones who think everything is ok are messing around doing nothing to drive the story of Eve forward.

    /sorry can't be arsed to fix the grammar... pulled an all nighter to finish an essay due to overindulgence in SCII
    Edited by 1 at 30/07/10 @ 15:04

  • President_Weasel #21 2 years ago

    I've been playing EVE for well over a year, and I haven't wanted Walking In Stations for any part of that time. I doubt I'll hate it when it comes out, I just don't see it as something that's particularly worth having.
    Went back to EQ2 recently, spent an evening getting a nicer house, couple of evenings doing legendary quests to get legendary items for my house, half an hour doing a quest for a throw pillow, an hour buying furniture on the marketplace, and I was utterly bored with player housing.

    That's not the game, it's just frippery.

    EVE is a game about spaceships. Incarna is just frippery.

    EVE is a game about spaceships that contains several half-finished features that the devs abandoned where they lay when a new shiny thing attracted their attention. I'd rather they tidied their room properly and put their old toys away before they got a new one.

    Dust 1999 is being created by CCP Shanghai, a subsidiary of CCP, using money CCP got and is continuing to receive from EVE subscriptions. Revenue from the game is being diverted to build a different game, and that's annoying to some people. Me, I'd be perfectly happy with that if it wasn't for the fact that CCP strongly implied that ALL their development resources were being used for Dust 2029 and Walking in Stations, and that the list of issue from the player base - player feedback from their much vaunted CSM - was essentially being put in a drawer for 18 months, in favour of yet more "look at the shiny shiny! shiny thing make it all better!"

    Having played Champions Online I think I can safely say that "look at the shiny shiny!" is no substitute for a working game.
    Edited by 1 at 30/07/10 @ 16:05

  • alcides #22 2 years ago

    I don't get this news.

    It's got me wondering if "carte blanche" is actually the english for carte blanche.
    It's got a typo.
    It quotes "hahahahahaha" from a nobody on a forum.

    It seems to have been made to troll on those developers.

    :/