CCP Games developed a massive server cluster to support the thousands of star systems and millions of unique objects that EVE Online, their flagship MMORPG, requires for it’s shared game universe.Their server system is so robust that they schedule a one hour down time every day to run backups, and the system can handle up to 25,000 players (and sometimes more) without collapsing.
|Despite supporting over 50,000 simultaneous users, the server cluster requires just one hour of downtime a day for maintenance.|Only one hour a day of maintenance is required for this monster server cluster, which is designed to scale to support over 50,000 simultaneous users.|With over 50,000 users logged in at peak times, the server cluster can cope with node failures, hardware crashes, and still keeps on going – with only an hour of maintenance a day.|A daily downtime of an hour a day is all that’s required to keep this giant server cluster running, supporting over 50,000 users at peak times.[/spin]
Because of the gigantic size of the database that players interact with, EVE Online doesnt lend itself to private server play, and there are no EVE Online private servers.
Although some might disagree, the player experience actually benefits from a lack of EVE Online private servers.However, the lack of EVE Online private servers benefits players and helps with the game experience.No other game boasts as many simultaneous users in such a large shared universe, and this is the real appeal of EVE Online. Because EVE Online runs on a single cluster, there’s never a choice, like in World of Warcraft, or City of Heroes, to decide which server you’re going to be on based on the server your friends are on.
You’re either on the Tranquility server (if you use the English language interface) or the Serenity server (if you’re using the Chinese language interface), and there are usually ten thousand or more players on simultaneously to interact with. Singularity, the test server run by CCP, is the third server cluster, and all players are recommended to install a test client and give input to the game’s development.
By contrast with World of Warcraft, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of private servers out there, that will let anywhere from a hundred to maybe a thousand players log in simultaneously. For WoW, this is an opportunity to “grind in private”; if you tried doing that on EVE Online, you’d have a hard time hooking up with other players at all, due to the massive size of the universe to explore.
Luckily for CCP, an EVE Online private server is beyond all but the largest research institutes and supercomputer sites – most people don’t have solid state drive arrays and massively parallel servers at home.
