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Over 1000 real players in one area, one fight, one siege?
-Zeno-
Member CommonPosts: 1,298
Has this ever happened again? The only game I know that actually had this happen was Shadowbane. Sure, players clients were crashing left and right and when you were not crashing you had 1 FPS. It is a record that has not been met since to my knowladge.
Why has technology not progressed enought to deliver us a real MASSIVE multiplayer online role playing game? Its been 9 years and we now have phones that are more powerful that PC's back then. What gives?
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
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Biggest ive ever seen was on WoW a few years back. It was during the beginning of the pre-WOTLK event, rumors went crazy that something was happening in Burning Steppes, tons of horde and allys went running and stood watching the min naxx floating in the sky, when nothing happened well, tentions went high and as soon as a guy was ganked everyone jumped on each other.
If I remember right their was about 400 people their, the server didnt crash but it came very close.
Was fun though, hoping to see that sort of thing in future
EVE beats that record regularly. Not sure if you meant to exclude it or not.
During hte open beta for Warhammer Online, I remember walking up to a cliff overlooking the teir 1 pvp area.... Looking down into this chasm at this massive horde of Chaos.. Red names everywhere, stacked on top of each other, as far as the eye could see.. I wouldn't be surprised if there were 1000 there.
It's not really about technology as much as it is about player fragmentation. There are so many more games now and games are using so many servers, that it is hard to get 1000 players in a single area in any game.
Also, I have never heard of 1000 player battle in Eve and would love to get a link to info about that event.
I thought EVE had a limit on how many ships can be in one area? Like 200 or something. A system will lock down if more than 200 are in the area. Sure, back in the day they may of come close to Shadowbanes number, but not now. Limits were put into place instead of a fix or technology advancement.
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
Eve does have battles much bigger. Here's a link to a story about one battle that peaked at over 3,100 players in the system at one time. You also have to take into account that the systems(zones) in EVE are truly massive in size... quite easily the biggest single areas in any MMO to date. One system in EVE is much larger than the entire world in WOW.
On topic with the OP in a more fantasy type game the largest battles I've ever witnessed were the 500+ player castle sieges in Lineage II. Some of those were truly massive on an epic scale. I've played dozens of other MMOs and besides EVE I've never seen anything like it.
Bren
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AIKA online has 1000 vs 1000 wars with 5 factions in one area. Its weird how some F2P mmos can provide support for so many players in 1 spot while some of these new pay to play mmos struggle with lag fests when couple hundreds gather in 1 spot.
I don't know if they've actually had 1000 vs 1000 fights but I've seen fights that had a few hundred. Unfortunately, my old PC could not handle the strain. Still, Aika was designed for large fights by limiting the customization of the characters such that there are less variations to keep track of.
Back in its early days, Aion would have battles in the Abyss that were about 200 or so on each side.
One of the biggest problems with a humongous online battle is that if N players are participating, information has to be transferred N² times. Imagine 4 people in a zone. Player 1 casts a fireball; his computer sends that instruction to the server. The server relays the result to all 4 players. Player 2 drinks a potion; again, his computer sends that to the server, and the server sends the result to all 4 players. If all 4 players are doing things, the server is sending all 4 results to 4 different people. Add a fifth player and now the server is receiving instructions from another player and relaying his actions to everyone in the area. Every time you double the number of participants, the number of data transmissions increases by a factor of 4. It gets wildly out of control very quickly. And that's without even touching the amount of additional computations performed by the server, particularly if you wanted to have any kind of line-of-sight, collisions, or area-of-effect spells.
The other big problem is that even though each additional player puts more and more burden on the system, each additional player adds less and less to the experience. Imagine a battle of 30 versus 30. Even though you could be focus-fired down in the blink of an eye, there would be at least some tactical combat in setting up good positioning and performing strategic advances and retreats. Scale it up to 100 versus 100. Now it's just two walls of meat colliding. It's more "epic" but far less rewarding. Your decisions, your skill, your overall contribution means less. All you see in front of you is wall-to-wall enemies, and nothing but plain luck decides if you get cut down instantly or survive. Throw another hundred or two behind each side, another mass of people behind the wall that you can't even see through. Do they even matter? They're nothing but a footnote: "btw, there were 200 more guys behind those guys." The experience is no different at all, except that a zone search shows there were 600 people in the zone instead of just 200. In the end, there's no reason to go through the effort of making it work other than just to say "we did it in our game, we had a 600-man fight."
I clicked this thread knowing the OP wouldn't have EVE in their discussions. There's over 1000+ (2-3000 on weekends) players just in the main trade area every day... with 1000's more in the surrounding areas. Having a battle with 3000+ isn't so far fetched on a game like EVE.
Taru-Gallante-Blood elf-Elysean-Kelari-Crime Fighting-Imperial Agent
Every day for at least 6+ hours of the day during Planetside's heyday they had 600 player battles (and before the tighter pop caps there were even more...although the popcaps made things much better overall.)
Certainly has to be more frequent than you see large battles in EVE (which tells the losing side to go back to farming for a while to recoup losses :P )
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
And there is the reason it doesn't happen.
A few hundred works but that is already hard enough. SB just got the insane idea that they actually could pull it off but the performance you get in a situation like that just ain't worth it.
Maybe when the net becomes a lot faster andwe get better computers... Then again it also creates confusion beyond anything we ever seen in another game.
Yeah, but Eve do have some advantages over landbased MMOs, the background looks stunning but takes very little resources... Not that it ain't amazing or anything.
I 'believe' that the most they ever had was 900 per battle (before the caps). However, I can remember these battles, as there was nothing else like them... even today. Planetside 2 is supposed to support up to 2k per battle. I am loking forward to this.
Camelot had this happen multiple times, on multiple servers. Sure, the framerate was atrocious, and more often than not we crashed the servers, but just as an example, one of the relic raids Docoloth led on Guin had 2.5 BG's of Hibs (that's 500 hibs alone)
Of course, that also predated Shadowbane ;P
PS - it's not entirely the PC's fault. technology HAS progressed, and so has the complexity of the games - pixel counts are progressing as fast as the tech is. 1000 stick models would be easy to draw. 1000 GW2 characters + all the complex artwork in the background? No longer so easy!
Server side tech is evolving to support massive numbers of players in one virtual place at the same time. I do not believe the client side challenges have been overcome yet. A company can almost infinitely scale the server side architecture with a proper "cloud" implementation, but their players are always going to have fairly mediocre hardware on average.
PikkoServer MMO Server Architecture
Pikkotekk’s “1000-Player FPS”
EVE doesn't have z-buffering issues of traditional mmorpgs. It also doesn't have the animations to support. It's childs play compared to games that have to populate a planet with all the triangles it needs to detail.
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WW2online/Battlegroup Europe had this years ago with houndreds of players in one battle. I have not seen such big player numbers in one battle from any other MMO I played so far and from some of the mentioned ones.
Mount & Blade : Napoleonic Wars has currently several servers and probably 1-2 servers with nonstop 24/7 fights and 200 players around on a regular basis, all on the same server, in the same battle and/or sieges in form of fortresses. Awesome game btw, if you love the Napoleonic Area and fighting with cannons, muskets, swords and cavallery aswell teamplay..this is the game which offers PVP content what I was missing in mmorpgs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPv56deYrsQ
Don't know how true that is or isn't, but you can't take away the fact that they pull it off. I've yet to see what they've managed to do lately with time dilation... anyone?
Oderint, dum metuant.
What waynejr2 is saying is true. They can pull it off because how simple the game is. They couldn't otherwise. The time dilation works... kinda. The server holds up, but the client stability is still an issue. DCs are frequent during large engagements.
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*Launches a volley of EM torps at waynejr2*
Brrradabrradbrooo000m!
How's that for animations?
Or this disco!!!! (watch HD)
Nah, just playing around, I agree with your points that EVE is very easy on clients compared to "land lubber" games. In that lies its greatest strength because fighting for meaningful control over huge chunks of "gameworld" with so many people at the same time is sadly something very rare in online gaming.
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I remember battles in the beginning days of Planetside of over 1200 players. Caps on continents(planets) did not come until much later in the games life. Back then it was insane battles of tanks, planes and so many incoming rounds on bases that to stick your head up meant almost instant death. There use to be a Planetside video hub called Planetside movies that had hundreds of fraps captured battles that showed those earlier fights on Oshur where the fight raged across the entire face of the world and not just one base. Those were Planetsides best days.
Today though if you want to experience all out carnage - play Mount and Blade Warband on the servers that can hold 100+ players at a time(200+ on some servers) - that is the closest you'll get to in your face combat in a virtual setting - especially the servers that do siege game play. Those can be tons of fun.
Years ago, in one of the earliest attempts to cluster servers for an mmo (not THE first), DAOC successfully supported a battle in the frontiers in which an estimated 1400 people were involved. It's been done before and as noted, EVE sees such events regularly. The 200 ship deal is not a limit. It is a trigger for the engagement of several systems designed to maintain reasonable performance under extreme strain. They first reinforce the node on which the battle is occurring. Then there is time dilation.
EVE is entirely on a single "server". Really, it's a single world with a serious (by game standards) server cluster supporting it. They can steal computing power from quiet nodes and shift it to busy areas. Last time I looked, EVE held the all time record for concurrent players logged in as well. Something in excess of 60,000 people in a single persistant world.
DAOC's cluster was more simplistic in that it, more or less, just devoted 4 or 5 servers to the duties previously done by one.
Server side, the potential is only limited by money and the physical potential of the bandwidth available to the host. The problem with 1000 person battles is usually the results of such a thing on the client side.