CCP Games’ flagship EVE Online is run on one of the largest clustered super computers on the planet, with five thousand star systems and several million unique objects in play at any particular time. Their computer system is so strong that they schedule an one hour down time every day to run backups, and the system can deal with up to 25,000 players ( and often more ) without collapsing. This quick EVE Online guide will discuss why you can’t run these servers yourself.
Thanks to the large size of the database that players engage with, EVE Online doesnt lend itself to private server play, and there are no EVE Online private servers.
Largely, the absence of EVE Online private servers is good for the overall play of the game. A lot of the appeal of playing the game is the sheer number of players working simultaneously on the universe. 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 are going to be on based on the server your pals are on. You are either on the Tranquility server ( if you use the english language interface ) or the Serenity server ( if you are using the Chinese language interface ), and there are usually 10 thousand or even more players on concurrently to have interaction with. There’s a 3rd server run by CCP, the test server, called Singularity, and they like to recommend that everybody set up an account there to test things and provide input into the next development of the game.
Conversely for World of Warcraft, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of private servers out there, that will let anywhere from 100 to maybe 1,000 players log in simultaneously. For WoW, this is a chance to “grind in private” ; if you tried doing that on EVE Online, you’d have a tough time hooking up with other players at all, because of the massive size of the database to explore.
In a genuine sense, non-public servers for MMOs are a threatening thing for the firms that produce the games. Those games are expensive to write, dear to maintain, require paid staff to keep on top of things, and require a continual development budget and selling plan. The subscription model you pay is what keeps the game being developed ; setting up “hacked ” MMO private servers simply hastens the moment when the company publishing the MMO can’t sustain the operation any longer, and has to shut things down. The details are covered in most good EVE Online guide.
Fortunately for CCP, an EVE Online private server is a really difficult thing to line up for a home user ; most of the people do not have home-based clusters of high end computers, each with sixteen gigs of RAM, to try to cause it to happen.
