Game bar - Loner

Welcome here, buddies. Some EVE fans are complaining about lag. Throughout the game’s seven-year history, developers and server engineers have waged a constant battle against the lag monster. Frequent upgrades and code overhauls have ensured that the capacity of each server cluster increased at pace with the growing subscriber numbers. When the Dominion expansion came, something in it caused lag to get a lot worse. The issue has yet to be corrected and has even spurred some players to put media pressure on CCP to correct the issue.

Until recently, the developers at CCP had been very quiet on the topic of lag and their efforts to combat it. Aside from the occasional fleet-fight mass testing event on the test server and the news that there was actually an entire team dedicated to lag, players were left largely in the dark as to what was being done to address the issue. In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, many players began to assert that EVE’s developers weren’t working on lag at all. Earlier this week, we posted that CCP was planning a series of devblogs on lag to showcase the progress it’s made. In a surprisingly rapid turn-around, four devblogs on lag and another on CCP’s core technology groups have already been posted. They cover such topics as server scalability, the results of recent mass testing events, and CCP’s new “thin client” testing tool.

In this week’s EVE Evolved, I introduce each of CCP’s four recent devblogs on lag with a quick summary. More >