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Is Eve the only game with a single game universe?
Lord Jezo
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One of the neat things about Eve is that there is only one single universe for every player of the game. All 30,000 people are in the same space at the same time. There is no need to worry about picking the wrong server or being unable to play with your friends if they are somewhere else. This has spoiled me when it comes to MMOs.
Has any other MMO out there done this sort of thing or do any future ones plan to offer something like that?
Has any other MMO out there done this sort of thing or do any future ones plan to offer something like that?
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Plus, more servers means more character slots, which is always a bonus unless the single server allows unlimited anyways. How many characters can you make in EVE?
I believe it is three per account, but skills train in real time and you can only have a skill training on one character at a time.
IIRC, anyway.
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Did that ever come into being?
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Gemstone and Dragonrealms both do this, but they are really super MUDs.
Also, every time you interact with an NPC you get to do so from your own pseudo instance -- either via a private comm channel or from a space station instance. This saves the hassel of having to position a ton of NPCs around, and prevents people from clumping up around them. You don't have to make a town with 30 NPCs handing out quests or services, you can just set them as variables in a space station and let the player select them from a list.
That isn't a dig on EVE, its just an explanation of why few other games have that feature. Until procedurally generated content really becomes practical, any setting in a world where terrain has to be designed, towns have to be built, and npcs have to be placed is going to be too limited by developer time to provide the space necessary for a single world shard with 30,000 players.
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Anyway, Guild Wars does this, as does EVE. But even in a single universe, it's not like the game is running on one physical server. And it's not always a good thing. EVE has had massive problems with stability and lag, and has separate servers (server clusters, really) for high-population areas. They have to monitor player activity and reinforce active systems with more servers as wars roam. They've even had to reorganize the game world to disincentivize players gathering in a central hub system because that system was so lagged. Guild Wars uses instances to reduce server strain and "districts" in non-instanced zones to reduce lag and the overall experience is quite smooth. But GW doesn't have the market economy (or politics) that makes EVE's single universe so effective.
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The only game I can think of that made it difficult for friends to play on the same server is FFXI. Every other game I have played with friends we discussed which server we would be playing on before going there.
that's partly true but your glossing over some major differences between eve and other games there. In eve the world is HUGE, thousands of times the size that a wow shard is, and it's entirely unsharded, there's nothing to stop you from going and and playing alongside anyone whose ever bought the game, no matter when or where, not many games can say that, and honestly none of the other's that can boast the sheer complexity and depth of eve.
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More than 500 people on a node and the game turns into a slideshow if you don't have a mean machine and a fat pipe to the internet. Loading grid first = Win for the big fleet battles. Eve, while an excellent game, suffers from lag problems just like every other MMO.
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you shouldn't take any single server claim too seriously. Who really cares? Most MMOs let you move around to different servers if you want. Eve being on one server causes problems sometimes as timezones become an issue. That empire you built can crumble while you're asleep.
apples and oranges, you're attempting to compare them. I didn't say they had magic servers that were better than everyone else's, I said their gameworld was far larger and more interconnected than the classic sharded model, sure you can still outpace the server's ability to handle the load, but eve at least try's, most other games just throw up their hands and lock you into shards and then charge exorbitant fees to get from one to the other.
Also eve has FAR more territory to ocupy than wow, it's very true that they don't have to work with near as much models or information to represent a large space, but that's just their good planning, it's as if you took all the wow server's made them unique worlds, and linked them all together so you could travel from one to the next. the eve cluster has over 5000 solar systems, each one is relatively small, but in their thousands the represent the largest contiguous game universe around.
No, he's pointing out that EvE's ability to have many players together is actually no better than anyone else's.
However, because they're working with space, they can have a lot more "land space" than any other non-Space MMO can.
WoW could link all the servers together, and enable you to travel between them as easily as instancing, but they certainly wouldn't be able to be unique in terms of the land thats there.
To continue comparing it to WoW, one realm would be like a region, you have a bunch of guilds there, but their always the same guys, maybe new players join and old ones quit but another group isn't going to migrate en mass from another realm and take over, or at least not without all of them forking over 25 bucks or more a piece. In eve however, if an area gets crowded you can go somewhere different, or you could drive other groups out of your territory, you really can't do that in wow or in most games, it's not how many players you can cram into one particular spot, its the fluidity of movement and the sense of being one single community rather than just part of your realm that I'm trying to illustrate.
saying eve's game universe is no different than wows shards is like saying San Fransisco is no different than Nevada, you still can't get much more population density maybe even less, but that doesn't change the fact that you have a lot more room to spread out in.
There are plenty of times when you need to be on the same grid as 900 other people. Off the top of my head, let's say you want to kill a titan. I am not sure how closely you follow the game, but recently there was an issue where a Titan was tackled but the 500+ folks trying to kill it were unsuccessful because the lag directly resulted in their dying before they loaded grid. Moving to a different system to avoid the lag makes it a little tricky when you want to shoot a particular ship that is somewhere else.
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Usually when you say "game universe" it means something else.
It actually started out as just one.
A lot of traditional MMOs back in the day started out as just one server then expanded as the load became too great.
These days developers tend to foresee these things happening and set up multiple servers on day one.
You answered your own question.
You don't run into EvE players as often because there are not very many of them, at least compared to WoW.
I'm fairly lucky with WoW, I live in Australia, so I play on Oceanic servers, so if I run into someone else from here, chances are they play on Oceanic servers, which narrows the range that they might be on.
A lot still do. This is a good point. A few people mentioned games that only have one server, or used to. The question is: If they had 30,000 concurrent users, would they STILL only have one server (and would that server be playable)? Even if the servers can handle it, which most can't, most land-based MMO gameworlds would be effectively overwhelmed by that many players, either in terms of space or spawns (likely both).
Exactly.
The argument many would counter your statement with, Hevach, is this. "BUt EvE Online has 30,000 concurrent players and it can handle them! EvE are some kind of design gods! (I do not actually know how many players EvE has)".
However, the response to that argument is quite simple. EvE devs are not design gods. They are dealing with a medium (space) which is effectively infinite, and requires very little design time to create MORE space. WoW designers have to create an entirely new theme with an entirely new design when they want more land/zones.
And also, from all reports, EvE can NOT handle 30,000 concurrent players. They can handle them all logged onto the same server, but try to get those people in anywhere near close proximity to each other and the whole thing is fucked.
This is my main reason for liking the way EVE works over every other game. Everyone is in the same space and all events impact everyone, even if just a little bit.
In EVE when you talk to other players about it everyone knows what is going on, you might just be sitting in some corner of the universe just shooting at NPCs but if you pay attention to the game at all you'll know about the political struggles going on around you and experience the same story as everyone else.
I guess you can't even compare EVE to other games. In WoW everyone knows the same areas and the same zones, but they dont know the same story. You can talk about how you conquered the big dragon, but you cant all talk about huge conflicts fighting to take over the entire universe.
Or maybe you can but I just dont know enough about it, but from what I have seen WoW is more about the game itself and what the developers have created while EVE is more about a history created by the players that is going on in real time, not waiting for the next developer created story point.
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wasn't really a question, just something to think about, you have a point about the oceanic servers thing but as you yourself pointed out you got lucky. I used to work at best buy, there were about 20 people at my store that played wow, spread across ten different servers, effectively we could all talk about wow but non of us was able to really share the same experience and all we had was shared anecdotes. At my current workplace there are about 5 EVE players, spread across the eve universe, even though we're all in different places, doing different things we all talk to each other about the events in game all the time, having intelligent discussions on politics strategy whats happening where, we all feel a sense of community that I've not seen among wow players from different servers.
Besides, every system is completely separated. All another MMO has to do to match that is say "Okay, now there are portals which allow you to jump from one server to another! One game world, lol!"
All I'm really saying is the one 'world' is cool and all, but it's not a technical feat like the fanboys make it out to be. I'd like more games to work in the same fashion, but the vast empty distances involved when it comes to interplanetary travel make a sci-fi themed MMO more suitable to this sort of thing than a fantasy MMO.
This would be like saying a WoW server couldn't handle 200 players at release, because if 200 players all went to one place the server died. I remember Sargeras crashing when about 80 alliance, iirc it was under 2 raid groups of players, tried to invade TB a few months after release and probably about the same number of horde went to defend.
EVE's primary server does handle 40,000+ logged on users during primetime. But try to get 300+ in one system with tons of drones and fighters going and the node has trouble. But, when spread out it handles 40,000 just fine. Just like a WoW server can handle 2-5 thousand players when they are spread out.
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