EVE Online’s Powerful Private Servers Revealed

EVE Online has a single game universe – all 5000 solar systems and millions of unique game objects are shared amongst the players, powered by a giant server cluster built by CCP Games, the developers behind EVE Online.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.

Requiring custom hardware – like solid state storage arrays, 10 gigabit ethernet, and multi-core 64 bit servers, EVE Online is an online game that has grown beyond a few private servers.

However, the lack of EVE Online private servers benefits players and helps with the game experience.Unlike other games, EVE Online actually benefits from the lack of private servers.EVE Online is unique, in that much of the game’s enjoyment comes from sharing a large universe with 50,000 other players. 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. The third server cluster is called Singularity, and it’s where CCP deploy the latest EVE Online code to be thoroughly tested by eager players.

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 game to explore.

An EVE Online private server would require so many expensive, high end, complex servers that – for many people – it would be cheaper to buy a supercomputer from Silicon Graphics or Cray.

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