EVE Online News

To our cherished players,

Today, 10 September, is World Suicide Prevention Day - and we at CCP would like to raise awareness of this vitally important and very delicate subject.

Anyone can find themselves in difficult times. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 700,000 people die due to suicide each year – and it is the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 15 and 34.

In light of the still very strange and constantly changing state of the world and our lives in the past couple of years, and the difficulties we all face in uncertainty, loneliness, and grief, it is more important than ever for you to be able to know that you are not alone.

If you are ever struggling with suicidal thoughts, feel overwhelmed by life, or even just need someone to talk to, you can be connected with a professional and share what’s on your mind in a single call: specialized suicide hotlines operate 24/7 worldwide, and are always prepared and ready to help.

On our end here at CCP, reports of intentions of self-harm are treated with the highest urgency, and we have procedures in place to ensure as immediate a response as possible, including contact with any available local assistance.

And on the side of the EVE community, the Broadcast 4 Reps movement maintains a safe and sympathetic space where anyone can reach out to speak to other space friends in times of need, operating a dedicated public discord server, and providing links to various other valuable resources on their website.

This year, we would like to recognize and thank the core team of B4R for their efforts and invaluable assistance to those in need, including Tovanis, Jezaja, Erika Mizune, Diana Valenti, Fyt 284, Daark (Nyx Palaiologos), and Thoroughbreed, and would like to give an honorable mention to Laura Karpinski. CCP will be issuing special in-game medals in gratitude to active B4R members in the near future.

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We would also like to give thanks to Sixth Empire, founded by Max Singularity and Feiryred, for developing a community of friendship and care for their fellow EVE Online players. Sixth Empire’s core motto is “Answer All Calls”, and the group emphatically supports the B4R movement - raising awareness and spreading motivational posts across EVE groups on various social networks.

Fly safe, and fly together: through any difficulties you may face, there are always those who want to and can provide help. No matter what happens, we want you to know that you are never alone!

BROADCAST 4 REPS

Tireless Capsuleers,

No Downtime starts today!

As you may have seen in the recent development blog, No Downtime starts today after 11:00 UTC. That means, if everything goes to plan, that on 9 September EVE Online will be entering uncharted territory yet again past the 24 hour mark.

The ultimate goal is for EVE to have no downtimes at all. The first step has been to shorten downtime, which is quickly approaching its asymptotic value of around 3 minutes. Then, the goal is to have fewer and fewer downtimes, eventually eliminating it altogether. This is a long-term goal and all of EVE’s technological advances are aimed towards that.

Just like last time, your help is required to flag everything that seems suspect or weird, letting us know how the game performs for you when you do the things you normally do.

There are a number of reasons why running another one of these experiments is beneficial:

• Improvements which have been made since the last experiment can be validated
• Things that may have regressed will be flagged
• Memory usage will be observed
• Verification that anything new is not making any downtime assumptions

Ultimately, an experiment such as this is dedicated to the Capsuleers of New Eden who hail from countries such as New Zealand, Japan, Korea, and Australia. As EVE Online has entered and launched in Korea and Japan over the past year, the activity in this timezone has increased, and not disturbing players during their peak hours is important.

For those that remember the video from 2019’s No Downtime, a whole lotta effort and power is needed for such a heroic stunt. Find out more about how that is possible in the No Downtime Vol 2 video.

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PLAY EVE AND ENTER THE UNKNOWN

Every day I think about downtime, wait for it to pass, and record the result.

The last time I wrote this (did you read that dev blog? It's really good, I promise), Tranquility's auto-reboot on weekends was approximately 4 minutes and 20-40 seconds, just enough for a quick cup of tea. Today's auto-reboot, a year and a half later, was 3 minutes and 34 seconds - just enough for a quicker cup of tea (I measured it while writing this dev blog). Given the improvements we have made since 2019, an auto reboot downtime of 3 minutes and 30-40 seconds is pretty normal these days.

I could focus on this improvement of 50-60 seconds, a 22.5% improvement between 3 Dec 2019 and 3 July 2021, and predict the end of downtime on 19 December 2026 with this super-scientific graph, but the reality is more complicated than that.

There is a (soft) lower bound of approximately 3 minutes given the three different activities during downtime - shutdown, database jobs, startup - which last approximately 1 minute each, unless fundamental changes are made, and the most fundamental one is still to not have any downtime at all. Downtime will not become much less than 160-200 seconds; instead there must first be fewer downtimes and then none at all. Nevertheless, I wanted to start this blog with a concrete example of improvements made in downtime reduction since last time. And now another no-downtime experiment is being planned for September 9.

The purpose of this second no-downtime experiment is at least four-fold:

• Verify the fixes made for the issues discovered in the previous experiment in the live production environment
• Verify that no other code/features have regressed since last time and in general look for further issues
• Observe memory usage
• Verify that our technology platform (which you will hear more about later) is not making any downtime assumptions

So what did we discover last time, I hear you ask?

First and foremost we discovered reliance on downtime as an event to mark the beginning of a daily cycle, and a reliance on a daily startup, such as structures not finishing 24+ hour timers and corporations not joining Faction Warfare. We fixed all those issues that we found, and those you reported to us. Now we want to verify them further (of course they have been tested but our test environments don't have Tranquility's scale) and look for more such issues.

We also observed time desynchronization (which we fixed), and significant memory usage (which we improved somewhat).

The time desynchronization was a known issue, but last time we were observing whether players noticed at the end of day #2. The target for time desynchronization is a maximum of ±0.5 seconds. But with newer hardware, we had been observing an end-of-run desynchronization of 2.25 seconds and - predictably - 4.5 seconds at the end of day #2 in the first no-downtime experiment in 2019.



Players started to notice once the desynchronization was above 3 seconds, mostly by noting what felt like module lag or delay when their client and the node hosting their solar system disagreed significantly about when modules were cycling. Time desynchronization is now normally within ±1/100 of a second, well within the maximum of ±0.5 seconds.

Tranquility has always been memory hungry. For better performance, then, we have always opted for pre-computing values & processing data and storing the results for later reference rather than re-computing those values again later. As an example, the Brain in a Box and Dogma Rewrite projects in 2015 were all about computing and storing skills and their effects (i.e., the characters' brains) and transferring the computed results between solar systems instead of re-computing the brains on each entry to a new solar system. We also never clean up any memory, as the cluster node memory is reset every day anyway, which is a reliance on a daily reboot (note: we of course don't clear our DB cache memory or our Redis cache memory, but the main simulation cache memory is cleared in the reboot in each downtime).

The most memory-hungry nodes in the Tranquility cluster, the Character Services nodes that store those brains I mentioned above (among other things), were at 75% memory pressure at the end of day #2 last time, which is just below our operating tolerance of 80%. We might be able to run Tranquility for 3 days (and perhaps 7 hours more) if we were to run the cluster to a "first-node-at 100% memory usage" state, given those 2019 numbers. In 2019, the day #1 memory pressure was at 55%, but these days it is around 35% and so we want to rebase our observations.

No-downtime is a long-term goal and all our technological advances aim towards that. We have been working for a few years now on a micro-service and message bus technology platform for EVE, and started using that platform for a number of features. We now want to observe how that ecosystem holds up with no downtime of the primary game cluster, making sure no assumptions have been made about a daily downtime.

See you on Thursday, 9 September, as the second No Downtime experiment commences. And, just like last time, there will be a video coming soon. A whole lotta effort and power is needed for such a heroic stunt.

Ambitious Capsuleers,

Join your trusted allies in heavy combat during a new, special Caldari Union Day Proving Grounds event, battling side-by-side aboard powerful battlecruisers as you prove the unbreakable strength of your bonds, evoking the unifying collective drive of the Caldari people!

This event begins at 11:00 UTC on 3 September, and runs until 11:00 UTC on 7 September.

The ruleset for the event is as follows:
- Participants receive 20m ISK each time they enter this Proving Ground event
- Only the Drake, Ferox, and Naga may enter
- Only one local repair module can be fitted per ship
- No shield boost amplifiers, rechargers, power relays, flux coils, or purger rigs allowed
- Sensor dampeners cannot be fitted
- Modules are restricted to meta level 5 and below
- No pirate implants allowed

Gather your friends, fit your battlecruisers, and grab your Proving Ground filaments (found in Abyssal Deadspace or on the ingame market) as you prepare for intense team combat, battling in tandem to climb the Proving Grounds leaderboard, achieving glory and earning special rewards!

PLAY EVE NOW

Self-reliant capsuleers,

As the Foundation quadrant draws to a close it's time for the Caldari to celebrate Union Day.

As with the other factions, the State seeks contributions of capsuleer propaganda that celebrate the unity and resilience of Caldari! To be in the running to win some cool prizes you must submit a piece of propaganda for review. Some of the topics it could address are:

• celebrate the rich history of the Caldari people
  
• denigrate the the enemies of the State - i.e. the Gallente, Minmatar, Guristas or Triglavians
  
• highlight a famous location in the State
  
• recognize a notable Caldari citizen and their accomplishments (this includes both player and non-player characters)

Or something else not listed here - as long as it's putting the Caldari in the spotlight we want to see it! You can find some examples of the excellent work produced by capsuleers for the previous Foundation quadrant contests in these threads 1|2|3 on the official forums.

[h2]PRIZES[/h2]

Submissions will be pored over by a crack team of CCP developers with impeccable taste and the chosen winners will receive the following:

[h3]1st place[/h3]

• Your choice of any Caldari ship model (Condor, Naga or Scorpion) offered by our friends at Mixed Dimensions
• A set of brand new apparel: the State Commander's Dress Jacket and Pants (men's and women's)
  
• Golem Octopus Orange Flight SKIN

[h3]2nd place[/h3]

• 1100 PLEX
  
• State Commander's Dress Jacket and Pants (men's and women's)
  
• Raven Octopus Orange Flight SKIN

[h3]3rd place[/h3]

• 500 PLEX
  
• State Commander's Dress Jacket and Pants (men's and women's)
  
• Drake Octopus Orange Flight SKIN

All winners and any distinguished entries chosen as honorable mentions by the jury will also receive a medal from the Caldari State to display with pride on your character sheets.

[h2]HOW TO ENTER[/h2]

• In order for your work to be considered it must be submitted in this thread on the EVE Online forums.
  
• The contest starts now and the cutoff for submissions is Monday 13 September at 11:00 UTC. Winners will be notified soon after!
  
• All entries must abide by the EVE Online Terms of Service
• Although no longer required for entry, please do continue to share your propaganda on EVE-related social media, such as Twitter with the #tweetfleet hashtag.

[h2]Livestream quiz[/h2]

Also be sure to to tune in to CCP TV at 18:00 UTC on Monday 6 September for the final installment in our series of Foundation quadrant livestream trivia! There'll be 3 quizzes of 15 Caldari-flavoured questions with Omega, apparel, SKINs and medals up for grabs. Set a reminder and then tune in to test your Caldari knowledge for a shot at some prizes!