Burning My Bridges One Hairdresser At A Time

As I write this the next expansion after Phoebe is due for release this evening, it is called Rhea.

December being what it is, and with the changes that came along with Phoebe, I wasn't terribly interested in blogging about anything to do with Eve Online.  Finally I realised I'd better get something down before the next expansion lands as it may be stretching the friendship to talk about the previous expansion after the next one has been released.

However what this does is gives me a window into Phoebe, the time before release, during and afterwards.  I'd also like to call this denial, acceptance, and depression.

The time before Phoebe was filled with much hysteria and misinformation.  Finally the facts were able to burn through the myths but still a certain amount of smoke lingers in some quarters.  I was, well not quite excited about the jump changes, but hopeful they would revitalise the game and help us move away from super blobs zapping around the universe to hot drop battle cruisers.  The universe had become a small place in the time before Phoebe.

Phoebe is released and players rejoiced! I was pretty happy about it.  I compared Phoebe to not quite a reboot of Eve but it was a massive change, hopefully one for the better, and I still think it is.

Before Phoebe we noticed the exodus of the renters from The Kalevala Expanse, then the region was sold to Russians, who didn't return any of our eve mails, it was time to leave also.  We left, players and then corps left us, we settled in a low sec area while the debris from Phoebe settled, it was only for thirty days and this was made quite plain.  We started receiving eve mails asking what's happening next after only a few days, more people left, more corps left.  Pretty soon the alliance wasn't viable and it essentially shut down.

We were in denial before Phoebe, still trying to live the renter lifestyle, and then afterwards in acceptance as the reality of the new expansion sank in and we were forced to change our ways.

The rest of the month plays out, we enjoyed ourselves in low sec, made some new friends, some of the bad guys learned to respect us, but it's time to move on. We head back to null sec.

In null sec, as part of the Darkness alliance, the learning curve is steep, but we've accepted that.  We, and I, are used to doing things our own way, but now we have this alliance dictating various things to us, which while expected is a little off putting, for me anyway.

We've gone from being an alliance built out of refugees from many other organisations, with one of our core building blocks, our foundation stone, is we do not have Call To Arms (CTA's).

Now we have CTA's, in fact we have several each day.  This is taking some getting used to.

Our time in low sec space was pretty enjoyable, though I personally think the game in Eve is in null sec space, so we lose some more members, some really fucking good members who couldn't get that out of their veins.

Hence the depression.

The Teshkat Intervention

We made the news!

Our alliance, and myself, was involved in a fight in Teshkat to try and save a tower coming out of reinforced that was owned by some new friends of ours.

Little did I know how epic the fight would become!

http://evenews24.com/2014/11/10/battle-report-welcome-to-valuetown/

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At 09:30 Eve Time on 11/9/2014, the forces of Silent Infinity began mustering in Ordat local to attack a Violent Declaration POS coming out of RF. The Violent Declaration Executor, MrsM had a CTA scheduled for the timer and FC Hender Eirborn was ready to take on the engagement. Hender began marshaling the assorted Coalition forces and by the time the initial Silent Infinity fleet landed, the forces were fairly evenly matched with the Coalition forces, consisting of the heroic E0N and the awesomely AUStastic League 0f Grumpy 0ld Farts in addition to Violent Declarations, were relatively evenly matched with the forces of Silent Infinity. Silent Infinity had a larger number of Guardians but VD and allies had more dps.

The Silent Infinity fleet initially warped to the cluster of POS mods aligned with Planet V. Hender warped the fleet to a tactical to allow the Guardians to muster. However, before the allied forces could warp down and engage, Silent Infinity warped off the field. With downtime approaching in an hour, Hender ordered shield reps on the POS. This resulted in Silent Infinity sending in a Sniper Eagle and Naga to play cat and mouse with the allied reps.

Realizing that they would be unable to burn down the tower with only their limited subcap dps and unwilling to take a brawl, Silent Infinity lit a cyno on Impro Factory station and began jumping in their Dreads. Crucially, the dreads needed to dock and recharge their cap after jumping before sieging the POS. Hender, recognizing that a brawl with the enemy subcap fleet and enemy dreads at range would result in a slaughter, made the aggressive call for the fleet to warp to the cyno. The move caught the hostile forces napping and their cyno was down nearly instantly. Enemy dreads quickly docked to await their subcaps.

Moments later, the Silent Infinity subcap fleet got a warp in on the Coalition Guardians and came in to engage. However, once again, the quick reactions of Hender and the logistics FC paid off and the allied Guardians were off the field. This was critical as it left the entire enemy subcap fleet stranded some 30 odd kilometer OUT of undock range. Hender successfully punished the AFK for the error a Guardian, followed by enemy battleships were primaried and began dropping like flies under the dps of the allied fleet. Critically, the large number of enemy Guardians were rendered useless by the L0G0F Armageddons who performed near flawlessly. With their subcap fleet evaporating, AFK made a final bid for the tower by undocking their entire Dread fleet and attempting to warp them to the POS before downtime. Allied ships began frantically attempting to tackle warping dreads and, as downtime hit, three hostile Revelations were left trapped on the station while 4 Revelations and a Phoenix had warped to the POS. This was the final mistake Hender would allow the enemy to make.

With their cap fleet now split and their subcaps decimated, Hender ordered a quick login after downtime and began tackling the three hostile Revs trapped on station. Fearful of the weight of Geddons on the field, the AFK dreads began docking. However, at the VD POS, a VD member reported having hero tackled the enemy dreads, forcing them into Siege in an attempt to kill the tower. Hender, joined now by VD PvP Director, Thaddeus Drake, ordered the fleet to warp to the POS to trap the enemy dreads.

Once again the pilots of L0G0F proved invaluable and their Geddons began expertly draining the cap from the sieged dreads. With no sign of enemy reinforcements, the allied fleet quickly burned down the first enemy Revelation while keeping the other dreads capped out and tackled. The Phoenix was next and, with still no sign of enemy assistance, fell quickly under the dps and neuts of the allied forces. The third enemy dread to be targeted was another of the Revs. He was cap dry before even being shot and began to melt quickly under the combined arms fire. However, a call came in from the Tashkat scout. Providence had heard of AFK’s failure and, rather than lose the subcap brawl and 5 dreads to a gang they outnumber 2 to 1 in total and 8 to 0 in capitals without killing the tower, CVA had dispatched an armor gang of HACs and Logistics to attempt to save the dreads.

The enemy gang jumped in from Teshkat and began landing on grid as the third Rev exploded. Hender handed over FC to Thaddeus who switched the fleet over onto the newly arrived subcap fleet. The final two dreads exited the field during the ensuing brawl and, despite the best efforts of the allied forces, there was simply not enough weight of allied Guardians to keep the allied ships up under the newly arrived dps. After getting a few more subcap kills, Thaddeus made the call for the fleet to return to the shield and warp off.

The allied fleet docked up and celebrated a hell of a fight and a hell of win while CVA and pets went back to shooting the single Minmatar Control Tower they had paid 10 billion isk to take down.

At the end of the day, the VD Tower did fall. However, CVA paid dearly for it and the allied coalition showed that they could easily best Silent Infinity despite being outnumbered.

Battle Report

Is It?

Just How Big Is It?

A few days ago a user on the Eve Online forums asked the question.

How big in Gb is Tranquility please?

The answer, and the other associated information is rather interesting.

The entity known as CCP DeNormalized decided to field this question starting from the 17th of October 2014 until the 20th.

Text in bold and green is mine.

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"DB is currently around 2.8 TB, 2 weeks ago it was 3 TB...

We do routine archiving to pull old log records, etc... out to separate databases in an attempt to run as lean as possible.

We also have difference services (sso/vgs/images) in different DB's, so while the core DB itself is around 2 TB (2.8 w/ free space in files for growth), the entire stack is closer to 5-6 TB total."

So that's quite large then.

"Over the course of the last year, the market tables have grown by about 500 GB :)"

I wonder if the growth rate is a constant or is speeding up.  My experience suggests the later.

"As mentioned, the core DB is 2.8 TB currently, and the image DB is around 1.3 TB.

the inventory system takes up about 250 GB (a single table w/ 2-3 indexes)
the market system takes up around 300 GB (2-3 tables and multiple indexes)
in-game mail system is around 300 GB as well (we delete most of chribba's mail just to annoy him :))"

Chribba ribbing for the win!

300Gb of in game mail, which is essentially just text files.  Daunting.

"DB is split across 2 tiers of storage, SSD (enterprise level intel disks in v7000 enclosures) for the heavily accessed stuff and 15k SAS disks for the second 'slower' tier.

I'm not that knowledgeable abuot the SAN side and how the block sizes are handed there, but as the LUN's are given to us, we setup our volumes @ 64K block size as this is the optimal allocation for SQL (64k = 1 extent = 8x8KB pages)

We do 2 full backups per day (written across 8 files for disk melting IO dumps) which take a little over 1 hour each... Hits the disks for around 400 MB/s"


"We used to run on the RamSan's but stopped about 3 years ago. They were completely overkill for our needs and at the time expanding was rather difficult.

We had 3 units, 2x 128 GB pure flashbased units and sometime later added a third 2 TB array (this wasn't flash based if I remember)."

I thought the RamSans were more recent, how time flies.


"we do different things w/ each backup - the secondary one gets shipped to a different server for reporting purposes, but you are correct, a differential would make sense in most cases here"

A full backup each time, well two of them as above.


"In this market order clean up, we noticed that there is one crazy player that has an open order for 7 years now!!!! Any order expires after 90 days unless you update it...

So this player has been modifying this one order, at least once every 90 days, for the last 7 frickin years!! haha

There are 3 items left in his sell order - I wanted to just go buy them so there wouldn't be such a big gap in ID's :)

I got over ruled on that as well

(i sent a mail to community about this guy saying he (or she?) should get some kinda medal, so we'll see what comes of that)"


"it is a sell order, that started with 20 units - 17 sold and 3 left :)

it's only like 1.6 mil per unit and not the highest in the region."


"I'm in a little more cynical :)

I also passed it onto security so they could check if it was some long forgotten about market bot sitting in someones closet praying for someone to buy the damn things so it could end itself :)"

My money is on the market bot plinking away hoping for a sale.

"the inventory system is around 250 GB - this includes multiple indexes on the same data though so we (or you) can access it faster, etc...

every item/stack per location has a unique row in the DB, for a total of around 2.2 billion rows at the moment :)"

2.2 billion!

"I've asked our SAN guys that very question ( re: expected life of enterprise SSD's) in the past :)

They say upwards of 5 year life span depending on how many writes, etc... keep in mind these are enterprise grade SSD's (with the insane prices to boot) and have extra 'stuff' to keep them alive longer :)

100% moar stuff!!! yeaaa!!!! hehe

We've yet to lose one, but I believe we're getting close to end of life and may likely replace in the coming year or so."

Damn impressive.

"The most insane part of our DB is ram IMO - we're running 512 GB of ram, so it's able to pull a tremendous amount of data into memory and that gives us great speed.

That much RAM coupled with fast SSD's (and properly indexed data) and you can do quite a bit :)

In terms of oldest item, it's a very difficult thing to find. Up until 4 years ago or so, we were recycling ID's (32 bit) so we are really able to say beyond that.

Now we use 64 bit and can trace how old items are, but I think it's fair to say that there are items in hangars from the beginning :)"

I think I've overused the word impressive, but very impressive!

Link to the thread.

Long Distance Travel Changes

It would seem in the past few days that CCP have dropped a massive bombshell with the long distance travel changes due in the next expansion.

Often I'm loath to call them expansions but this one will be worthy of the description as change it will certainly bring.

Since the announcement the forums have gone nuts, spewing many pages per minute of comments, most of them negative.

Personally I couldn't be happier!  It will bring real change to the game, makes people rethink nearly every aspect of their activities outside of empire space.

We've had some folks, in our alliance,  who almost certainly injured themselves jumping to conclusions and have abandoned null sec or even the game, maybe for a while, maybe forever.

What I'm concerned about is the negative reaction to these changes having a very negative effect on server population, and null security space becoming a ghost town.

Great for making ISK, not so great for PVP and content.

I believe the numbers quoted by CCP will be reduced a bit, if not with the first release then with the next.

The coming few weeks will be interesting to see the level of hysteria the Eve Online population will reach, and what CCP will do about that before the fateful day.

Links:

Long Distance Changes

CCP Greyscale's Forum Post about some probable limitations