Lag War in EVE Evolved

It is easy to get close to this phenomenon: someone is always complain 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. Until recently, the developers at CCP had been very quiet on the topic of lag and their efforts to combat it.

CCP Tanis -- Mass-testing events

CCP Tanis wrote the first blog entry on mass testing events. The mass testing programme is one of the ways CCP has been trying to involve players directly in the development and bug-solving process. Before a new feature or a change to the code goes live, it's vital to test it under realistic gameplay conditions. This identifies potential bugs or performance issues in upcoming patches before they're applied to the main game server, which helps stop features inadvertently introducing further lag and game-breaking bugs to the game.

Everywhere I go, I see people demanding that CCP "just fix the lag." Through their recent devblogs, EVE Online's developers have been showing us just how complex the issue of lag is and what work they've been doing to help combat it. All of these devblogs are worth a full read, as there's a lot more to them than I've been able to fit in this week's column. More than anything, though, this recent flurry of devblogs makes me hopeful that we're seeing the start of a more active and communicative development process within CCP.